by Ian Porter
Emboldened by Maud’s presence, Ruby shot back that if he were that concerned about her being out of bed, he could cook the supper. She was both hungry and confident she could keep something down that was more solid than the fish she had managed thus far.
Being more hunter gatherer than chef, Nash popped back out and quickly returned with pies, mash and liquor. The sight of the latter, a disgusting green slime which passed for a form of parsley sauce in East London, had Ruby running for the kitchen sink. She wasn’t going to make it to the outside toilet. When she returned, her husband made it clear that she was not going anywhere the following day.
How little the man knew his wife; he may as well have talked to the wall.
******
The ex-Suffragette walked into Bow police station feeling a little ill at ease. The last time she had passed through its doors, she had done so horizontal courtesy of a policeman dragging her by the hair. It had been six years earlier, after a riot when the police broke up a Suffragette rally in Victoria Park. Her uneasiness got worse after she saw the desk sergeant. She remembered him as the young constable whom she had rescued from the clutches of Mrs Arber.
Mrs Arber’s husband was a printer. The printing press in the basement of his Roman Road shop, printed Sylvia’s Dreadnought newspaper and all the East London Federation of Suffragette’s leaflets. Mr Arber had to do this free of charge, much to his chagrin, because his wife, an ardent Sylvia supporter, said so. She was a big, intimidating woman and nobody argued with her, least of all her husband. And it was she who, during the Victoria Park altercation, had been holding a policeman below the surface of the Hertford Canal with a boat oar when Ruby had stepped in to save the young man.
Ruby wondered if he would remember her. She doubted it. The last time she had set eyes on him, he had been was far too busy kneeling on all fours coughing up water to notice the young woman who had knocked the oar away on his behalf.
He looked up as she approached the raised wooden desk above which he sat. Ruby was relieved to see there was not the slightest hint of recognition in his eyes.
She told him of her interest in becoming a police officer and expected him to warn her of the rigours involved, and follow this by having her fill out countless forms in what was bound to be the start of a long stream of red tape.
But the flu epidemic had left the police force seriously undermanned. Police officers appeared to have suffered from the outbreak more than most. And policemen had not been remunerated for the additional stresses in their work that the war had created. As a result there was low morale and growing unrest in the service. They were desperate for new recruits.
The sergeant supplied her with a form and while Ruby completed it asked her whether she’d had the flu. She thought she had hidden her wan complexion with a bit of subtle rouge shading, but obviously not.
She admitted that she had only just recovered from the virus. He looked at her with what appeared to be increased seriousness. She silently cursed herself. Perhaps he hadn’t thought she looked ill. He might have just been asking her if she had ever had the flu. She should have pretended that she hadn’t.
“Good. You’re just the sort of girl we’re looking for,” said the sergeant with enthusiasm.
Ruby let out a breath of relief and relaxed somewhat while she listened to the policeman continue.
“If you’ve had it once, you won’t have it again. Or so our police doctors hope anyway. They reckon elderly people are not getting it because they have an immunity from the Russian flu epidemic that were here the best part of thirty year ago. So you should have immunity now see?”
It made perfect sense to Ruby. That was why Nashey hadn’t caught it from her. She made a wager with herself that her husband was one of the ‘elderly’ who had previously suffered. She looked forward to asking him about it. She looked forward even more to calling him elderly.
Ruby lied about her age on her application form. That was standard practice. Everyone had done so when she had been on the ships, claiming to be older in the hope they would get a more senior, better paid position. But now she was passing herself off as younger. She was a young-looking thirty six but wondered whether there might be an upper age limit, in which case it might be thirty. It was pushing it a bit but she wrote twenty nine in the appropriate place. Given the scantiness of the information they needed about her, she was surprised there were also questions about one’s father and husband. The former was easy. Deceased. She considered the latter a rather more difficult one to answer.
Goodness knew what the name Alexander Nash might bring up in police files. She followed the advice her husband had once given her that when lying you should keep the extent of the fib to a minimum so you were less likely to be caught out at a later time. She wrote down Alfred Nash, occupation: wood yard worker.
She hesitated about how much of her Suffragette experience she should tell them. They were bound to have her criminal record to hand, and Mrs Pankhurst was something of a hero with the government these days, so she decided to write down details of the work she had done for her which included going to prison for assault. She decided not to include her little known involvement in the Suffragette Derby, and also omitted her Suffragette work for Sylvia in Bow. This gap in her work experience was filled by saying she had returned to working on ocean liners for a time, before starting work at the local nursery. Edna had told her that they didn’t check such things. Edna had originally assumed that it was because they didn’t have the manpower to do the checks, but now having worked for the police, she had come to realise that they were simply too slapdash.
They may have been slapdash but they were also speedy. Only a few days later Ruby was called for interview. It was a perfunctory affair. She got the impression throughout that the job was already as good as hers. And her prison record was conveniently ignored by the two interviewers. At the end of the interview, the two men looked at each other, exchanged the briefest of nods to confirm they were satisfied, and she was promptly told her application had been successful and asked if she could start immediately. She confirmed that she could.
There followed a relatively short period of training during which time, amongst other things, she was shown how to put a restraining hold on someone. Her trainers had been amazed to see that their butter-wouldn’t-melt new woman recruit, not only already knew the holds, but showed them a few others of her own. When her trainers had asked her the obvious question, she told them she had been brought up in a rough part of Southampton, down by the docks, and had learned the holds down there. The part about the location of her upbringing was true enough, but she had learned the grips from her ex-villain of a husband.
Having made a good impression throughout training, before she knew it she was picking out her uniform. When her husband saw her in the clothing for the first time he had to suppress the desire to smile. It was the most unflattering garb imaginable.
He had first met his wife on the Titanic, just minutes before it sank beneath the waves. Having thrown her into the last lifeboat to be launched, Nash later saved himself by swimming to an upturned lifeboat they had not had time to launch, and clambering on its hull. They had not then come across each other on board the rescue ship. The next time he had met Ruby, was well over a week later, when she was still in the uniform, an a la carte restaurant cashier’s dress, in which she had left the ship. It had shrunk, was filthy, wrinkled and stained with salt. And her unwashed hair had been a mess too. But Nash still thought his wife had looked better then, than she did now in her crisp, clean, new police uniform.
There was a stiff shirt and tie, over which lay a jacket down to the hips, complete with four large pockets. A police whistle chain dangled out of the right breast before disappearing under a lapel. A thick belt did its best to show a waist, and there was WP insignia on each shoulder. A skirt appeared from beneath the jacket and descended to the ankles, where leather boots, shined to w
ithin an inch of their lives, took the eye. The whole thing was topped off with a glossy peaked cap and band, with a discreet WP police badge in the centre of it. And everything bar the white shirt was a sea of darkest Metropolitan Police blue.
Nash asked himself what was wrong with the clothing. The hat, shirt and tie were all right. The shiny boots were good. The skirt was plain and just hung limp, but what else would you expect? It was functional. It was the jacket that was the problem. It was just a mass of sagging wrinkles and creases. Nash had to admit that male police officers in uniform had a certain impressive look about them. The same could not be said of the new women recruits.
“I’m proud of you girl,” he said and kissed her, before making the obvious joke that he never thought he would see the day when he would kiss a copper. He left it at that but his wife didn’t.
“You should see the voluntary part-timers. They look even worse,” she said before adding wryly with a raise of the eyebrow. “Mind you, I still look better than those little firewomen of yours.”
Nash had not been very happily married for four years without knowing when to agree with this wife. A saucy smile was followed by a nod of agreement.
Chapter 21
“If the women in the factories stopped work for twenty minutes, the Allies would lose the war.”
French Field Marshall Joffre
Granny Brown had lost a niece to the flu but the rest of her family had recovered. Although grieving, the old woman was back at work. Needs must. During the summer many of her clients preferred the free morning alarm of daylight and perhaps a cock crow to wake them, rather than pay for her services. So this was the last of her few calls to make this morning. Her pea-shooter and its ammunition were already in her mouth as she had taken up position beneath Maud Kemp’s bedroom window. She crooked her neck up and let fire.
The short sharp piercing noise of hard pea on glass told Maud she owed Granny Brown a penny. It was five AM; time to rise, if not shine. Maud knew that if she tried to wake gradually she would simply fall back asleep. She shot to her feet, pulled back a filthy bit of curtain and put a hand up for the briefest moment as a thank you to her alarm, who turned and made her way out of the yard. Out of bleary minded habit she picked up her hat pin from the wooden crate that was her bedside table, to break the film of ice on her water jug. But even in this dark cold room, it was no longer necessary at this time of year. But it was still cold enough to have her throwing on her clothes in double quick time before running downstairs to the kitchen to spread some margarine over two slices of bread. She stuffed one in her mouth and left the other on the table while she popped back upstairs to wake her daughter.
Minutes later she was attempting the not inconsiderably difficult task of pushing a pram down the street while simultaneously attempting to ram a piece of bread into the mouth of a grumpy, crying toddler. And the little misery most certainly did not want to eat breakfast moments after being dragged out of bed and roughly dressed by a no-nonsense mother who had more important things to worry about than child psychology. It was not without a sense of relief, immediately followed by a mother’s sense of guilt, that Maud left little Rose at the nursery, which had just opened its doors when she arrived. As she left she asked the nurse to make sure Rose finished the bread.
Maud took a dozen steps before stopping. She stood head down, staring at her shoes for a moment, hesitating. Then looked up at a nearby clock tower. It confirmed she just about had time. She walked back to the nursery and carefully took some creaking wooden steps which, care of some shrapnel from the last air raid, were a wonkily precarious route up to a side window. The Silvertown explosion almost eighteen months earlier had accounted for its glass, which had never been replaced. Now a bit of tarpaulin did a poor replacement job. But someone had had the bright idea of making a small hole in the material which enabled mothers to peer through the hole and check to see how their little ones were getting on, without the children being disturbed by seeing them. This was of particular benefit to local women who could pop by in their lunch break to check on their tots. Maud worked too far away to usually enjoy this luxury but now gazed down to see Rose sitting on what must have been a once beautiful rocking horse, which had had the stuffing literally knocked out of it. But the poor old thing was providing its jockey with a great sense of joy. Rose’s tears had dried and she now giggled as she held the reins in one hand and a small sliver of bread and marge in the other. She urged Neddy to giddy up while her mother shed a little silent tear of her own.
A couple of minutes later Maud reluctantly began the three mile walk to the remote Abbey Creek munitions factory in which she worked.
She made sure that she was outside the factory gates a few minutes before her shift was due to begin. This gave her time to pop into a public lavatory to pluck out of her bag some leggings and rubber gloves, which she duly added to her uniform. And then out from a piece of cloth she pulled a flat, round, honed shard of glass, and just as she might have donned rouge before starting work behind a shop counter before the war, she now coated her face with flour and starch.
Her ghostly appearance was lessening the impact of the TNT. She felt better in herself. She smiled to herself when remembering that even Nashey had commented that she was looking better. And she had not had ‘Chinkie’ shouted at her by any young rascals for some time.
She and her fellow shell workers enjoyed a bit of friendly rivalry with the fuse girls to see who could come up with the most fashionable look. Rummaging in her bag produced some thin brightly coloured green ribbon, which she substituted for her existing government-issue shoe-laces. She and her shell girls wore green, the fuse girls yellow. The ribbon was more show than blow. It was not the most practical for the hurried three mile walk from home, hence the last minute change.
Then it was time to sort out her headgear. She was already wearing her munitions cap, which was a circular piece of material with a string round the edge like a pudding cloth. In her haste to get out on time she had plonked it roughly on her head before leaving the house. Now it was time to take out her hairpins and skilfully rearrange it. Royal Ascot, it was not, but great skill was used by all the women to make it appear that the authorities issued a dozen different types of headgear.
But fashion accessories could be withdrawn as well as added before starting work. Maud would not dream of appearing in public in her faded blue munitions uniform with the only decoration on it being a stencilled number on the back. It made her look like a prisoner. On leaving the factory at the end of a shift she would pin her shells workshop’s flower emblem to her uniform, where it would stay until she had to unpin the posy before re-entering the factory the next day.
Maud was just attending to this task when she heard an explosion. It was not a large one but any explosion in a munitions factory was to be feared. She grabbed her things and ran out of the lavatory and through the factory gates to check her colleagues were all right. She quickly deposited her hairpins, posy and wedding ring with the security officers, some of whom were rushing to close the factory gates to ensure no prying eyes from the outside world could see what was going on.
Hundreds of women had just passed through the gates to start their shift. Waves of them in a sea of blue uniforms moved through the front courtyard. There was stunned confusion and inquiry in their faces; some voiced their concerns. But there was no crush or panic as they made their way to their workshops.
There was the smell of oil in the air. Slivers of what could have been anything were fluttering down. Maud trod on something soft, her foot skidding momentarily. It was a dead rat. Something that before the war would have had her screeching and rushing to the nearest stand pipe to wash any rat blood, real or merely perceived, off her shoes and trousers, now merited barely a response. She simply made a face. It was one of knowing acceptance. Even rats couldn’t manage TNT.
She reached what had obviously been the building where the explos
ion had taken place. It was next to her own workshop. The building had a hole in the roof which was hardly surprising as workshops were built with weak roofs and strong walls so an explosion would go upwards but usually stay contained from spreading to other buildings. Women were standing outside, some coughing and spluttering. Others, unconscious or worse, were being dragged out. There did not seem to be any fire thank goodness but the water sprinklers didn’t know that so were turning the place into a sodden mess. It reminded Maud of a scene a couple of years earlier when a Zeppelin’s bomb had hit a water main and turned a street into a torrent.
Maud recognised one of the women being attended to. Bea had a little one at Rose’s nursery. Her husband was away in the army. She lived with her aged grandparents. She was on danger work because she had them to keep as well as a child. Although conscious she was badly dazed. Maud knelt down in a puddle by her side.
“It’s Maud here Bea. You know, little Rose’s mother. Don’t worry girl, if the ambulance comes and takes you away and no one gets word to your grandma I’ll pick up little Mabel for you at the end of me shift and drop off her at your place.”
She wasn’t sure the woman fully understood her but there was no time to repeat herself. She needed to clock in on time, otherwise she would lose wages. She made her way past the building to her own shop and was horrified by what was happening there. Or to be more precise, what was not.
Her colleagues were working away as if nothing had happened. The only thing out of the ordinary was that the male supervisors were standing over the women glowering at them. The deafening din of the machinery was such that the workforce working in total silence did not make any difference to the general sound of the place, but nevertheless you could clearly cut the tension with a knife. Maud suspected the supervisors had just laid down the law, telling their staff to get on with their work. She thought it reminiscent of what a Victorian sweatshop must have been like.