Heart of War

by John Masters

  “Cos he’s going to get his call up notice!’

  ‘But they’re not taking married men.’

  ‘That’s just it! He divorced our Ethel so he could live with that dirty Italian woman he had … making Ethel sign that paper she’d gone with other men when she hadn’t looked at one, the very idea! But he’s not married! So I wrote to the Army people who ought to know that … Frank found out who I should write to, and I did, I gave them his name and address and told them he’s British by naturalization, as he says, though he’ll never be an Englishman if he lives to be a hundred, just a dago …’

  Bob swallowed a piece of sausage. She was a peaceable enough woman most of the time, but threaten any of her children and she became a tigress … out for blood. But this time she was cutting off her nose to spite her face, if their daughter, Ethel, really still loved Fagioletti. A live waiter might, some day, come back and make her happy: a dead soldier never could. They’d had two sons at the war, but now it was only one – Fred, the officer, with the Wealds somewhere out there. The other, Frank, was a sergeant with the Wealds when he’d been badly wounded just before Chrismas last year; he was in Lady Blackwell’s Hospital here in Hedlington … and now one of the two sons-in-law was likely going out there …

  He finished his cup of tea, nodded to the two women, went out of the room, down the passage, and out of the back door. He always went to his shed at the bottom of the garden after his high tea; there was no need to say anything.

  Once inside the shed he lit the gas mantle, closed and bolted the door behind him, placed a certain picture, an advertisement for a motor car, in the window, facing outwards, drew the curtains, stood back, and stared hungrily, like a man gloating over a beautiful, waiting woman: only what he was looking at was a beauty of steel and chrome, the racing motor cycle he was building here for an attack on the world’s speed record – Victoria. The handlebars were curved out and down, so that the rider would lie almost flat along the petrol tank, offering little resistance to the wind. The tyres were thin and hard, offering little resistance to the road. The engine had two big cylinders. There was no headlamp, nor place for one – no carrier, no mudguards … a naked, gleaming beauty, existing for only one purpose.

  Bob ran his hand slowly over her, then sat down and stared … the vee-twin cylinder engine was a Blumfield … he had himself changed the valves from side to overhead, with the help of some high tensile steel that Guy Rowland had got for him from an aircraft company … ‘lightweight wheels … frame of steel tubing built by Bob himself following Cotton’s theories … Sturmey Archer gearbox and chain drive for both primary and final drive. He’d started with chain primary and rubber vee-belt final drive, but the vee-belt just wasn’t capable of transmitting the power output he was attaining … He’d got her up to 92 but he desperately wanted to be the first man to take a motor cycle over 100 miles an hour. What more could he do to Victoria to reach that goal?

  Most of the new work was being done over in America. They were building engines with hemispherical combustion chambers, and valve cutaways in the piston tops. And they were using alcohol fuel. He could try that. The engine ran cooler, he’d read – so he could cut off some of the cooling fins on the cylinders, reducing weight. Another way to reduce weight would be to plane down the fly wheel … another, to use still narrower tyres on the front wheel, and that, according to the technical papers, improved steering as well …

  The tap at the window made him start violently, for he had forgotten he had put the picture there. He lowered the light and opened the door. The girl who slipped in was about four feet eleven inches tall, pale skinned, lank haired. She was wearing a dress a little below her knees, torn but carefully patched in half a dozen places. On her feet she wore a pair of men’s boots, several sizes too large for her, with no stockings. As Bob closed and locked the door behind her, he felt a powerful stirring in his loins … there were breasts budding under the thin material of the dress, but they were not yet big enough to put him off. It was still a girl. He was fully erect and straining inside his trousers. It would be there, the slit, dark, mysterious, hairless, pouting from the bulge of flesh that curved down between the thin thighs. He reached out and lifted the dress. She was wearing no drawers, and as the dress rose, the girl saying nothing, her loins came into view. Bob stared, trembling, uncontrollable ecstasy flowing out from him as though from a gaping wound. Oh God, the slit was half hidden by hair, and there was a little patch of it on the mound above. His erection drooped and faded as he let the dress drop. ‘You’ve grown,’ he said accusingly. He turned away in disgust and disappointment. This was a woman, not a girl.

  His back to her, he heard her say, ‘I’m going to ’ave a baby.’

  He held onto the bench for support, listening, her voice a mile away.

  ‘ … I ’ad the bleeding twice, before I ’ad any ’air … then I come ’ere … and I didn’t bleed no more … three months … I’m in the family way.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said, the words wrung from him.

  ‘Garn!’ she said. ‘ ’Fink I don’t know all about it? Wiv all the kids muvver’s ’ad?’

  He felt that the shed was swinging slowly round him, and clung more firmly to the work bench. How old was she? Eleven, twelve, just, perhaps? He groaned aloud as the girl said, ‘Well, wot are you going to do?’

  ‘Who have you told … talked to?’

  ‘No one, ’course. But me muvver’ll guess soon.’

  He turned and stared at her. It had had to come and now it was here. One anonymous letter to Jane, warning her that her husband had young girls, he had intercepted before she had seen; and for a while after that he had fought off the compulsion to do it. Also, he had all along told himself that since God had laid the curse on him, it was up to God to decide his fate … gaol, or a miraculous release from the compulsion, or more years of shuddering relief in their thin, formless bodies.

  He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone. I’ve got to think. Find someone …’

  The girl said, ‘Me granddad’s Woman gets rid of babies.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Probyn Gorse’s Woman, down to Walstone.’

  Bob said, ‘I’ve heard of him … poacher, he is …’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ll go and see her. With you. Next Sunday, we’ll go down, eh? Look, here’s two bob. Take the first train down, Sunday. Tell your mum you got the money running errands for the men at the factory, and you want to see your granddad … I’ll be on the same train. But we don’t talk or anything, see? I’ll ask my way and when I turn up, you go out and play … Your granddad’s Woman could do with some money, eh?’

  ‘’Ow much?’ she said.

  ‘Ten quid.’

  ‘You can give ’er five … and five to me,’ she said, holding out her thin hand.

  ‘On Sunday,’ he muttered. His head was splitting and he had an overpowering need to vomit. The girl watched him indifferently.

  Richard Rowland, Harry Rowland’s eldest son, sat in his office at the Rowland Motor Car Company, waiting. It was nearly four o’clock and Bob Stratton would be along any moment from his office down the corridor, just past the point where the linoleum ended and the bare concrete began. Richard leaned back in the swivel chair which his father had installed – what, twenty years ago? – eyeing the pictures on the wall … a sepia photograph, much enlarged, of the first motor car turned out after Rowland’s had changed from motor bicycles; the visit by the Duke of Connaught in ’88; a 1912 impression of the plant as a whole, with smoke belching from chimneys and a line of barges loaded with motor cars sliding away down the Scarrow … a lot of artist’s licence in that one; and a good photo of himself, when young, with his father and Bob Stratton … they were both clean shaven in those days, and now both bearded. It was all old fashioned, faintly grimy, redolent of the age of coal and mud and clogs; but modern factories ought to be clean, dust free, run by electricity. You ought to be able to eat a meal off the
floor, or off the block of one of your own engines. Instead of old photographs there ought to be diagrams on the walls here, production graphs, output and manpower charts; but he hadn’t the heart to change anything when his father handed over control of the firm to him after the election last November. And now perhaps it was too late.

  He sat straighter and swung the chair round slowly as he heard the knock on the door. Bob Stratton entered without more ado, as was the custom at Rowland’s. He stopped the other side of the desk, his bowler hat set firm on his head, his strong craftsman’s hands folded across his belly, over his Albert, the gold watch chain with half sovereign seals that looped from one waistcoat pocket to the other. His square-cut beard and thinning hair were both pepper and salt, and he wore rimless glasses. A snub nose sat in the middle of his lined, square face.

  He said, ‘If they haven’t telephoned, we’ll have to do something, Mr Richard. The men are on their last jobs … and half of them aren’t needed on those now. They’re sitting around, at the benches, talking, waiting.’

  Richard said, ‘I’ve heard nothing.’ They both knew that in fact he had heard something – last Tuesday: that the War Office was not interested in ordering the mobile machine-gun platform on a Rowland chassis, which Richard had designed for use in defence of airfields and large headquarters against saboteurs or enemy raiders. Nor was the Admiralty.

  Stratton said, ‘I suppose Mr Harry couldn’t do anything.’

  Richard took off his thick glasses and shook his head. His father had been an M.P. since last November; and had done what he could to get the War Office to order the mobile machine-gun vehicle; but there was a limit to what he could, or ought, to do, as an interested party.

  ‘’Tis a good idea,’ Bob said. ‘They should have taken it.’

  Richard said, ‘They should. But there aren’t many people with imagination in Whitehall, I’m afraid. And everyone’s so busy staring at the trees – the problems under their noses – that they can’t look up and see the wood … new ideas, new ways to overcome them – get through the trees if you like … We’ll convert to munitions, Bob. I’ve seen this coming for some time, and have been making inquiries in the proper quarters. We have a definite government offer of financing to convert, and of course, a guarantee that all the shells we make or fill will be bought. We’ll be privately owned, but otherwise we’ll be just the same as a National Shell Filling Factory. There’s an Assistant Superintendent at Woolwich Arsenal who’s an expert on conversion. They’ll send him down as soon as we ask for him.’

  Bob sat down heavily. He did not normally sit down in this office unless asked to, but he was feeling tired, and old, and worried. Perhaps he should have retired when Mr Harry did, after all. That damned girl, turned out to be really a woman when she was still looking like a girl. He pushed the bowler hat to the back of his head – ‘We’ll have to lay off most of the men, Mr Richard.’

  ‘We’ll need some to make the conversion.’

  Bob nodded. ‘That’s true, but when we’ve done that, and we’re ready to fill shells, a lot of men will not be coming back at all. We won’t need their trades. I’ve seen a Filling Factory, and it’s mostly manual labour, unskilled, too.’

  ‘It’ll be mostly women,’ Richard said. ‘That’s why I’ve been trying to get more women into the plant since I took over … and my father had started before that, as you know.’

  Bob said, ‘I didn’t like it, but he was right. If we hadn’t taken women we’d ’a had to close the gates long since.’

  ‘Do you have a list of everyone who works here now?’

  ‘Miss Harcourt has in her office, for the payrolls. But I know them all, and their trades.’

  ‘We’ll have to make some sort of announcement this afternoon before they leave.’

  ‘Miss Harcourt has the lay-off slips all typed out. It’s only a question of who we give ’em to. An’ that won’t be easy till the man from Woolwich comes down and shows us what changes we have to make.’

  ‘Right. Look, we’ll give them all an extra day’s wage by not handing out the slips until tomorrow. Then, I’ll get everyone together in the main machine room and tell them what’s happening. We’ll hand out lay-off slips to everyone, except Miss Harcourt, Beckett the night watchman and two others to caretake in the daytime. You choose those – take Willum Gorse for one … Then you and I will go through the roll, and decide first, whom we will probably need to make the conversions … and finally, whom we can recommend to Hedlington Aircraft, or the J.M.C.’

  ‘The Aircraft’ll only be wanting the fabric men and women. J.M.C. might take some others,’ Bob said gloomily. What if the girl died? They did, from abortions, he knew.

  Richard said, ‘Before I do anything else, I’ll call the Ministry of Munitions. They’ve got some good men there – Lloyd George put them in. They act, not just write memoranda.’ He reached out for the telephone, and, while Bob Stratton waited, sucking his teeth and looking sightlessly at the Duke of Connaught visiting the plant in ’88, half listening to his employer, Richard spoke: ‘Ministry of Munitions … Mr Smiley, please … Smiley, Richard Rowland, of the Rowland Motor Car Company in Hedlington here … No, the War Office didn’t manage to persuade the Navy to take the vehicle, so it’ll have to be shells … Thanks, so am I … Yes … Yes … As soon as possible. I have several hundred men and women who will be laid off tomorrow … He can come down tomorrow? That’s wonderful! … Three weeks, if we can install a new big boiler and lagged piping in the time, and build the boiler house. All right. Thanks. Come down yourself to see how we’re doing. Any time. We can still give you a good unch at the South-Eastern … and we have to fix the financing. Come soon.’

  He put down the telephone and turned to Bob – ‘Well, that’s that. So round about April 7th we’ll be reborn as Rowland’s Shell Filling Factory. It’ll be an occasion for a celebration, I suppose.’

  ‘Or a wake,’ Bob said gloomily. The plant would be changed out of recognition – pipes all over the place, wet floors, hand washing all the time, and everywhere – women. He opened his mouth to say what was on his mind when there was a knock at the door and three women entered, their hair hidden under blue factory caps, like mob caps, shirt sleeves carefully buttoned down, long skirts stopping six inches short of the ground to show high buttoned boots of black leather.

  Bob stood up instinctively; then, silently, cursing himself sat down again. He could not get used to women in the factory. They had no business here, especially ladies, the sort the other women called Miaows: and two of these were Miaows. One of the two spoke, ‘Mr Rowland, we’ve come to complain about the treatment the men are giving us in this factory. We’ve tried to grin and bear it. We’ve hoped the supervisory staff would notice, and take action. We’ve hoped that the men would tire of this stupid prep school persecution. But now our patience is exhausted.’

  Richard said, ‘What’s the matter, Miss Delauncey?’

  ‘Ever since we have been employed here some men – not all, I will say that – have made systematic efforts to hinder us in the efficient execution of our work.’

  ‘Why should they …?’ Richard began; then stopped. Everyone knew why men would do such a thing: to make the women seem helpless and inefficient, and so get them fired; and so preserve the jobs for themselves; and so avoid conscription and the trenches of Flanders. He said, ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They don’t pass us tools when we need them, the sort of tools that are meant to be handed round any particular bench. If one of our lathes breaks down, they pretend to help us mend it, but actually make it worse. They send us to Coventry, for no reason except that we are women. They pour oil into our drawers, and then nail them up. They …’

  Richard had a hard time suppressing a smile at the picture that conjured up; but this was a serious matter. He turned to Bob, ‘I know there’s been friction. I suppose it’s inevitable, in the circumstances, but I didn’t know it was as bad as this.’

  He himself had given
only part time supervision to Rowland’s since the Hedlington Aircraft Company had been founded; as he was also Managing Director of the Jupiter Motor Company. In fact he was Fairfax, Gottlieb’s chief executive for all their English investments: Fairfax, Gottlieb was the New York investment bank of which Stephen Merritt was Chairman of the Board. Bob Stratton had been acting as manager of Rowland’s, rather than as works foreman; and obviously he had not been paying much attention to the plight of the women. Perhaps he didn’t want to.

  Bob said, ‘The women aren’t as good, man for man. How could they be? They never seen a lathe before. Stands to reason …’

  The working class woman, standing between the two Miaows, said emphatically, ‘You just look the other way, Mr Stratton, that’s wot … ’cos you don’t want us ’ere, ain’t that the truth? Well, we’re ’ere to stay, an’ ’elp win the war, so you know wot you can do wiv it. Stuff it up your bleeding arse, that’s wot!’

  ‘Really, Miss Corbett –’ Richard began.

  ‘Mrs Corbett, Mr Rowland. Me ’usban’s in the 1st Battalion of the Wealds … Lance Corporal. An’ I’m working to put shoes on my kids’ feet. You try to raise three little ’uns on a Lance Corporal’s allotment.’

  Richard turned to Bob, ‘I think you’ll have to speak to the floor and shop foremen about this, Bob. And tomorrow, I’ll make the point that Mrs Corbett made just now – that the women are here to win the war, and it’s up to us men to help them, not out of mere chivalry, but out of patriotism.’

  Miss Delauncey said, ‘I hope your talk takes effect, or we’ll have no alternative but to go on strike. And I should warn you that we – all the women who work here – have decided that it is time we had an increase in pay. None of us is getting more then twenty-two shillings a week now, for an eight-hour six-day week, on the pretence that we are untrained and unskilled beginners … but in many cases we have long since passed that point.’