Izzy's War

by Isla Dewar

  Away from the pulpit, Hamish enjoyed spending his free time tinkering with his MG sports car. Often, on Saturday afternoons, he’d take Izzy for a run, roof down, through the Perthshire countryside where they lived. They would thunder and rattle through Crieff towards Loch Tay, wind sweeping their hair from their faces, yelling their sparse conversation above the din of rushing air and roaring engine.

  So, her father had given Izzy a conscience that she kept in prime condition, and a passion for speed and wind. He was her hero.

  When she’d read about the ATA in The Aeroplane magazine, she’d applied, thinking she wouldn’t be accepted. But she was invited for a test flight at White Waltham near Maidenhead. She’d flown round the airbase following the orders her instructor, seated in the rear cockpit, hollered down a Gosport tube. To her, and her family’s, amazement, she’d passed.

  Her mother had been horrified. ‘But you can’t go flying aeroplanes all over the country, you’ll die,’ her mother said.

  ‘I’ll just be on the ground planning the routes and making sure everyone gets home at night. Same sort of thing I did for Betty Stokes Flying Show.’

  ‘Don’t mention Betty Stokes Flying Show to me. I don’t want to hear that name again. You, a well brought up minister’s daughter, joining a show like that. It’s a disgrace.’

  I suppose I am a disgrace, Izzy thought. But she rattled along smiling. She’d told her parents she was a back-room girl at Betty Stokes Flying Show, making tea, selling souvenirs. But she’d been flying. Happy days, she thought. Flying over towns and villages, a long red and yellow banner trailing behind her Tiger Moth – ARRIVING TOMORROW, BETTY STOKES ALL-GIRL FLYING SHOW. People below would stop and point, and she’d heave a batch of leaflets over the side, watch them flutter down. God, she’d loved doing that. It would have been better, though, if she’d been paid.

  ‘You’ll be miles from home,’ her mother had said. ‘And what about the other girls? How will you get on with them? They’ll be rich, and you’re not.’

  Izzy hadn’t answered this. But, in time, she’d found this to be true. It wasn’t wealth that bothered her. She’d never dreamed of being rich. In fact, she wasn’t bothered when her new colleagues spoke about their huge homes. She didn’t want a vast mansion. Who would clean it? She wasn’t comfortable with the notion of servants. Certainly, she did have Mrs Brent cleaning the cottage she shared with Julia and Claire. But Mrs Brent wasn’t really a servant. She was an opinionated tour-de-force who had a way with dusters. The thing was, Izzy knew that if she had servants, she’d be on their side. She imagined herself getting up in the middle of the night to wash dishes and sweep floors so they wouldn’t have to do it. In her mind, she was sure that if she hadn’t learned to fly, she’d probably have ended up as someone’s maid.

  No, it was the self-assurance of her fellow pilots that worried her. She was mixing with women who had ostentatious accents, loud voices and oozed confidence. They made her feel emotionally dowdy. Failure never occurred to these women. Izzy was sure none of them had ever experienced such a thing as doubt. They surged through their lives busy being right about everything. She, on the other hand, tiptoed. She entered rooms quietly. She thought she was just . . . just Izzy. I’m only me, she thought, nobody much. She went through life looking over her shoulder, expecting to be discovered for what she was – just Izzy who did not belong among these poised women.

  ‘I thought that was what you’re meant to do, follow your dreams,’ she’d once said to her father.

  Her father had placed his folded hands on the table, ‘Following your dreams is one thing, making rash decisions is another.’ He’d looked across at his wife. ‘I fear that we have somehow produced a child that is prone to rash decisions. You must promise us, Izzy, that when you’re far from us, you’ll behave in the same way you do when you are near us. You’ll not forget your faith, and you’ll be true to your upbringing.’

  Now, puffing as she skimmed along, Izzy shook her head, dismissing this. Memories, she thought, mustn’t linger in the past.

  Her bike rattled more than the other two, and was too big for her. She had to stretch to reach the pedals. It was heavy and black, and had belonged to a local policeman. He’d sold it to her for two shillings and sixpence.

  ‘I think he saw you coming,’ Julia had said when she saw it. ‘You got rather ripped orff, I’m afraid, darling.’

  Thinking that soon she might join the sky, Izzy cycled faster and caught up with Claire, who shot her a scathing look. ‘Don’t chat. You’ll interrupt my worrying.’

  That was it, Izzy thought. Claire just said she didn’t want to chat out loud. Izzy would just have thought it. Claire said what she wanted – peace to worry – and didn’t give a fig what anyone felt about that.

  Izzy said, ‘Sorry.’ She cycled past to catch up with Julia. ‘We’re bound to get up today.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Julia.

  Izzy allowed herself to feel the rapture that came when contemplating flight, and the guilt and fear that always went with it. ‘Do you think this is wrong?’ she said. ‘To be enjoying this war? People are dying and I’m having the time of my life.’

  Julia said she knew, but what could you do? ‘If they weren’t paying me to ferry planes, I’d do it for nothing. It’s such bloody fun. Anyway, it isn’t all good. There’s always the chance we could get bumped orff.’

  She always put an ‘r’ in her ‘off’s.

  At first, Izzy had been troubled by Julia’s attitude to death. It seemed flippant. But, as time passed and colleagues had been killed, she’d seen this as a way to deal with it. Considering her own mortality and the likelihood of an accident in foul weather or in a mechanically faulty plane, she decided she’d rather not die, just get bumped off. It was jollier.

  Izzy said, ‘Don’t you worry about what you’ll do when the war ends?’

  ‘Depends on how it ends. But we’re sure to win this thing. After the Blitz and Dunkirk, it’s in the way of things that we should win. It’s our turn. Besides, we’re in the right, we didn’t start it.’

  Izzy said she didn’t think that not starting a war necessarily meant you’d win it.

  ‘Of course it does,’ said Julia. ‘Greedy, arrogant little dictators never win in the end, they always get what’s coming to them.’

  This struck a chord with Izzy. Of course Hitler was doomed, vengeance was coming his way. It was a pity, she thought, that he’d never attended that little hillside church outside Perth and heard one of Hamish Macleod’s scathing Sunday sermons, he’d never have dared to invade Poland after that.

  They were both a little breathless, faces pink with effort.

  Izzy asked, ‘Who was that man this morning?’

  Julia shrugged. ‘Don’t really know. Some Polish chap Charles met on the train and invited along. He thought he looked a little lost. He’ll be gone when we get back, Mrs Brent will see him orff.’

  They grinned. Mrs Brent was a force to be reckoned with.

  By now, they were almost at the base. Skimming along beside the long wire fence towards the gate, they could hear it and smell it – the rumble of engines, the shouts of ground engineers, the heavy leaden reek of petrol.

  Nerves shifted and heaved through Izzy’s stomach.

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’ Elspeth had asked her once. ‘I mean, don’t people die doing what you do?”

  ‘Yes, they do get bumped off, sometimes,’ Izzy had agreed. And was she scared? ‘Sometimes, a little.’

  Elspeth had looked at her sceptically, eyebrows raised. She didn’t believe her.

  Izzy had looked down at her feet. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t know fear.

  The other pilots felt it, too. Though nobody spoke about it. For, really, it didn’t diminish the rapture she felt.

  Chapter Two

  Elspeth Moon

  ELSPETH BREATHED ON her fingers. They were stiff, so cold they ached – a constant dull throb. It was a bright clear November day, but bitter. S
he reckoned the temperature was below zero. Still, it wasn’t raining, or snowing – there was always something to be glad about.

  Above her two buzzards, floating on wind thermals so high they were distant specks, claimed their patch of the sky. Elspeth stopped to watch them and felt a brief pang of envy. If she’d stuck at her flying lessons, as Izzy had, that’s where she might be – up there looking down on all of this, miles and miles of forest stretching all shades of green and brown up the hillside. It would be especially wonderful today for it was clear. Usually the hilltops and the mountains beyond were draped in mist.

  Learning to fly had been one of her many grand ideas. Amy Johnson was her heroine. She’d taken lessons at Scone airfield and being in the air had thrilled her. ‘I could get my own plane and fly to America,’ she’d said. On the bus going home, after her first flight, Elspeth had expounded to Izzy on the joys of being in the air. ‘It’s definitely as good as sex.’ Izzy had looked at her dumbly. At the time, she’d known nothing about sex.

  A year after the war started, Elspeth, having abandoned flying for another notion – she was prone to flitting from notion to notion – had joined the Women’s Timber Corps, become a lumber jill. The things she knew now amazed her. Me, she thought, doing all this. Well, goodness.

  She’d learned about forests and how to cut them down. She knew how to operate a cross-cut saw and fell trees so that they did not fall back into the forest when they groaned and crashed to the ground. She could swing a six-pound axe and strip the trees of their branches. It was hard, hard work. No, not work, she thought, it’s graft and sweat and tears. But she was fitter than she’d ever been, not an ounce of fat on her. Her body was trim, muscled. She was proud of this.

  At night, in her army cot under her two regulation scratchy grey blankets, she’d run her hands over her new perfect sinewy thighs and think that this experience had at least done some good.

  At first, she’d ached all over. Everything hurt – muscles and bones. The cold and winter damp seeped into her. But mostly the pain she felt was the cruel complaining of long dormant muscles being stirred, suddenly and mercilessly, into everyday action. She groaned in the morning getting out of bed and would creakily, painfully, pull on her workman’s dungarees. She’d hobble over the duckboards outside to the lavatories, legs, feet, arms groaning with her as she moved. At breakfast, in the wooden dining hut, it hurt to lift her porridge spoon to her lips. It hurt to sit, hurt to stand. But then, she told herself, that’s what happens when you start to use your body and not your mind. The body screams in protest.

  Till now, she thought, I taught music. I sat listening to reluctant children thumping out begrudging scales for hours each day. Now, I know what work, real work, is. I have learned about life. Real life. And I have endured.

  But now she would go. She’d applied to join the Red Cross. She would leave this forest, north of Inverness, miles and miles from anywhere. A wilderness, she thought. Nothing like the polite woods back home where she and her good friend Izzy used to stroll, and sometimes sit drinking tea from a Thermos flask, listening to Mahler on the wind-up gramophone she’d lug along.

  Soon, she would take the train south, back to her cottage. She would spend a week there, have hot baths and sleep between soft clean cotton sheets. Bliss.

  As she worked, she thought about the letter from Izzy. In it, Izzy had told her about The Letter. Izzy was worried that now her father would know that she had slept with a man.

  Elspeth would reply tonight telling Izzy she was a big girl now and could do as she liked with her own life. She would say it was time for Izzy to tell her father about her job, her boyfriends, her loss of faith – everything. ‘It’ll come out one day,’ she said to herself. ‘Can’t keep on lying.’ Sometimes she despaired of Izzy. She thought that at times Izzy seemed to be almost crazed with doubts and fears. ‘You’ve got to stop keeping your true self a secret,’ Elspeth planned to tell her.

  Right now, Elspeth was breathing in the scents of peaty wind coming down from the hills, pine and freshly cut wood. She was watching buzzards and somewhere, not far away, an Italian POW was singing something from Rigoletto.

  ‘So,’ she suddenly said to Lorna who was standing nearby, ‘what are you doing for Christmas?’

  ‘Well,’ said Lorna. ‘I had thought I might spend a relaxing day, opening presents, sitting by the fire listening to the wireless, eating too much. Then, I thought, no I’ll go into the forest and chop down some trees. I’ll get bleedin’ cold, I’ll smell the shit from these horses trotting up and down pulling logs, I’ll get sore and cut by pine needles and shouted at by that Duncan Bowman. That will be a grand way to celebrate Jesus’ birthday.’

  ‘I think I may join you. I will forgo the meal at a posh hotel served by flunkies wearing white gloves, the long-stemmed glasses of chilled champagne, the glistening golden turkey stuffed with crumbling apricots and chestnuts, the gleaming nubby Brussels sprouts, roast potatoes – crisp on the outside, melting soft within – the hot, rich gravy, the creamy bread sauce, cheeky little chipolata sausages, all of that. I will come up here into the bitter winter chill and chop down trees.’

  They had been told earlier that morning that, no, they would not be getting Christmas day off, they would be working as usual. There was a war on, and there was no time for Christmas.

  ‘Bleedin’ hell, is that how you used to spend Christmas before you came here?’ asked Lorna. ‘You’re too posh for me. We used to get a little present, something shiny, a sixpence and an apple. Then, if my dad was working, we’d have a chicken, but he usually wasn’t, so it was sausages.’

  This shamed Elspeth. The hotel and the white-gloved flunkies were imagined, but champagne and glistening turkeys had always been part of her Christmases at home. Until this moment, it hadn’t crossed her mind that some people’s celebrations were not very lavish. Indeed, they were frugal. ‘I like sausages,’ she said. ‘Turkey can be dry, sausages are always good.’

  Lorna said she knew that, ‘But, tell me again. Not about coming up here, about the meal, only missing out the Brussels sprouts.’

  ‘No,’ said Elspeth. ‘It’s wonderful up here.’

  ‘It’s bloody freezin’,’ said Lorna.

  ‘It’s fresh,’ said Elspeth. ‘Good healthy weather.’ She stopped breathing on her fingers and shoved her hands into her armpits, her warmest available part. ‘A moment like this is as near to perfection as a person could get. We are in the depth of a forest, far from anywhere, surrounded by nature and a tenor is singing. Marvellous.’ Well, she thought, I would think it marvellous. I always love a place or a person with all my heart just before I leave them.

  Lorna said something like ‘harrumph’ and the boss shouted, ‘Moon!’

  She looked across at him. Duncan Bowman was standing, arms on hips, scowling. He waved at her to stop her prattling and get on with her work. Elspeth gave him a swift salute.

  Duncan never did speak much. Well, not to the women, anyway. He didn’t like them. Not here, working in his forest, felling his trees. It was their voices, the way they sang as they worked, their jokes, the high-pitched laughter, that irritated him. Like an itch he could do nothing about.

  He’d worked for the Forestry for nigh on forty years now. ‘Man and boy,’ he said, ‘started when I was fourteen.’ He used to think he’d seen everything. Then the war started, his co-workers had joined up and been replaced by women, and he knew he hadn’t.

  He’d grown used to working with men. He respected men, you couldn’t respect a woman, well, not at work, you couldn’t. He could see they could do the job as well as any man. Except that they looked strange swinging an axe, or working the saw. Their problem was, he concluded, that they just weren’t manly. He felt he couldn’t be the man he really was when women were around. He couldn’t spit, or swear. He just didn’t want them here, talking about their boyfriends, lipstick and how they fancied Gregory Peck, and, sometimes, bursting into tears because they were cold or their blis
ters burst.

  ‘We don’t cry!’ he shouted. ‘Foresters don’t cry. Stop it.’

  Once, that Elspeth one had said it was a shame to see lovely trees chopped down in their prime.

  God, the stupidity of the woman. ‘These aren’t trees any more. They are telegraph poles, pit props, ships’ masts, road blocks.’ He’d shoved his face close to hers. ‘They are crosses for dead soldiers.’ That had shut her up. She’d even blushed. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Better get used to them. All the good men gone. There’s a war on. What can you do?’

  Now, Elspeth, head down and working her way up the tree trunk, removing branches, pine needles thick against her fingers, breathing in the strong scent of resin, said, ‘The way he yells your last name does have an unsettling effect on the digestive system. I get butterflies. I think I might fart.’

  Then, hoping he didn’t think her salute impudent, she took up her axe and continued snedding. ‘There was a time when I didn’t even know what bloody snedding was. I was happy then.’

  ‘Thought you was happy now. You just said this was marvellous.’

  ‘It was a happy moment: the buzzards, the smells, the tenor singing. I wasn’t including the snedding.’

  Lorna, bending over the tree, hacking at branches, said, ‘If you’d kept yer bloody mouth shut when we were training, you’d be doin’ something else.’

  Elspeth knew this to be true. Her big ambition had been to work with the horses that dragged the felled logs to the clearing by the road to be loaded onto trucks. But her lip had led to this dreadful job.

  When she joined the Land Army, she’d asked to be sent to work for the Timber Corps as a lumberjill. She had a notion of herself in a plaid shirt. But, on arrival at the training camp, she’d been issued with a uniform – riding breeches, green pullover, beige shirt, green tie, melton coat, green beret with a badge with a tree on it, long woollen socks and stout leather boots – that didn’t include anything plaid at all. Still, she thought it wonderful. She imagined herself striding through the village back home wearing this outfit, and being admired by one and all. ‘I’m a lumberjill,’ she’d say. And people would think her splendid.