A Plague on Both Your Houses

by Ian Porter

  Along with scores of colleagues, she punched in her attendance card, walked over to stand meekly at her machine and started work, head down. She exchanged the odd look, frown and use of eyebrows with a colleague when the supervisor’s back was turned, but not a word was spoken. When women had to speak to each other as part of their work, they did so formally.

  Maud got on with her work on what was nicknamed a ‘monkey machine’, because it had long arms with which to compress gunpowder into shells to get a greater payload of explosive into them. It was boring, laborious, dangerous work. A few hours passed before a supervisor called her into the office. Her hands were black with the warm thick oozing of her machine so she gave them a quick once over with some grease remover and a rag before following the man to the office.

  She was offered a transfer from shells to fuses. To get away from the danger inherent in her present duties was certainly attractive. And there would be less contact with TNT. But she could not afford to give up the tuppence per hour extra wages she received for danger work. She explained this but the supervisor reassured her that she would retain her present pay level because the work she was going to be doing was categorised as danger work. So she agreed to the transfer.

  Minutes later she was shown in to the very shop where the explosion had taken place. Women were working as usual with the walls around them splattered in blood. Four women had been killed and many others injured. This was why she had been offered the transfer. To walk into dead women’s shoes. It was danger work all right

  Chapter 22

  “A soldier was so disordered while he was going down the stairs into the London tube …mistaking the hollow space below for the trenches and the ascending crowd for Germans, fixed his bayonet and charged. But for the woman constable on duty… who was quick enough to divine the trouble and hang on to him…he would have wounded many.”

  Mary Allen, ex-British policewoman,

  memoir, The Pioneer Policewoman

  Given that her home address was in Bow, Ruby was allotted Aldgate as her patch. It was sufficiently distant so that she was unlikely to come across anyone she knew, but nevertheless only a tram ride away so an easy commute.

  Ruby’s first week on the job had her and another new recruit learning the ropes from an experienced woman officer who had joined the force three years earlier soon after women were first admitted to the service. It turned out that she too had been a Suffragette who had been to prison. It was a small world.

  During this week Ruby impressed with her worldliness. New recruits usually suffered from being too naïve but that was not the case with Ruby. Having an ex-villain as a husband had certainly given her a head start.

  She remembered him once telling her how he had used police rules to avoid Bobbies on the beat during his villainous years. Each policeman had a set beat of four streets, around which they were expected to walk round at exactly one and a half miles an hour, so they passed the same spot every twenty minutes. That way everyone always knew where to find a policeman. And of course it meant characters like Nashey always knew when and where to avoid coming across a copper. It was the shirker police officer who had always been his potential nemesis. The policeman who shirked off to have a crafty drag of his pipe, sitting down to rest his ‘plates of meat’ on a bench hidden in a dark spot somewhere. Then just when Nashey had been in the process of relieving some wretch of their valuables, a uniform could appear out of nowhere. He had been chased through Whitechapel on several occasions when this had happened. It was the main reason he had always kept himself so fit.

  Ruby told her senior officer the gist of this story, though of course altered the narrator of it to being a friend of her father’s. It made the woman smile. The two women then exchanged many a Suffragette anecdote from when they had both been on the wrong side of the law.

  The following week the powers that be decided Ruby was ready to start as a patrol leader, in charge of part-time voluntary patrols. She was to be the link between these women and all authorities, civil and military, and direct the energies of these subordinates. Each patrol had the brief to befriend women they came across on the streets, warning them against unladylike, lewd behaviour. These patrols were to be at night, when the prostitution problem was at its worst. But being volunteers, members of the patrols could only administer such parts of the law that were the right of any private person to enforce, namely to make citizens’ arrests. Only Ruby had the power to make any formal police arrest that may be necessary.

  Aldgate, being close to the docks, and one of the places where the poor East End abutted the wealthy City of London, had, like the rest of Whitechapel, a long history of prostitution. It was a stone’s throw from where Jack the Ripper had roamed only thirty years earlier. Ruby and her women were going to have their work cut out to keep things under control in the government’s fight against the spread of VD.

  This section of Whitechapel had been part of Nash’s old hunting ground, and he had been able to give his wife some useful tips about the area. She deployed one of her groups around St Botolph’s Without Church in Aldgate High Street, a renowned pick-up spot. Another group patrolled the dark Gower’s Walk warehouse area just north of the Tower of London barracks.

  Ruby and her patrols had a good week. They successfully curbed both professional prostitutes and young women who had become known as ‘amateurs’, for offering themselves for free to soldiers out of a sense of patriotic duty. The patrols were particularly successful in sending young soldiers on their way. In much the same way as the lads outside Selfridge’s had responded favourably to a woman telling them the error of their ways, squaddies tended to accept what policewomen said to them in a situation in which a male police officer would have found himself embroiled in a punch-up. But Ruby and her colleagues were not so naïve as to think that these young men were not finding their pleasure up against a wall around the corner. So if she came across women who were amenable, Ruby would take the opportunity to hand out government leaflets giving advice about using sheath contraception. But amateurs were generally difficult to cope with.

  Ruby’s first arrest was of an amateur prostitute, who unlike the local poverty stricken professional wretches, had obviously had a decent meal as well as more unsavoury things inside her recently. She was strong and fought like a man. There was none of the usual hair pulling and scratching. This was real violence. She had already laid out one of Ruby’s volunteers, and was about to put the boot in to another, when Ruby shouted at her to stop. The woman threw a punch her way but Ruby blocked it with an arm, then back-handed her truncheon so the tip of it smacked into the woman’s throat. This was Nashey training. The woman collapsed gurgling, to her knees. Ruby picked her up. Police training said to put her in an arm lock but again she preferred to follow the teachings of her husband. She took the woman by the hand in what might have appeared from a distance to be a friendly gesture, but closer inspection would have seen her pressing a thumb hard into the webbing between the woman’s left thumb and forefinger. It was painful for the recipient. She then heard herself repeating something that had been said to her in the past by many a policeman.

  “Are you going to come quietly miss?”

  The woman grimaced and nodded so Ruby released her painful grip and simply held the woman by the wrist while she marched her to Leman Street police station.

  Sergeant Granger at Leman Street was impressed. Though only grudgingly so. He thought this new WPC was rather too good to be true. Believing that ‘leopards didn’t change their spots’ he would keep an eye on this ex-Suffragette troublemaker.

  Chapter 23

  “We want to have our husbands and sons back from the war and we don’t want to starve anymore.”

  Group of German soldiers’ wives’

  letter to the Hamburg Senate.

  Prisoners’ Aid Society packages from England, and loaves from Switzerland arrived in Germany weekly. And the German author
ities passed on the provisions to POWs with scrupulous efficiency. The local government official who accompanied the food to Klaus’ farm considered it outrageous that British POWs were being fed better than many German people. The same man also kept the local farm’s output statistics, and when he had first queried the farm’s poor performance, the owner had simply shrugged his shoulders and told him the British were a lazy race compared to the great German farm hand at the best of times, and in captivity they barely worked at all.

  He was telling the man exactly what he had always suspected. Consequently the official would unceremoniously dump the prisoners’ packages off the back of a truck shouting ‘schweinhund’ at the lazy enemy as they gathered round him.

  But once the farmyard dust from the departing food truck’s wheels had settled, an air of reciprocity came over the farm. Tommies didn’t care for the dark dry German bread that Klaus fed them as part of their official ration, so gave some of it to their guards in return for being allowed to forage on the farm for nettles and dandelions, which they boiled up to make soup. The remainder of the bread, which was at least filling, was thrown in to the soup as the heaviest of croutons. The arrangement also included that any old cabbages the Englishmen found were to be handed over to their hungry German counterparts. Klaus also had a deal going on with his captives. They were allowed to collect as many snails as they liked, which they cooked in their shell and ate like hot winkles. In return they passed on to the farmer as many acorns or chestnuts as they could find. The government were keen for people to collect these for use in ersatz foods, and Klaus was eager to provide as much of these as he could to keep the local official, who was becoming increasingly frustrated by the farm’s poor output, at least partly happy.

  Klaus also managed to keep the official off his back somewhat by feeding him an embroidered version of the truth about his business plans. With his farm doing so badly he was thinking of converting it into a factory for turning animal bones into gelatin for camera companies. As a farmer barely scraping a living, he had no working capital with which to do this, but a wealthy business associate would provide the funds. It was only the present flu epidemic which had delayed things. Once that had run its course, he and his business partner would be ready to proceed.

  The official was aghast. One of the farms under his watch providing such poor production statistics was one thing, but having the figures reduce to zero was quite another. His bosses would want to know why he hadn’t been more proactive in helping the farmer. The POWs and the injured soldiers guarding them would need to be reassigned too. The official could see an administrative headache coming on. He promised Klaus he would look into providing him with more men to increase production. And given the way the war was going, they were more likely to be German than English.

  ******

  Ursula climbed on board the back of the horse-drawn wagon and sat down in the only free space available on the crowded vehicle. There was a large urn on board and her two work colleagues were already in situ, their feet resting on a couple of the many large sacks of potatoes that took up much of the room. The driver was motioned to make a start. A crack of a whip and what sounded like a gypsy’s guttural curse had the horse move off. Ursula greeted her friends in the usual way which included an oft used wartime motto that had become a casual form of address in Germany.

  “Good morning Marita. Good morning Eartha. May God punish England.”

  Her colleagues responded similarly.

  Their conveyance left the pleasant leafy area of Mitte and headed for a poorer part of Berlin. It could have struck out in any direction to achieve this, but on this occasion it was going to head towards the East End. But first it headed south towards what was to be its first stop, outside the Stettiner railway terminus.

  Marita immediately set to work with the women’s pride and joy, a-state-of-the-art electric potato-parer. Eartha got on with chopping while Ursula completed the assembly line by dropping the potatoes into the huge urn of boiling water.

  The horse made slow progress carrying such a heavy load, which worked perfectly, giving the women time to get ready for what was sure to be a busy day.

  Before the war communal soup kitchens were run by the Charitable Society for People’s Coffee Halls, but this had now been expanded into the nationalised People’s Dining Halls. Ursula was now in charge of this mobile version of one. She would be selling a quart of soup for forty pfennings and the clip of a ration card.

  On arrival at the station, the three women shouted the colloquial name for their soup kitchen to announce their arrival.

  “Gulasch kanone!” “Gulasch kanone!” “Gulasch kanone!”

  That was enough. They were quickly surrounded. Women and children held up a tin or dish in one hand, forty pfennigs and their ration card in the other. Marita took their money and passed the ration card to Eartha to punch it. Ursula’s long handled pale, now changed jobs from stirrer to ladle. She hauled it up and slopped its contents into the first dish of the day.

  ******

  Even when he had first fallen into her arms in the marketplace and she had been the cool, professional nurse with him, there had been a frisson of chemistry between Dorothea and her patient. And once Peter had started to recover and his nurse had relaxed her guard with him, they had got on like a house on fire. She had even stopped wearing a face mask in his presence after a while. And one thing had led to another.

  The first time they had kissed, the first words uttered while they were still in their embrace had been Dorothea telling Peter that, “I really like you.”

  Had it been spoken by one teenager to another after they had unlocked from their first hesitant grappling, it would have sounded gauche. But coming from an apparently sophisticated woman of the world, it appeared to carry a certain profoundness. Dorothea was telling the new man in her life that as far as she was concerned this was not the start of a mere wartime flirtation between two lost people. And he had agreed.

  But there was one thing standing in the way of their relationship growing any further. The war. Or rather, how they disagreed about the relevance of the conflict. As far as Peter was concerned, it was the war that had brought them together, just as it had many lovers, and they should simply enjoy each other and see where things took them. They should ignore the war when it came to their romance.

  Dorothea disagreed. The war was so all encompassing, it could not be ignored. He was a soldier. He could be dead next week. She could not bear to invest so much romantic capital in someone only to be made bankrupt a week later. It was not better to have loved and lost as far as she was concerned. And she was a nurse. If she became a nurse within the DRK, the German Red Cross, which someone with her skills ought to, she too could be dead in a week. Of the flu. She had heard through the nursing grapevine that huge numbers of soldiers were dying of a new, more virulent form of the disease, and presumably many nurses were as well. They agreed to disagree and waited to see what the future had in store for them.

  Grenadier Fueschel’s nurse had written to the army again, informing them that her patient had no sooner recovered from the blow to his head than he had contracted the flu. But the soldier always dressed in his uniform and kept his bags packed by the front door so should an army medic, or worse still a couple of military policeman, come calling, he would claim that he had finally returned to good health and was just about to report back to the Front. And there were his bags to prove it. The army were so desperate for men they might even choose to believe him. Or maybe they wouldn’t. He was to all intents and purposes absent without leave, a deserter, hoping the war would end before it ended him.

  He spent his days working from Dorothea’s home, doing administrative work for her suffrage society. But cognisant of the fact that Peter could not simply do this all day, every day, waiting for the war to end, Dorothea needed to find him something more physical and manly to do. And she had. Her friend Ursula would not
wish to admit it, but her mobile soup kitchen had become a fairly awful affair, feeding little more than slops to desperate people. But from the moment he had recovered enough to stand next to a boiling stove, Peter had impressed with his cooking skills, so Dorothea had decided he could help Ursula, hopefully turning her operation into something more akin to a military field kitchen.

  And for his part, Peter thought he would rather be doing something useful, which gave him some sense of self-esteem, if and when the military police came calling, than be found simply cowering in his nurse girlfriend’s house.

  Chapter 24

  “Dear mother, I’m in the trenches and I was ill so I went out, and they took me to the prison and I’m in a bit of trouble now.”

  Aby Bevistein, British boy soldier suffering

  from shock, executed for desertion

  Freddie Barber was fourteen years old when he lied about his age in order to get into the British Army. But after two weeks in France his young mind was already in a bad way. He told the authorities what he had done, and that he wanted to return home, but sympathy and understanding were in short supply. He was a soldier in the British army now.

  The following day he was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. It knocked him unconscious and there was a fair amount of blood, but the wound looked worse than it was. He could have been up and fighting again sooner rather than later.

  He was lying on the ground outside a tented casualty clearing station, a huge influx of gassed men having taken all the stretchers. A hopelessly overworked triage doctor worked his way through the copper coloured gassed men, their eyes swollen, bloodshot and streaming, a horrible discharge coming from noses and mouths, their breathing like that of bronchitis patients. When he arrived at Freddie, the doctor gave him only the most cursory of glances.