War Girls

by Adele Geras

  ‘You haven’t got any pigeons,’ my mum said. ‘Never have.’

  ‘I was going to get some,’ said Grandad. We looked at him in surprise. ‘Well, I was thinking about it.’

  ‘You told me pigeons give you the heebie-jeebies,’ Mum said.

  ‘You said they’ve got nauseating habits,’ I added.

  ‘I can change me mind,’ he said, turning to the next page.

  We were six months into the War and Grandad was embracing it from every angle. He was too old to join up (though he’d tried, of course) and instead made a point of reading and reporting on its every aspect – especially any gossip and rumours. He’d put up posters in our front-room windows (YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU! and WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE GREAT WAR, DADDY?) and would discuss battle tactics with anyone in the Dog and Duck who couldn’t get away in time. I wouldn’t have minded, but he had an opinion on every element and some of them were plain batty. Oh, and he’d also started a Give a Blanket to a Soldier campaign to encourage the locals to donate a blanket to our boys at the front. There was a pile just inside our door and I kept tripping over them.

  I was concerned and apprehensive about the War, but as a girl there wasn’t a lot I could do to help. I couldn’t fight. At sixteen I wasn’t old enough to train as a nurse or an ambulance driver, and I didn’t want to work in a munitions factory, because the chemicals turned your hair and skin yellow. ‘Wear the colour like a badge of honour,’ they said about the factory work, but I wasn’t having any of that. I didn’t want frizzy yellow hair. I’d decided, instead, to get a job in London, a bus ride away, where there was lots more going on: rallies and parades, brass bands and marches. I thought I’d really get the feel of the war there, so I’d got a job as a waitress at the big Lyons’ Corner House on the Strand.

  The day before I was due to start work I went into my bedroom and put on the uniform: smart black dress with starched white collar and cuffs, little white hat and white apron. I tied the long straps in a bow around my waist and went downstairs to show Mum and Grandad.

  ‘How’s this?’ I asked. I put on a classy accent. ‘What would you care for from our bill of fare, modom?’

  ‘Ooh, Harriet, you do look grand!’ Mum said. ‘Doesn’t she, Dad?’

  Grandad peered over the newspaper and nodded approval. ‘You’ll make a good waitress, lass. And it’ll be first rate working up there in Charing Cross and seeing all our soldier boys coming and going.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said, twirling round so they could see me from the back. The tea room was bang opposite the big mainline station, so I hoped to be able to dash over there sometimes and cheer the soldiers as they came and went. Perhaps some of them would pop in for a cup of tea, and I’d be able to wish them goodbye and good luck. If they were handsome, I might even offer to write to them. I knew it would be awfully worrying to have someone you loved actually on the front line, but it would be grand to knit him socks and send him parcels.

  ‘The War Office is near where you’re working – just up the road in Whitehall,’ Grandad went on. ‘That’s where the generals get together to decide things like whether we can keep pigeons and how many potatoes we’re allowed to have on our plates.’

  Mum looked at me and rolled her eyes, and I went to change back into my ordinary clothes. I was already feeling quite nervous: I’d started worrying about getting people’s orders wrong or dropping their macaroons on the floor.

  Grandad was looking thoughtful as we sat down to tea. ‘You know old Mrs Bertram in the corner shop?’ he said. ‘I think she might be a spy.’

  Mum and I burst out laughing.

  ‘You can laugh, but Dora says we’ve got to watch out for German spies.’

  ‘Who’s Dora when she’s out?’ Mum asked.

  ‘D-O-R-A. Defence of the Realm Act,’ said Grandad. ‘DORA says we’ve got to watch for people infiltrating the system and pretending to be something they’re not. In other words, spies.’

  ‘Not old Mrs Bertram though!’ I said.

  ‘Bertram is a German-sounding name. ’Spect it’s ‘von Bertram’ really. She’s got a dachshund and I’ve heard her playing some sort of German music in the shop. Marching tunes and so on. What more proof do you need?’

  ‘None of those things means she’s a spy!’ I protested.

  ‘I’ll tell you how you can find out,’ Grandad said. Neither of us looked interested but he was going to tell us anyway. He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Only spies know the second verse of “God Save the King”.’

  ‘What?’ Mum and I said together.

  He nodded. ‘Everyone knows the reg’lar bit – ‘happy and glorious’ and all that – but who knows the rest?’

  I shook my head, shrugging.

  ‘Spies! That’s who! Mince pies. People who aren’t what they seem. People who feel they have to prove they’re British by learning all the stations on the Metropolitan line off by heart or knowing the second verse of the National Anthem.’

  ‘All right, Grandad,’ I said. ‘If I ever hear Mrs Bertram singing “God Save the King”, I’ll hang about and listen to her.’

  ‘You can mock …’ he said.

  I felt very important travelling to work on the horse-bus the next day along with all the clerks, the businessmen in bowler hats, and the people in Army or Navy uniforms. One thing I noticed straight away was there were lots more women going out to work than there used to be. The bus conductor was a woman, for a start, and I saw a couple of lady lorry drivers and even a chimney sweep, poles balanced across her shoulder. People said it was a great time to be a woman, and that we would soon get the vote, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. Mind you, everyone was pleased enough that we were doing the jobs that the men weren’t around to do.

  London looked much the same as usual but for the posters everywhere: SEND MARMITE TO YOUR MAN AT THE FRONT, they said; BREAD – THE NATURAL FOOD FOR THE TROOPS and JOIN THE ARMY AND HELP STOP AN AIR RAID!

  When we went along Fulham Broadway I was amazed at the sight of a queue of men, maybe a couple of hundred of them, waiting patiently in line outside the Army Recruitment Office to sign up and fight. Burly, slight, tall, short, young, old; all waiting to do their best for their country. It made a girl feel proud, it did really.

  The Lyons’ Corner House I was working in was very smart: shiny black and silver, and almost as big as a proper department store. It had three different places to eat, and sold all sorts of foodstuffs, as well as flowers and chocolates. Ladies could have their nails painted or their hair done in the salon on the top floor.

  I’d already done some training, so I was allowed to start in the ground-floor tearoom straight away. I was working under a supervisor called Milly Moffat, who’d been there for two years. Between us we had a nice little section right behind the front window – twelve tables each seating up to six people. The kitchens were at the back, so all we had to do was get people’s orders and take them to the kitchen door where the manager would collect them.

  Milly was twenty. She had her hair cut short in a bob, and had turned up her work dress and apron so that they were calf-length. ‘It’s so I can get about quicker,’ she said, winking at me, but she knew and I knew that it was actually so the boys would be able to see some extra leg. ‘I’ll tell you this for nothing,’ she said, ‘the more you flirt, the more tips you get.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, and I pointed to the bottom of the bill of fare where it said, ‘No gratuities allowed’.

  ‘Stuff that,’ she said. ‘If you give good service, you get a tip. That’s only right.’

  ‘What if someone sees?’

  She opened her eyes very wide. ‘If one of my customers takes it into their head to leave me sixpence, what am I supposed to do? It’d be rude to refuse.’

  ‘So you …’

  ‘You just watch me, girlie.’

  So that’s what I did for a couple of days; followed her about like a puppy, seeing how she worked the tables. She flirted with the boys a
nd complimented the girls – telling them she liked their shoes or their frock or their handbag – and if she served a couple she would teasingly tell them that she could see they were in love. Some customers left tips and some didn’t, but she was nice to everyone.

  After a week or so she trusted me enough to give me my own part of the floor and my own tables. We helped each other out if one was busy and the other wasn’t, but apart from that she left me to my own devices.

  As I’d hoped, we sometimes got soldiers in. Usually they were meeting up with the rest of their platoon over the road at Charing Cross, ready to leave Blighty later that day. We made a special fuss of them, giving them extra-large portions and free top-ups of tea or cocoa. The pity of it was, we would only see these boys once before they caught their troop train to the coast, got on a ship and disappeared into the vast entity that was the War. There were a few boys I quite liked the look of, but I never got up the nerve to ask if they’d like me to write to them.

  Apart from the boys in khaki, Milly and I both had our favourite customers – the ones we saw quite regularly who could be relied on for tips. I had two or three ‘Specials’, as we called them, and Milly had a very beautiful young lady she called Miss Clementine, because it sounded posh, though we hadn’t got the slightest idea what her real name was.

  Miss Clementine was in her late twenties, I should say, and terribly elegant. It was winter then and very cold, so she had a little fur hat with two pom-poms dangling from a ribbon tied under the chin. She wore a black astrakhan jacket and her skirts came down quite long, but swirled around her feet daintily, showing off her kid-leather ankle boots when she turned. She spoke in a throaty sort of voice as if she had a permanent cold and drew the eye of every man in the room. A couple of waiters even used to come from the big restaurant upstairs to ogle her from the doorway.

  I’d only been at the Corner House three months or so when Milly announced she was leaving. She was going to be a VAD – a volunteer nurse – in a military hospital and, oh gosh, she did go on about it: how she was going to wear a natty uniform with a navy-blue cape lined in red, have a red cross on her cap and be chatted up by everyone: tommies, officers and doctors, too. If you were a nurse, she said, you were doing real war work, people applauded you in the street and let you into the cinema for nothing. They were desperate for nurses, apparently, because (rumour and Grandad had it) there were twice as many war casualties as they were admitting to in the newspapers. Milly made it sound so valuable and essential a job that I almost wished I was eighteen and could apply to be a nurse, too.

  I missed Milly, but her leaving had its good side. The shop was short-staffed because of the number of waiters who’d got themselves war work, so until someone new arrived, I was going to be in charge of our little section on my own and would get to serve Miss Clementine. She would become my Special.

  Grandad said, ‘In my newspaper, it says we’ve got to keep the home fires burning.’

  Mum and I looked at him. ‘So?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘But how are we supposed to do it with no coal, no logs and no matches?’

  ‘All those things have gone to the front!’ I said.

  ‘Humph …’

  ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it: to help the tommies?’

  ‘Besides,’ Mum added, ‘keeping the home fires burning doesn’t mean literally. It means kind of – spiritually. Keeping faith.’

  ‘How’s spiritually going to help me chilblains?’

  Miss Clementine nearly always had the same dinner: a rare roast-beef sandwich with horseradish sauce and lettuce, followed by a black coffee. So sophisticated! Sometimes, if she was in a hurry, she would eat one square of her sandwich and I would carefully put the rest of it in a greaseproof bag for her to take back to work. She worked as a personal assistant in a big fashion salon, she said, and sometimes, on my way home from work, I would walk down the Strand (also saving a penny on my bus fare) and look into all the shops in the hope of seeing her.

  Miss Clementine talked to me like I was a woman, not a girl. She said I would break boys’ hearts when I was older. She nearly always left a silver sixpence as a tip and was like the most glamorous, generous older sister a girl could ever want. She gave me a darling little bottle containing a smidgeon of perfume called ‘L’heure Bleue’ – she told me that meant the ‘blue hour’ – to use on special occasions. She bought me a brown velvet ribbon, which she said was a match for my eyes, and a bottle of nail varnish in Siren Scarlet. I wouldn’t have dared put it on my fingernails – that would have meant instant dismissal – but I painted my toenails in this most startling, shiny red, so that when Grandad saw them he asked if I had a job as an exotic dancer. ‘Girls today …’ he said, shaking his head, but I just grinned at him. Times were changing, all right.

  One day, about a month after Milly had gone, a man I’d never seen before, tall and handsome as a movie star, came into the restaurant and sat at one of my tables. He was wearing a dark cashmere overcoat and a trilby hat. His coat bore a triangular brass badge, which meant he was in a reserved occupation and shouldn’t be called out as a coward and presented with one of the dreaded white feathers.

  I served him a Welsh rarebit and, afterwards, a cup of tea. When I took the tea over he was busy scribbling something on a paper serviette (upstairs, they had linen) and didn’t look up. People should always be polite, I thought, so I said rather pointedly, ‘Thank you, sir!’ and immediately felt mean because he started, and said, ‘Oh, I’m very sorry, my dear. Thank you so much. The rarebit was delicious.’

  He drank his tea, still scribbling, then got up and went, leaving the serviette behind. I was just about to go over and clear his place when Miss Clementine rose from her usual seat and went past his empty table, waving to me on her way out. When I went over to clear the man’s table, the serviette had disappeared.

  ‘What d’you think I saw today?’ Grandad asked that night.

  Mum and I tried to guess, but couldn’t.

  ‘A lass, driving a big car!’ he said. When we didn’t react, he repeated, ‘A lass, driving a big car!’

  ‘And why not?’ I asked.

  ‘’T’aint natural, that’s why not. It’s like … like a rabbit riding a bicycle.’

  Mum and I started laughing.

  ‘But, Grandad, a woman working as a chauffeur or driver frees up a man to go and fight,’ I said. ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

  He grunted. ‘They’ll be wanting to be doctors next, you mark my words.’

  About a week later, a whole contingent of khaki-clad soldiers began forming up over the road on the station forecourt, all of them young and keen, laughing and joking. A hundred or more people had gathered to watch them, and some were pressing little presents of cigarettes and chocolate into the soldiers’ pockets (they had a lot of pockets). I stood in the restaurant doorway, watching, and when they eventually slung their kitbags over their shoulders and marched off in formation to catch their train, everyone applauded.

  ‘Did you see them?’ I asked Miss Clementine, who came in just after they left. ‘They looked all shiny and new.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘No one in the crowd seemed to know where they were going. I wonder if …’ My voice went wobbly and Miss Clementine looked at me enquiringly. Seeing a whole lot of soldiers like that – well, I couldn’t help but ask myself how many of them would come back in one piece. I knew that some of the latest battles had resulted in terrible loss of life.

  I pulled myself together. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ I said to her. ‘Your usual sandwich?’

  She nodded. ‘Maybe with a little more horseradish.’

  I ordered the sandwich from the kitchen and took it over to her, and then something a bit odd happened.

  The handsome man in the cashmere coat had been in the restaurant again that day and eaten a slice of veal and ham pie. He paid his bill and went out of the door, leaving behind a brown
envelope. I noticed it on the chair straight away and dashed over to get it, ready to run after him. But as I passed Miss Clementine’s table, the envelope in my hand, she reached out to me and said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll take that.’

  ‘But he just left it. He’s outside, I can—’

  ‘He left it for me,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’

  She lowered her voice. ‘You see, he and I are friends.’

  ‘I didn’t realise …’ After all, as far as I could remember, they’d never even looked at each other.

  ‘My dear girl, may I rely on your discretion?’

  I nodded, breathless.

  ‘We are more than friends. I trust you won’t be too scandalised if I tell you we are lovers.’

  ‘Oh!’ I gasped again. How shocking … How wonderful!

  ‘Unfortunately, we are both married to the wrong people, so at the moment all we can do is write to each other and try to express our feelings through poetry.’

  ‘Oh, gosh. How awful for you. But how terribly romantic …’

  She sighed deeply. ‘My heart absolutely aches for him!’ she said, tucking the envelope into her bag. Her hand squeezed mine. ‘One day, my little chick, you will fall in love and then you’ll know what it’s like.’

  I was probably gazing at her in a soppy way. ‘Oh, yes, gosh, I hope so,’ I managed to say.

  ‘Of course, the angels are on the Allies’ side in the War,’ Grandad said.

  ‘How d’you know that?’ Mum asked.

  ‘In the Battle of Mons,’ Grandad said, ‘angels appeared and fought on our side.’

  ‘The angels had guns?’ I said.

  ‘Not guns,’ he said irritably. ‘They just appeared and … wafted about and helped us.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ I said, remembering the story in the newspaper. ‘It was invented. Just a story. The man who wrote it admitted he made it up.’

  ‘No, he did not!’ Grandad said furiously. ‘You ask the boys who were there – they saw those angels all right. In long white dresses with haloes!’

  I tried to make it easier for Miss Clementine and the Handsome Man. I moved his table slightly so that she and her rare roast-beef sandwich were in his direct line of sight, and made sure that any envelope either of them left was conveyed quickly to the other. He didn’t come in every day, but when he did I saw them glancing at each other and could see the love reflected in their eyes – love, and a certain desperation, I thought. I longed to be in my twenties and as sophisticated and worldly as Miss Clementine. Imagine not only being married, but also having a lover!