Tools of War

by Dulcie M. Stone

  How long before Julian would arrive?

  Meanwhile there was no escape. She dare not even try to cross the room to hide in the small laboratory with Aaron, who’d also not opened his door.

  “I’m sick to death of her dramatics!” Joan bellowed.

  “It’s not dramatics!” Sophie raged. “It’s true!”

  “You’re as bad as she is.”

  “Show them your neck, Anne,” Helen begged.

  “Why should I?” Where was Julian? “I’m not a liar.”

  “No one said you are. You just bloody twist the truth.”

  “Take that back!” Sophie screamed.

  “Let’s see!” Leaping from her stool, Joan snatched at the protective scarf.

  “Cut that out!!!” Julian strode into the room.

  Joan released her.

  What would Julian do?

  “Get back to work.” No louder than a whisper, Julian’s order was icy.

  “I was only…” Joan began.

  “Get to work.”

  Quickly recovering, Joan held her ground. “But I was…”

  “You were what? Assaulting a co-worker?”

  Red-faced, Joan skulked back to her place.

  Shaking, she rewound the scarf around her throat.

  The only sound was Lillian’s hysterical sobbing.

  “For God’s sake,” Julian ordered. “Will someone look after that woman.”

  Helen helped Lillian to the staff room.

  “Thank you.” Julian waited until the staff room door was closed. “We’ve had enough drama. Back to work, ladies. There’s a war on.”

  Heads down, they shuffled back to their assignments. Except for Alice, who started towards Julian.

  “I believe I made myself clear, Mrs Henderson.”

  “You did,” Alice came to a halt a pace from Julian. “No drama, Mr Reeves. Just a question. If I may make a suggestion?”

  “Later.” He was brusque. “There’s more than enough time been lost.”

  “As you say,” Alice did not back off. “However - one word…”

  “If you must.”

  “I assure you, I must,” Alice’s bird eyes were black. “As this morning’s debacle has clearly demonstrated, morale is dangerously low. You’ll agree something has to be done.”

  From his superior height, Julian did not respond.

  “There’s no dispute mechanism in place.” Mistaking his silence, Alice continued. “There are no grievance procedures. There’s no Union, as such. Among many things, that’s a start. We need to talk.”

  Julian smiled his thin derisive smile.

  “No comment, Mr Reeves?”

  Anne tensed. Watching Alice was like watching an innocent strike a match in a gas-filled room. Though Julian would have to agree in principle with the rights of the workers, Alice was an unhappy choice of advocate. If her co-workers had chosen her? Highly unlikely. Alice was doing as she always did, taking control.

  “Surely you have a comment, Mr Reeves?” Alice was burying herself.

  Julian shook his head. “No comment, Mrs Henderson.”

  “A matter of staff morale?” Alice persisted. “Surely one would think staff morale was a matter of deep concern to you?”

  “Meaning?” Julian was being oddly cautious.

  “Don’t be coy with me, young man. You’ve been brought in to straighten things out. I have it on good authority. Right?”

  Anne held her breath. What good authority? What was Alice talking about? Why did she feel so secure tackling Julian? Whatever she was talking about, it would make no difference. Though she might have some special information, she didn’t even have the sense to understand that provoking Julian was extremely unwise.

  Surprisingly, Julian turned his back on her. Had she touched a nerve? Or was he unwilling to prolong a confrontation which could lead to Alice revealing her ‘good authority’ source to everyone?

  “Don’t you dare turn your back on me!” Alice cried. “I haven’t finished.”

  “Alice, dear…” Myrtle’s plea fell away, unfinished.

  “I haven’t finished, Mr Reeves,” Alice insisted. “We need to…”

  Quickly turning, Julian held up a warning hand. “Enough!”

  “Excuse me!”

  “Mrs Henderson,” Julian’s controlled sarcasm stung: “You asked for a single word. You’ve exceeded your limit. Check your math.”

  “Really! This isn’t…”

  “I have two words, Mrs Henderson,” Julian interjected. “Shut up.”

  Alice’s bird eyes blazed with fury. She said nothing.

  “Thank you.” Julian again turned his back.

  Embarrassed, her colleagues watched Alice return to her bench. She’d asked for trouble, not Julian’s cruelty.

  He was giving the group every reason to fear him. Was that his intention? Something fundamental had changed since this morning’s talk in the café. Or had it changed last week while she was away?

  “Sophie?” Julian called across the room.

  “Yes, sir?”

  Sophie’s submissive response was the final confirmation of the new hierarchical structure Julian had established in her absence. Macklin and Grace remained invisible, Alice had been brutally cowed and Sophie was acting like a docile puppy. Already, in less than a week, Julian reigned in this small kingdom.

  “Sophie,” Julian beckoned: “If you will follow me….”

  She watched them disappear behind the closed door of the small laboratory. This wasn’t just about power. Julian’s ideals embraced the antithesis of power for power’s sake. It was something else. But why? Why now and not when he’d first arrived?

  This tactic of alienating the staff, whenever it had started, would have been deliberate. Even the selection of Alice, who was probably best equipped to recover from the humiliation, could well be a carefully planned strategy. Knowing him, she had to wonder. Had Alice really pushed him? Or had he manipulated her into the confrontation? So why this morning?

  A few seconds later, Aaron came in from the small lab: “Julian wants to talk to Sophie alone. What is happening?”

  “I don’t know.” She made a place for him at her side. “You should know more than I do. You see more of him.”

  “He’s a busy man, Anne.”

  “Too busy for me.”

  “Is this truly what you think?”

  “He hardly ever came to see me,” she complained. “Even when he was busy he used to make time for me.”

  “Your throat, Anne. How is it now?”

  “The tablets help. But then they wear off.”

  “Perhaps you should not have come to work yet.”

  Flushing, she turned to the work she had not yet begun. “I can work.”

  Placing a detaining hand over hers, he whispered. “About Julian. There’s something very important happening. He is always asking questions.”

  She looked out across the large room. Both the office door and the door to the small laboratory remained closed. In the large laboratory everyone was still trying to recover from the fracas. Heads were bent and eyes were downcast. No-one was taking any notice of her conversation with Aaron.

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Everything. Julian asks about everything. About the ladies. About Mr Macklin.”

  “Does he ask about me, too?”

  “Nice questions, Anne. How are you? Are you happy? How do you get on with Alice? He worries about you.”

  “You’d never know.”

  “He has been watching out for you,” Aaron reminded her.

  “It’s not like it used to be.”

  “He also asks about before, when you were in the former laboratory. About - I believe there was an explosion?”

  “Sure. Ages ago.”

  “He asks about it.”

  “What else?”

  “He asks about your attack. Now he also asks about your attack.”

  “I told him. It’s not the first time. It’s the war
- the black-out. It happens.”

  “The serial killer, the American soldier. He was caught, Anne.”

  “What’s to stop another one? That’s how it works. It’s probably some copy cat idiot.”

  “Julian does not believe it’s bad luck. He believes someone has selected you. Especially since you work in this place of importance.”

  “What difference does working here make?”

  “Too many things are happening which should not be happening.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know what, Anne. It is in chaos. We have to ask - what work is being done in this place?”

  “That’s not fair!” Quickly, she again lowered her voice to a whisper. “We work very hard.”

  “Hard? Of course, hard. Yet not of the required standard.”

  She re-checked the room. Still, all heads remained down and all eyes remained intent on their work.

  “You do know something is wrong. I can see.” Aaron’s large brown eyes were intense.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “You know that when the work is done, it becomes necessary to carry out the reviews and the corrections of the defective assessments.”

  “It doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Not true, Anne. Quality performance, it is deteriorating. It is a cause for great alarm. Mr Macklin, Mrs Dawson, Julian, myself - we are all working late into the night and early in the morning. We are all working with diligence to maintain the required standards. The workers are not doing it!”

  “So what? It doesn’t mean anything sinister.”

  “Think! Think, Anne!” Aaron’s unhealthy pallor flushed with passion. “Think of the effect of this gross inefficiency. Think of the effect on the war effort. You all speak of it. You talk! It changes nothing.”

  “Come off it, Aaron. You’re jumping at shadows.”

  Scrubbing a stubby fist across his distressed face, he groaned: “You should also jump at shadows. You forget Europe.”

  “Aaron! I’m sorry.”

  “The shadows, Anne. They are substance.”

  “I said I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” Had she learned nothing?

  “Of course. Of course. It is most difficult for you,” he sighed forgiveness. “To be constantly suspicious is not a thing to quickly learn.”

  She placed a comforting hand over his.

  “There is something,” he volunteered. “I heard a question Julian asked of Sophie. Before the door closed.”

  She was instantly alerted. “What did you hear?”

  “It was an indication only.”

  “Aaron – please….”

  He looked around, myopically scrutinising the other desks. Everyone, knowing Julian could reappear at any moment, was working. Still no one seemed to be paying them undue attention.

  “It’s okay, Aaron,” she prompted. “They can’t hear you.”

  “Sophie, I think, has also been followed.” He took his handkerchief from his pocket, dried his sweating palms, dabbed at the fine beads of moisture coating his face.

  “Are you sure?” Sophie had never said.

  “I am not sure. I do not know the circumstances, no. But it seems so.”

  She struggled to make sense of it. If Aaron was right; something was surely going on.

  “Whatever it is,” he pocketed the handkerchief. “It has to do with when you were employed in the previous laboratory. You will find it started then.”

  “If I ever find out.”

  “It will happen.” He had no doubt. “You will find out. You will find out it started long ago.”

  “But that was…!” She stopped, aghast. It started long ago! When Julian was smuggling match-boxes into the munitions factory.

  “Anne! What is it?”

  “Nothing.” Praying he would not press any further, she bent her attention to the work she’d postponed. “I should be getting on with this.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  6th June:

  “Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.” General Eisenhower’s Headquarters.

  June 6th. 1944. ‘D Day.’ The long-awaited Invasion of Europe! The Second Front, the Normandy Landing had begun. At last.

  At last it was coming to an end. At last Hitler was going to be thrashed. It heralded the beginning of the end for all the bad guys and confirmed the forecast that all the good guys would win in the end. Soon the world would be its sensible self again. Had anyone ever doubted it? Not in Anne Preston’s world. In her world, and the world she knew, good inevitably overcame evil.

  But on June 6th, 1944, that happy time had not yet arrived. In the laboratory, Alice Henderson was getting her way. Discussions had begun. Affiliating with one of the powerful industrial unions, the laboratory assistants were to become union members. Except for Anne. Heeding her father’s earlier warnings, she refused to take part in any of it.

  Although his specific position in the laboratory was still undefined, Julian was one of the bosses. Therefore he’d distanced himself from all plans for unionism - apparently. Knowing his beliefs, his communist affiliation and his loyalty to the working class, she had to wonder. What Julian was seen to be doing was not necessarily what he was actually doing.

  Since the terrible confrontation the factions had become fixed and seemingly irreconcilable. The consequences were even less output, less efficiency, less reliability, less well-being, more dissatisfaction, more suspicion, more spasmodic ill health, more long-term absenteeism and more resignations. The outcome was inevitable. New staff to be trained, new staff at the mercy of the endemic unrest, new reasons for despair.

  A further inevitable consequence was that, in this crippled central laboratory in the heart of the city, the actual number of completed assessments of precision gauges was now slowing at an alarming rate. The ultimate consequence, therefore, was that the Department’s entire production of machine tools was affected. Which, of course, directly affected the entire output of the Department’s weapons of war. Because its core component was disintegrating, this Australian Department would soon no longer be able to fill its orders for Churchill’s ‘tools to finish the job’.

  Catastrophic!

  Of this the majority of staff was barely aware. Dangerously detached and living in a world where personal survival was their prime concern, they daily reported for work, performed at a level designed to preserve both individual mental health and employment, and left for home.

  All things considered, it was not surprising. Lillian, one of the original and formerly most stable staff members, was still under doctor’s orders and spent week-ends and holidays in bed. If it had not been for the demands of the war effort, it was probable she too would long ago have been diagnosed as suffering a nervous breakdown severe enough to exempt her from work. Which might have been better for everyone, including Lillian. As it was, even though her actual efficiency was adequate, her continuing presence afforded for her friends a disconcerting example of where they might themselves be heading. Lillian’s wounded eyes were visible evidence of a volcano too close, for too long, to eruption.

  As for Lillian, so for Anne. Prematurely resuming work after the assault, her fragile system was stretched to impossible limits by the physical, intellectual, and emotional stress. Physically exhausted, emotionally vulnerable, unable to concentrate, and distressingly ambivalent about her feelings for Julian, her hard-won self confidence was disastrously eroded. Gradually, she succumbed to acute depression. Its gravity went unrecognised, its potential for tragedy un-comprehended. Those few who did notice that all was not as it should be considered that ‘Anne was tired and unwell.’ Or that ‘Anne was doing too much’.

  And so, to varying degrees, for all but the very newest staff members. Whatever their individual idiosyncrasies there was, overall, a bizarre sense of interrupted drama; an eerie suspicion that Fate had declared a deceptive rest period. While no-one could believe all was well, it
was tempting to believe that Fate, deftly directing its own melodrama for reasons yet to be revealed, had declared an interval.

  Obeying subconscious laws of self preservation, they worked with absent minds and witless disinterest. At the same time Julian, Aaron, Grace and Macklin were still working late almost every night and most weekends. To them fell the laborious task of trying to reverse errors, complete unfinished work, ensure quality standards and meet deadlines.

  Meanwhile Anne crawled for endless undisturbed hours into the safe haven of her bedroom. Saturdays she slept, almost entirely without interruption. Sundays she stolidly walked to St Margaret’s, played the organ, avoided the choir and the tenor and the Vicar, came home, ate lunch, and slept again. Fortuitously, choir practice and weddings with music were, at this tired end of five years of war, rare. On the few special extra occasions she had to be there her father, who was now working from home, drove her. While her mother, after telling herself that at least Anne had the common sense to ‘recuperate at the weekends’, was careful not to further pressure her.

  Helplessly watching her deterioration, Jim and May Preston were out of their depth. Totally unaware of the turmoil at the laboratory and of all the complications associated with Julian, they were reaching the end of their patience. There seemed to be far more going on than ‘Anne is tired’ or ‘Anne is overworked.’

  Something had to be done about Anne.

  “Anne!” May Preston knocked on her daughter’s bedroom door. “Tea!”

  From behind the door, there was no response.

  “Anne! Tea’s on the table!”

  “This has to stop.” Jim Preston, already at the table in the adjacent living room, lowered his evening Herald.

  “She’s taking so long to recover.” May turned away from the door.

  “Too long.” Jim folded the paper, slapped it deliberately on the table, and started for Anne’s door.

  “Don’t upset her, Jim. She’s on a fine edge.”

  “Something has to be done.” He rapped firmly on the bedroom door. “Anne! It’s Dad.”

  Outside the window, in the garden, was the haunting song of the evening black-bird. Behind the closed door, in Anne’s room, was no sound.