Propped up comfortably. Father took his tea in short nervous sips. His hands were trembling.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. It had been bought second hand and it creaked under our combined weights.
"Is your chin feeling better?" I inquired.
Yes, thank you.""Mother told me what happened about your wages."
"Yes?"
"I am sorry, Daddy. Sorry for you and sorry for Mother."
He did not reply.
I plunged in. "I don't know how you and Mother are going to make it up. But it's like a boil which has burst and has drained. Perhaps things might heal a bit now."
I'm sorry, Helen. Your mother fritters money so. There seems no point in giving her any more." Despite the apology, he sounded defensive.
Frittering money away was something both my parents were good at, I thought sadly. Aloud, I said, "She's very tired, Daddy, because really in the final analysis everything falls on her shoulders. And she's had seven children—and a very severe illness after Edward was born."
"I'm tired, too."
"I know," I soothed. "You must be exhausted. You've been dreadfully ill. You have both had a very bad time."
I took the empty cup from him and put it on the side chair. I picked up one ofhis limp, cold hands and began to rub the circulation back into it. "You know, you and Mother really need each other. There's a tremendous shared experience between you—and you've somehow stuck it out all these years, despite the fights." I laughed softly, and he managed a rather grim smile.
In the glare of the unshaded bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, I sat talking with him for about an hour, reminiscing about the nicer things that had happened in his life before he went bankrupt. I pointed out that our lives were slowly improving now, and that if Mother stayed at home, she would be less tired and consequently less testy. "You could find some interests in common and could have a little social life together."
"I doubt it," he said, in response to my last remark.
"Well, after all the frightful things that have happened to you, you have probably not given it much thought," I suggested.
On I went, driven by pity for my mother and my drifter of a father. It spurred me to cajole, to mend his shat-tered pride, to give him ideas of how to bridge the gap between him and his wife.
Finally, I said fairly briskly, "Edward will be in soon, I expect. I think I should put the hot water bottle in your bed, to warm it up for you, and then tidy up this bed for Edward, so that he does not know anything is wrong. I'll help you move."
Before he could protest, I picked up the cup and whipped out of the room. I was, after all, going to put him firmly back into the bed he shared with Mother, and he probably would not be very happy about it.
He did, however, move without comment. Since we had no extra bed Unen, I took the pillowcase off my own pillow to replace the bloody one on Edward's, and by the time he and Tony and Avril came breezing in from the houses of their respective friends, all was in order. I made cups of cocoa for them and sent them to bed.
I then sat down to my sewing machine, to fill in the time until Mother should arrive.
She arrived, around midnight, with Fiona, whom she had met at the end ofour road. Fiona was, for once, walking back from a village dance by herself, and Mother did not hesitate to pour out her troubles to her, being bent on enlisting her on her side. This was an unpleasant custom both parents had, of making the children take sides in their quarrels.
At their entrance, I stopped turning the machine handle and looked up. Fiona gave me the faintest wink, and I nodded back. It was enough to indicate trouble, to each other.
Mother was still talking to Fiona, as she took off her coat, expressing her bitterness. Yet it seemed to me that some of the steam had gone out of it.
I had earlier made up the fire, and both women went to warm themselves by it, while I made more cocoa.
We sat round the fire for hours, drinking the sugarless, almost milkless, concoction, while Fiona reiterated to Mother much that I had already said to Father. I chimed in occasionally.
Both Fiona and I had the same instinct, to try to hold the family together. Poor as we were, together we had certain strengths; separated, we were puny indi-viduals who could be individually crushed, and, after her experiences in the aircraft factory, nobody knew this better than Fiona.
32
HOW the months of the war dragged! Like many other women I was waiting it out. Servicemen were shipped abroad to threatened India and to Singapore, in the latter case, to man guns which had been fixed facing the sea, the traditional source of danger to the Httle island, while the Japanese came through the jungles behind them. So many men went to North Africa that it seemed like a bottomless pit swallowing human lives.
Stories of horrifying Japanese atrocities were, at first, only half believed, and tales of military bungling came from all directions, to add to the restlessness of troops, like Eddie and his friends, still cooped up in England.
With our minds filled with nightmares of what would happen to us if Britain were invaded, it was difficult to sustain hopes of what we would all do when the war was finished. We felt that, on the other side of the English Channel, the German troopswere drooling over what they would do to us, once they got a footing on our shores.
I was tied, by Government decree, to an organisation which would be dissolved when the war ended; the men recruited from the oil companies would want their positions back, and the droves of young women at present doing their jobs would be out of work.
I felt that I ought to be studying to preparing myself for a better future. Yet where was the time? To eat, to have travelling expenses, to clothe myself, to help with the high rent of our bungalow, I had to sew in my spare time. By the end of the evening, my eyes were red-rimmed, my body stiff from sitting all day in front of a desk, and, later, in front of the sewing machine. No wonder I walked or danced so late in the evenings. Both were very necessary exercises, and could be done after ten o'clock at night.
We missed Brian's lively presence very much. For a long time, he sailed with a crew made up largely of Newfoundland fishermen, few of whom could write, though they were superb sailors. He wrote their letters home for them, and becameknown throughout the ship as The Professor. He was trained as a Gunner AA2, to defend the ship from aerial attack, and it still makes my flesh creep to know that, during action, he was chained to his gun. He used to wear a crucifix and a tiny glass black cat, on a chain round his neck, perhaps to beguile the powers of both light and darkness into protecting him. Something did protect him. He was in almost every major theatre of the war, including the invasion of Normandy, and came out unhurt.
I do not know how Father and Mother made up after their dreadful quarrel, nor what explanation Father gave to the younger members of his family, to explain away his bruised and cut face. But, after a period of sullen silence, they began to treat each other more normally—for them. There were many small spats between them and occasional shouting matches. Mother, however, never went to work again, and there is no doubt that Father began to be more careful about how much he drank. He stayed at home more and found solace in a steady stream of librarybooks about other wars. Mother continued to go to the cinema.
We began to have family jokes, incomprehensible to others, yet guaranteed to make us all laugh.
Tony and Father were masters of the absurd, Tony verbally and Father of mimicry and wild improvisations.
With a towel wrapped round his head. Father could instantly transform himself into, say, an Indian prince being received by the King. The prince with the utmost gravity and with a drawling Oxford accent, invariably got the better of our stuttering King. The same towel tied round his waist and a kitchen knife in his hand, made him into two surgeons trying to remember which leg they were supposed to amputate. Hands clasped together, as if in prayer, eyes half-closed and with the indignant expression of a camel ordered to get up, he was an Egyptian queen ordering a breakfast of f
ried asps—hot. He was quite capable of mentally climbing inside an indignant camel and answering his camel driver back. It was as if he had, in some part, regained a boyish sense of fun. Even Mother managed to smile at his antics.Eddie continued to write to me, sometimes from the heights of optimism, occasionally from the depths of despair, as he realised that he was well into his thirties, which could have been his best years, and was stuck in a castle feeding rice pudding to two cats.
When he had only a short leave, he would arrange to meet me under the clock in Lime Street station, and we would go out to tea at some nearby restaurant, to eat baked beans on toast or sausage and mash, followed by sponge cake which tasted exactly like sawdust. The cafes were always stuffy and underheated, filled with men in damp uniforms and women in clumping utility shoes and too much lipstick.
He had undergone training as a Commando, part of a group specially trained in silent, hand-to-hand fighting, to carry out small but devastating raids on particularly sensitive enemy positions. He was pleased at being considered tough enough to belong to such an elite group. In a dark corner, on the way to Central Station to see me on to my train, a corner which a more enterprising man might have used to press for favours, he obligingly taught me how to kill a man, barehanded, from behind. "Could be useful if we're invaded," he told me gravely, as I ruefully rubbed my sore throat.
"I sometimes think I should do more for the war effort—join the ATS," I told him once, over a cup of limpid Uquid which was supposed to be coffee.
"You? You're mad! You stay right where you are. You're doing part of my job, aren't you?" He was quite angry and his face went even redder than usual.
"I'm much fitter than I was, Eddie."
He replied indignantly, "A little thing, like you? Those bloody, lesbian NCOs! They'd make your Ufe a hell. You'd be lucky if all they did was walk all over you. What on earth am I holed up in a bloody castle, keeping cats for, if it isn't to save you from things like that?"
"Eddie!" I protested, suppressing a desire to laugh.
He scowled. "You don't know what you'd be up against. You stay here like a good girl, and leave the war to me."
A chuckle burst from me. "Eddie, thereare a few other people fighting the war," I gurgled.
The grimness left his face and the pair of us began to laugh immoderately. Two elderly ladies sitting almost touching shoulders with us, frowned, and tried to redistribute the margarine on their toast, with loudly scraping knives.
At the back of my mind, I thought with some wonderment, he cares, he really does. And yet he's never even kissed me, even as a friend might kiss me.
At another meeting, he said savagely, "I wish they'd start the Second Front and get it over with. It's sitting doing nothing that gets me. It's like waiting to be guillotined."
Such a pang went through me, because I knew his unit was not made up of men who had seen much fighting, despite its fearsome training. They could easily be killed by more seasoned German troops. Though Eddie was known at the Installation as a hard-fisted brawler, he had yet to kill a man.
"Perhaps the Russians will be able to put paid to the Germans, without there ever being a Second Front," I suggested.He replied gloomily, "The Russians'U be lucky if they're not ploughed under themselves."
He became obviously quite troubled about me when, at one point, I became a Test Case between the Petroleum Board and the Employment Exchange. The argument of the Government was that older women could do the jobs of the younger women employed by the Board, and that all the girls working on the Installation could then be redirected, either to factories or to the Forces. The Petroleum Board responded by saying that they had already lost most of their male staff to the Forces, and had had to train their current female staff to take over. It would disrupt their organisation to an intolerable extent, if they had to train a fresh female staff. The fact that I was the rabbit thrown to the governmental hounds to be chewed over, made me wonder if our almost invisible General Manager on the Installation had remembered the impertinent young woman who would not wear stockings and had caused him to have to back down.
While the Government's tribunal triedto make up its mind, I spent two uncomfortable days in the cold, smelly waiting room of the Employment Exchange with another fellow sufferer, from a sugar company. This girl had been directed to a sugar manufacturer and had found that the sugar penetrated her shoes, causing her feet to swell abnormally. Her doctor had recommended that she seek different employment. The Employment Exchange clerks had refused to permit this. So she sat beside me, clad in her father's carpet slippers, to be judged by as supercilious, self-righteous a group of people as I have ever met in a chequered life.
If they are so keen on factory work, why aren't they doing it themselves? I wondered crossly.
Acutely aware of my lack of education and, therefore, the certainty that wherever I was sent I would be at the bottom of the pile, I sat, wooden-faced, in front of the tribunal and let them talk at me. The more caustic the tribunal became, the more I silently raged within. It was obvious that if they could not make the oil companies yield up their young women, they weredetermined to make as many as possible volunteer for factory work. But I had seen what had happened to Fiona. It was not going to happen to me.
Eddie had heard the news of the impending call-up, and nestling in my handbag was a hastily scribbled note to me.
"Let the oil companies fight it. You are not to volunteer. They'll probably try to shame you into joining the ATS or some bloody factory. It will kill you. Be shameless, httle lady, be shameless. You are doing as good a job as anybody, already."
I clutched my handbag in my lap, and answered the patronising tribunal in monosyllables. After two wasted workdays, I was allowed to return to the office, while the oil companies consulted their legal representatives. The unfortunate girl with swollen feet was told that there was a war on, and was sent, weeping, back to the sugar company.
As we went out together, I said to her, "Get your doctor to sign you off until they change their minds. That's what my sister did. You don't have to suffer so."She stopped crying, and a big grin dawned across her wet face. "Thanks, pal," she said. "I'll do it."
The oil companies talked to higher echelons of government, bypassing the local tribunal. They simply said that they could not guarantee their distribution system, if the girls were removed, and the whole war effort would, in consequence, come to a slow stop.
Ernest Bevin's administration knew when it was wise to give a little, so I went back to my desk, and hundreds of other girls in other parts of the country stayed in front of theirs, for the duration.
The experience had tired me inuneasur-ably, and I realised that, despite canteen lunches and a more bearable situation at home, I did not have as much endurance as many girls did.
Civilians bore their own particular difficulties without a great deal of complaint. Perhaps the lack of fuel was the greatest hardship. We queued for coal at the railway stations, gas jets flickered down to a tiny, almost useless flame; and, despite dropping shillings into the electric meter, the lights often went off. Nothinglay between our bungalow and the sea, except windswept marshes and the dike, and the gale howled through the uninsulated structure, while every wave hitting the dike made the bungalow shudder on its cement raft.
The smallness of the soap ration also bothered us. There never seemed to be enough to wash clothes properly, and we would use the water from the wash to scour the floors.
The question on the billboards, "Is your journey really necessary?" became rhetorical. If they did not have to do so, few would put up with the acute discomfort of cold, slow, packed trains and buses.
In the winter winds, our bare legs got increasingly chapped and sore, and we had to admit that one of the very few advantages of being in the Forces would be to have thick woollen bloomers and woollen stockings. Our Wizard-of-Oz type manager continued to forbid us to wear trousers in the office, and we, fools that we were, obeyed him.
I continued my habi
t of buying bits ofold, hand-knitted garments from secondhand shops and unravelling them. Whether sitting or standing during my train journeys to Liverpool, if I had enough elbow room, I knitted gloves, cardigans and jumpers, either for myself or for various members of the family. Considering how the trains shook, it was surprising that I never impaled a fellow passenger on a knitting needle!
Since I had no clothing coupons, I watched the small advertisements pinned up in the window of the village tobacconist, in order to buy second-hand shoes. Because shoes were often trodden out of shape by their original owners, it meant that to find a reasonably comfortable pair, I had to follow up several advertisements. I was plagued by chilblains on my heels and toes, caused by exposure to the winter weather. To get a bUster from an ill-fitting shoe, on top of a chilblain, and have it turn septic, which it usually did, was very painful.
All through the war, late at night, I danced. I danced with men from every nation in Europe, and they had one atti-tude in common; they never talked about what they would do after the war. Perhaps they accepted, what I feared, that they would be killed.
33
CIVILIANS were not the only people who fell ill and had their sickness made worse by overcrowded conditions and poor food. Alan, travelling home on leave, was stuck in a train which became mired in an enormous snowdrift in Derbyshire. There were many children on the train who became fractious with cold and hunger. Alan volunteered, with some other servicemen, to walk through the waist-high snow covering the bare fields surrounding the train, in the hope of finding help. They came upon an isolated farm, which provided milk, bread and candles. Unfortunately, it did not have a telephone, though they promised to send out a messenger to the nearest phone, some miles off, to try to hasten help to the stricken train. Back in the freezing train, Alan and the other men were unable to dry their sodden uniforms, and when he arrived home, forty-eight hours later, he had pneumonia.Because of the tremendous snowfall, we were unable to get him to the transit camp hospital. Their telephone lines were down and the lanes leading to the camp were choked. Our local doctor was out at a confinement, and by the time he saw poor Alan, the crisis was approaching and the family was nearly beside itself with worry. The doctor examined the tossing young man, who was extremely thin from overwork and poor food, and said flatly that he doubted if he would live. When Mother burst into tears, he said uneasily that he had a sample of some new tablets put out by May and Baker, which might help, though he was not sure. A powder with the same base had been used by the Russians, to pack wounds before removing their men from the battlefield, and they had had great success in lowering the rate of infection in the wounds.
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