Girls on the Home Front

by Annie Clarke

  Fran snatched up her side plate, on which lay the crusts of her bread and dripping. Her mam swore it kept the chills from their chests, even during the warmest of summers. Now her mam tutted. ‘Crusts make your hair curl, bonny lass, and we’re on to winter soon, so you need to keep the chill away. Besides, it’s wartime, so don’t waste good food. Mind you and Sarah have a good dinner in the canteen at the Factory, which I heard you girls call it as if we don’t know what it really is. But aye, we know from the posters these walls might have ears … I can see their lugs growing every day, flappin’ in the draughts—’

  Fran grinned. ‘Draw a breath, Mam, for the love of God, or you’ll have a turn.’ Her mam took the plate and Fran headed for the door saying, ‘Just don’t go on about it when you’re out and about.’

  Her mam sighed. ‘Teaching a dog new tricks, eh … Lugs open for spies, lips tight shut till us find ’em. Go on with you, and don’t forget your bag and your gas mask.’

  Fran was laughing as she unhitched both from the back of the chair, slipping the bag over her shoulder and patting its patchwork. ‘Oh Mam, it’s a miracle you didn’t sew me into existence too, but let’s face it, it would have been a darned sight easier than all that heaving and push …’ She faded away. How could she be so daft? She reached a hand out to her mam, who had stopped dead in the scullery doorway. ‘Oh Mam, I didn’t think.’

  Her da’s voice came from the hall doorway. ‘Aye, ye do far too much “not thinking” by a long chalk, Fran Hall.’

  Her mam stepped into the kitchen, the plate still in her hand. ‘Oh hush, Joe, the bairn’s got a bus to catch.’

  ‘She’s no bairn, which as I recall, she took pains to tell me not so long ago, eh?’ Her da glared at Fran, but then dug in his trouser pocket for his handkerchief and held it to his mouth.

  Fran looked at her da, who was coughing up muck now, black muck, but no blood. Not yet, not yet. It was a sort of mantra against black lung. He stomped past her to the back door, pulling aside the blackout curtain. He opened the door to the clatter of pitmen as they headed along the back lane to Auld Hilda, the pit, and reached out to grab his boots from under the old chair at the side of the step that he had set up as a footwear shelter. It was a shelter that doubled as the place where he’d plonk himself down at the end of a shift and survey the yard.

  Her mam spoke firmly. ‘Best be on your way, our Fran. Be safe, bonny lass.’

  Fran passed her da, who was slumping onto the chair at the head of the kitchen table, ignoring her, and looking tired, unhappy and out of sorts. She wished he wasn’t so cross with her, on top of everything. She walked across the yard, swinging her gas mask, slowing by the old pigeon loft where the hens now roosted. She lingered, waiting just as she had done for the last month for those words – ‘Be safe’ – from her da, but none came. Instead it was she who called out to him, as she had since she had been a child, ‘Be safe, Da.’

  She lifted the sneck and stepped into the back lane, keeping tightly to the side as the miners almost marched along for the early shift at the pit. As she was about to close the gate she heard her da call, ‘Be safe, our Franny.’

  She could hardly believe it, and thought for an awful moment that she’d burst into tears in front of all their neighbours and friends. She could hear the relief in her voice as she replied, ‘I will, Da, and thank you.’

  She walked on feeling as though a great weight had fallen from her shoulders. Be safe, she thought. Oh, be safe. She swung around, stared back at Auld Hilda’s pithead standing a bit over half a mile out, with its winding gear stark against the moonlight, and said, ‘You take care of my men, d’you hear, Auld Hilda.’ It was what she’d done ever since she could talk and her da had gone on shift, and then her older brother, Stan. She’d once asked who Hilda had really been, but no one knew, or cared.

  She repeated herself as she set off again, and the miners continued to pass her, ‘You take care of them all.’

  She wondered if Stan still missed the hewing, the heaving at the coalface with his pickaxe, his marrers – this world. She had asked him in one of her letters when he’d started his first year at Oxford University, and he’d replied, How can you not miss something that’s in your blood and bones, and aye, in your bliddy lungs too? She’d imagined him laughing as he wrote it.

  She’d asked Davey if he would miss it if he were Stan. Davey, her canny lad, the one she loved and had always loved, said he’d miss her more, then kissed her. She was seventeen, he eighteen, and that had been two years ago. It was the first time they had kissed, and it sealed what they had both known.

  Mam had said that seventeen was too young to set your heart on someone, but there was nothing she or her mam could do about it. It had always been Davey for her and her for Davey, right back to when they were wee bairns. They just fitted together, two halves of a whole, and everyone nodded, smiled and accepted it. Just like they accepted the kingfisher that owned the beck, and the slag heaps that smouldered day and night.

  She hurried on, turning right and staying to the side as the men coughed, gagged and stamped along, their gas masks slung over their shoulders such a part of them all now that no one noticed any more. Some slammed their yard gates behind them before slipping into the stream with their bait tins hanging from their belts or hands, their caps pulled down or over to one side. Their mufflers were pulled up against the pre-dawn dampness of this September morning. Some were talking to one another, some nodded to her, all said, ‘’Ow do, pet?’

  ‘Be safe,’ she muttered each time, looking ahead to where Davey would come along with his marrers, Sid and Norm, and all the time her heart was singing because Da had said, ‘Be safe.’

  So, at last she was forgiven for not going into the armaments factory office, where it was clean, respectable and safe, and where she’d use the skills he had grafted to pay for, as he had yelled a month ago. ‘Grafted – and what do you do? Go and bliddy work with ammunition so’s I might as well’ve shoved you down the pit and set you to work on the fuses.’

  She could hear him now, and her own voice as she’d shouted back: ‘It’s supposed to be a secret. You mustn’t say those words about the Factory or you’ll end up in prison, and me an’ all.’

  She slowed now, staying by the wall and looking up at the night sky and still the men passed and her da’s voice roared in her head. ‘I’ll say what I bliddy like in my own house, and I say you won’t do it.’ He’d been standing by the range mantelpiece, which was what he always did when he was making a point about some fat-arsed politician, as he called them, or when his children’s school reports had said could do better, if only he or she tried. This time, he’d rammed shreds of tobacco into his pipe, as though pulverising the Hun he’d fought in the First World War, and stormed out.

  Fran set off again, nodding to the pitmen, knowing that the same thing was going on in the Bedley household too, but both Fran and Sarah had dug in their heels. Fran turned right out of the back lane which ran between her own terrace, Leadenhall Terrace, which fronted onto Leadenhall Street and Litton Cottages, and set off towards the bus shelter but the echo of her da’s voice followed her, as loud as if he was here beside her.

  ‘It’s bliddy shift work, grubby and dangerous, like the bliddy mines. In t’office you’d’ve been fiddling with typing keys, wearing clean clothes, getting on, working your way up. And I don’t give a rat’s arse about what Sarah does. Thee and she’ll always do what t’other does, yer always have and always will. Two bliddy peas in a pod, but that’s nowt to write home about when you’re daft as brushes.’

  Her mam had called from the scullery, ‘Language, Joe. You’re not in Auld Hilda now.’

  Fran had said, ‘And it’s more money than in the bliddy office—’

  ‘Enough.’ He’d flung his unlit pipe onto the mantelpiece and stared down at the range before turning to her and saying in a voice that was full of rage and pain, ‘You’re saying I can’t look after your mam, and it’s up to you to pay for the
washing and ironing? You’re saying I can’t look after me own family? You, a bairn, saying that?’

  He’d stepped towards her, drawing back his arm, and Mam had yelled, ‘Joe Hall, don’t even think of laying a finger on our Fran, d’you hear me? What in the name of goodness …?’

  At the memory, Fran slowed, and almost stopped, but then shook herself for she had a bus to catch. She crossed Dunbury Street onto which Sarah’s terrace fronted, then their back lane. The pitmen were clattering through it, but it was the quiet in the Halls’ kitchen she heard. A quiet broken only by the spluttering of the range, and it was this she had concentrated on as her da’s arm fell to his side. It was spluttering because Mam had used slack gleaned from the slag heap. It was coal from Massingham Colliery that burned quietly, coal delivered weekly to every miner’s house from the pit, as decreed by the fair and decent owner, Mr Reginald Massingham. She remembered thinking this, and even as she did so she had wondered – why?

  A couple of pitmen passed and called, ‘’Ow do, pet?’

  ‘Be safe,’ she called back, but her mind was on the coal and thought perhaps her brain had been trying to find something normal to concentrate on as the shock reverberated, but then young Ben had come in from his friend’s house, where they’d been trying to solve a crossword her Davey had set them. At his entrance, Da’d shaken his head, yelling that at least Stan had got out, and away, and he’d picked up his cap and stomped out. Perhaps he was heading to the canaries in the Canary Club shed on the allotment, where he’d find Sarah’s da and talk about their daughters’ behaviour.

  Sarah, her best friend, who had worked in an office too. Sarah, whom she had started school with. Sarah, who was Davey’s sister, and who now worked in the same section she and Beth had been directed to – detonators, not that Fran or Sarah had told their mams and das that.

  Fran sighed. Poor Da, he had had such hopes for her, but the war would end, and then she could type until the world ended. Perhaps she should have said that as he left, but it was her Mam who had spoken on the heels of the slammed door. ‘He fears for you, for me, and for Ben. He wants to be the one facing any sort of danger. He wants to be the one supporting us. You have to try and understand that to have a daughter bringing home more’n him and being in danger is more’n he can bear, because it makes him fear he is not the man of the family. ’Tis all right for me to make me proggy rugs and sell them, because it’s safe and just pocket money, but— Oh, he’d never strike any of us, he just ran out of words. You need to know that, Fran.’

  ‘Of course I know that,’ Fran said as she hurried now, for the bus had pulled up at the bus shelter where the women were milling. Yes, she knew it, but nothing would stop her working, because her mam was still thin and weak from the septicaemia that had struck after Betty was born and died, all within the space of half an hour, and she needed help, and that was that.

  What’s more Madge had been pleased to take in the washing, and there was enough left to save for a doctor, and one day there’d be enough for a headstone for Betty.

  Fran walked past a group of miners getting a move on towards the pit as the hooter sounded. One nodded at her and called, ‘The old man up, is he, pet?’

  ‘Oh aye, and raring to go, Mr Corbitt.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ Eddie Corbitt laughed.

  Fran smiled. They all loved her da because he was not only a hewer, but also on the rescue team and would put his life in danger to save the men. Well, they all would, of course.

  She lifted her head and breathed in her world, the one she had always known: the sulphur carried on the breeze from the slag heaps, the noise of the boots as shifts began and ended, the clank of the pit gear, the train that steamed to the main line, just past the Long Pull, where you could buy sweets and beer before there had been such shortages. She loved the gleam of the train tracks that ran across the square and the sound of the coal as they shovelled it into the firebox. It was Massingham coal, built with their pitmen’s blood and toil. Theirs, these men like Da, Tom Bedley, Eddie and Davey, and Stan before he left.

  Ahead, the bus exhaust was huffing out into the fading night. The girls and women were in groups, some smoking, and she laughed aloud to think of her mam on her Thursday-night Air Raid Precaution duties having to call, ‘Put that light out.’ Her mam said she felt a right fool because smouldering behind the smokers were the slag heaps, which could be beacons for any bombers, though none had ever come this way.

  They hadn’t even found the Factory, but if they did, wouldn’t that be an explosion big enough to end the bloody world, or theirs at least? There were air-raid shelters on the site, but they weren’t the huge bunkers she had seen; those were, it was whispered, where shell and bomb filling was carried out and were designed like that to contain any accidental explosions.

  She saw Davey then, marching along with his marrers, though that was an overstatement – slouching, coughing and talking was more like it. She knew exactly when he saw her, because he hurried ahead, his boots slamming on the cobbles. They stood close. He smiled, reaching out his hand for hers. ‘Well, bonny lass, another day, eh?’

  ‘Da said it as I left, Davey.’

  ‘Be safe?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  He leaned close and kissed her forehead. Sid groaned as he approached. ‘Just put her down, Davey, for pity’s sake. You’ve had your breakfast, no need to eat another.’

  Norm dragged Sid on as Davey lifted her hand, kissing it. ‘I’m right glad, my sweet bonny lass.’

  She heard the bus driver hoot. She had to go. ‘Be safe, lovely lad. Can you still come with me after shift to sort out the buyer of Mam’s proggy rugs?’

  His grip tightened. ‘Oh Franny, I do wish just for once in your life you’d done as your da wanted and stayed beatin’ hell out of a typewriter, not doing whatever you Factory girls do. But all I’ll say for now is be safe yourself. Course I’ll come to give him hell. I pumped me tyres up ready and’ll make sure yours are all reet. You’ve the address? Does—’

  He stopped. His marrers were calling out that he’d be late for shift else he got a wriggle on. He dragged himself away and Fran hurried towards Sarah, who was waving to her from the queue, calling, ‘Howay, pet, get some steam behind you or Bert says he’ll leave love’s young dream, and see how she bliddy likes that. Was that reet, Bert?’

  The other women were piling on to the bus and laughing, and one called, ‘Same every morning, afternoon or evening with you two, Fran Hall. Time you wed the lad and were done with it.’

  Another, Maisie this time, called out, ‘Their mams say they’re too young. But right canny they are, and even manage to match their shifts. I don’t know how, do you, Sylv?’

  Her friend shook her head, her faded headscarf keeping her hair in order as she clambered on board.

  Fran heard Davey calling then, but she was already on the step and had to strain to hear. ‘Sarah has something for you. I’ll be waiting with both bikes, if you still want to go after … Oh never mind. I love you, bonny lass. Don’t be too hard on—’

  She couldn’t hear any more as he was fast disappearing down the alley, so she moved up into the bus and along the aisle, Sylv walking ahead of Sarah and calling, ‘Full speed ahead then, Bert. Divint be lazing about. Get your foot down, for the love of God.’

  ‘Bliddy hell, the cheek of it,’ Bert huffed, putting the bus into gear while the women laughed and the bus lurched off. Fran steadied herself as she made her way along behind the others as they peeled off into seats, until finally she bumped into Sarah, who had stopped at a couple that had an empty aisle seat opposite, next to Mary. Sarah threw her muffler onto the single seat to bagsy it for Beth, whom they’d pick up at the Sledgeford stop, then slid along the double to the window. Fran joined her. They were over a wheel arch so would be shaken up good and proper. The slatted wooden seat was as hard as it always was, and cold. Bert swung the bus round the corner and headed down the winding lane towards Sledgeford.

>   ‘What did Davey mean? I couldn’t hear him. What’ve you got for me?’ Fran asked.

  Sarah snatched off her hat and began tucking up into hair slides the escaped strands of her long, flyaway blonde hair. She had put it up in a French pleat that was even now disintegrating and was ramming the hairpins back in as she muttered, her blue eyes dark with anger, ‘Didn’t he tell you? He is a toerag. A bliddy toerag. I’ll have his guts for garters, copping out like that.’

  Maisie called from the seat behind them, her Woodbine bobbing up and down on her lower lip as she spoke, her eyes squinting against the smoke, ‘That’s men for you, in’t it, Sylv?’

  Sylv laughed. ‘Reckon you’ve a point, Maisie.’

  Chapter Two

  The bus jolted as it swung round the ancient Hanging Tree on the corner and set out for the next village. It was said that highwaymen had been hung from the oak tree, and on a stormy night you could still see one dancing a jig on the end of a rope. Fran had believed it when she was young and couldn’t pass beneath the branches, but such stories reverted to the fiction they were when one had to grapple with real life. She had told Mam so a couple of years ago, and Mam had hidden a laugh, though not in time.

  ‘Mam …’ Fran had wailed.

  Her mam had merely kissed her and said, ‘You enjoy sorting out your grappling while you’re young, bonny lass.’

  Stan had been there, giving his boots a spit and polish to keep out the wet before he headed over to see Beth, who lived two streets down and whom he had courted before she broke his heart. He had added, ‘Aye, do that, pet. The grappling doesn’t get sorted, it only gets worse.’

  He and Mam had laughed quietly together, both dark-haired, dark-eyed – well, all the Halls were. The slack had spluttered, the oil lamp flickered, and the smoke from Stan’s roll-up drifted towards the ceiling.