by Isla Dewar
She was also given dungarees and wellington boots. This is what she wore, day in day out.
On her first day of training, after a dire and sleepless night on an army cot in a row of army cots, in an unheated hut along with twenty other trainees, she was handed a six-pound axe that she could hardly lift.
‘Are these the only axes you have?’ she’d asked. ‘These are surely for men. Don’t you have ladies’ axes?’
Her instructor hadn’t bothered to answer, and had set off up the forest track. The girls, welly boots scraping and squelching in the mud, bent under the weight of the axes that they had struggled to sling over their shoulders, had followed. They exchanged horrified glances. They all knew now that this had been a Big Mistake.
He only led them a few yards to a truck that would take them to the part of the forest where their training was to begin. It lasted four gruelling weeks. At the end of every day they’d had to walk back to their base, six or seven miles. Elspeth not only had stiff and groaning muscles, she had blisters on her feet and hands.
She’d learned how to chop down trees, how to use a cross-cut saw, how to measure timber for pit props, how to load logs onto a truck and snedding.
Snedding was her downfall. It was the word. She’d never heard it before. So when instructor had said, ‘Today, yer going to learn the snedding,’ she’d sniggered. ‘Sounds like something naughty. Oooh, we went into the woods and did a little snedding.’ She’d wiggled her hips as she said it. And the other girls had joined in the sniggering.
‘You.’ The instructor pointed at her – a rigid derogatory finger. ‘You can help me demonstrate.’ He was standing beside a felled tree and was about to show the girls how to cut off its branches, where to stand, how to stand, how to work from the base up and how to stop the emerging log from rolling on top of you. He wasn’t happy about working with women. Didn’t think they had the strength for man’s work.
Elspeth’s remark enraged him. He handed her an axe and a billhook, told her to work her way through the branches, stand on the opposite side of the trunk from where she was cutting.
‘Perhaps,’ Elspeth had said, ‘this is not for me. I’m thinking about my hands. I’m a musician, you see.’ She held them out for him to admire their softness.
He hadn’t answered verbally. He’d just looked at her. A look that said he thought her as disgusting as something he might find on the sole of his boot.
Her training behind her, and now working here in the forest beyond Inverness, she was still snedding. In rain, wind, snow, sleet and hail, she snedded. It was a punishment.
Now when she looked down at her hands, she hardly recognised them. They were rough, chapped, blistered with a ring of grime embedded under the nails. These are not my hands, she thought. These are not a musician’s hands.
She had brought her accordion with her. In the evenings the girls would gather round the wood-burning stove that heated their hut, and was kept stoked red-hot. They’d come from all over the country. They were shop girls, factory workers, typists, a couple of librarians. Bonded by their suffering – cold, aching bones and homesickness – they’d laugh, tell jokes and silly stories and sing. Most evenings, Elspeth would play. The tunes that filled the room were mostly songs of the day – ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’, ‘Bless ’Em All’ – but sometimes she’d drift into traditional melodies – ‘The Skye Boat Song’, ‘Marie’s Wedding’ – and the girls would hum along, swaying, drifting into their memories.
Years ago, a lifetime ago, Elspeth had worked in Selfridges. She’d loved that job. It had opened up whole new lifestyles to her. At home, her mother and father mostly talked about how busy the Tube had been on her father’s journey home, what the man in the grocer’s had said about the price of ham and what was in the news today. But at work break times the girls would chatter about lipstick, boyfriends, embarrassing things they’d done or said, their brothers and sisters. Their conversations overlapped, they interrupted one another. They giggled a lot. It had taken Elspeth a while to relax and join in. But when she did, there was no stopping her. She felt she belonged with these women.
She felt the same here with her fellow lumberjills. She was one of them. However, her background was far more privileged than any of the others. Lorna, her new best friend, was from Glasgow. She’d lived in a two-roomed flat with her mother and father and four sisters. Elspeth knew that times had been harsh for the family. But when Lorna spoke about life back home, she made it seem fun, rowdy, crowded fun. And, despite herself, Elspeth envied her that.
When Lorna had seen the hut she was to share with the other girls, she’d smiled. ‘Cosy,’ she’d said. She’d spread her arms enjoying the space between the beds. ‘So much room. And a locker of my own. And a whole bed to myself for the first time in my life. Always had to share with my sister.’ Elspeth had grinned at her. Oh, but the pang she felt at the comfortable life she’d led.
When night fell thick, black, there would be scuttlings. Not the swift fervid movements of forest animals – deer, rabbits, mice, foxes – but lovers – girls from the hut, and Newfoundlanders over to help in the war effort, working with the girls, living in log cabins nearby – slipping from their huts to meet and sneak into the trees.
They called their kissing and cuddling ‘canoodling’. Elspeth abstained from this. The consequences of canoodling where dire, she thought. She didn’t want to get sent in disgrace from the camp, pregnant. This had already happened. And would, she was sure, happen time and time again. She would play her accordion, she would work through pain and exhaustion, but love would never touch her.
Now, leaning towards Lorna, she said, ‘What I’d really like to do is work with the horses.’ She looked enviously at Avril, who was running behind Harry, a brown Clydesdale, through the clearing to the road where the logs were stacked onto a truck. Avril jumped stumps, crashed through fern and bracken. And, whenever she heard the shout, ‘TIMBER!’ she scarpered.
‘Up at five,’ said Elspeth, ‘grooming and feeding the horses.’
‘Shovelling shit,’ said Lorna.
Elspeth ignored this. It ruined the dream. ‘Caring for them, chatting. I think they’d like me to sing to them. I’d be good with the horses.’
‘Well,’ said Lorna. ‘The only way you’d get to work with them is to make the boss think you’d hate it more than you hate the snedding. That’s what he’s like – spiteful.’
‘I know,’ said Elspeth. ‘I should learn to keep my mouth shut. I just open it and out come the most inappropriate things. No matter now. I’ll be gone from here soon enough.’
Behind them, two girls were at either end of a cross-cut saw, heaving it to and fro, kneeling on the ground as they worked their way through a tree trunk singing, ‘Daisy, Daisy’.
The whistle blew, a blackened billycan was boiling over a small fire, time for tea. Newfies and the Italian POWs appeared from where they’d been working further in the forest. Calls and wolf whistles.
Tyler Bute, a brawny Newfoundlander who had his eye on Elspeth, called her name. ‘Hey, Ellie, looking beautiful today.’ He waved.
Elspeth trilled her fingers back. Then she slipped her hand into the pocket of her dungarees and fingered a bar of chocolate – a present from Izzy.
Elspeth had written to Izzy:
Darling Izzy,
You will never believe where I am now. I am in the depth of a forest a few miles north of Inverness. I have joined the Women’s Timber Corps. I’m a lumberjill. Fancy that.
Living conditions are rudimentary to say the least. Actually, they’re hellish. There is no electricity here. No plumbing, and the food is quite awful. Though I have to say, after a day working outdoors, I’d eat anything.
Lunch for Elspeth and the rest of the workers was tea and a sandwich. These sandwiches were not the delicate things Elspeth was used to – cucumber, peeled and finely cut and placed between two thin slices of bread – they were thick and contained cheese or gra
ted carrot and, occasionally, beetroot. Still, she ate them with relish.
I have never known hunger like the hunger I feel these days. It gnaws at me. I think this is what life should be like. We should be aching for food when we sit down to eat. I rather fancy I used to nibble too much.
Anyway, darling Izzy, could you please do me a favour? It is October and winter is coming on. It is going to get cold, very, very cold. At the moment I am wearing my silk lingerie under my work dungarees. It reminds me that I’m a woman. But I rather fear this will not do in the months to come. Could you please send me a pair of long johns?
I have no money to send you. I get thirteen shillings a week. And they take money off for our food. Not only am I eating carrot sandwiches, I’m paying to eat them. I will pay you back when all this is over.
But right now, I work five and a half days a week out here in the middle of nowhere – a real wilderness – and rarely get near any shops. What little cash I have I use for the cinema in the village and some fish and chips on a Saturday night. Oh, I do like my Saturday nights.
If you could send me the long johns, I’d be warm, or warmer, in the ice and snow.
Thank you.
All my love, your old friend,
Elspeth
Izzy had sent three pairs of long johns. She’d used her clothes coupons to buy them. She spent most of her time in uniform and rarely bought anything new to wear. She’d also sent several bars of soap, two jars of Ponds cold cream, three pairs of woolly, socks and chocolate.
She wrote:
Don’t worry about the chocolate, we often have to work all day with no time for lunch, so Cadbury’s donate these bars to us. I often forget to eat mine. Will send more, seems like you need it more than me.
Lots of love,
Izzy
Sitting with Lorna on a log to drink their tea, Elspeth broke four squares of chocolate from her bar and gave Lorna two.
‘Chocolate,’ said Lorna putting one square into her mouth, letting the melting sweetness trickle down her throat.
‘I know,’ said Elspeth. ‘Chocolate.’
Tyler shouted, ‘Hey, Ellie, you don’t need chocolate, you’re sweet enough!’
Elspeth shrugged and said, ‘How original.’
Lorna told her not to mock him. ‘He’s lovely. Full of fun.’
Two of the Italian POW sat across from them. One was the tenor – tall, olive-skinned with a mop of dark hair that he would occasionally sweep back from his brow.
‘There’s a man I wouldn’t mind getting to know,’ said Elspeth. ‘Much more my type than that Newfie.’
‘You’re too thin. He says we’re all too thin. He likes his women plump. I’d rather have the Newfie. He’s a laugh.’
Elspeth said it would be a meeting of minds. ‘Me and that tenor. We could talk about music and art.’
‘Minds,’ scoffed Lorna. ‘Who needs minds? If I had a man like that, it wouldn’t be his mind I’d like to meet. I mean, you don’t need a man to think. You can think when you’re alone.’
Elspeth remembered well that at nineteen she, too, had been wise in the ways of men. Confident, too. She wondered what had happened to her. The older she got, the less she knew. The more experience she gained, the more she realised how ignorant she was. At this rate, by the time she reached sixty, she’d be a complete fool. Even more of a fool than she was now – and she considered herself to be an impetuous idiot who’d rushed into a stupid job because she liked the notion of striding through a forest in a plaid shirt, listening to birds singing, the air around her filled with the sweet smell of pine. No-nonsense Lorna was right. Elspeth decided she didn’t need a man. She needed to get out of there.
As she sipped her tea, cupping her hands round her mug, she saw Duncan approach.
‘Too late to bother with any man,’ she said. ‘I’ll be gone from here. Think of me when you’re out in the wind and snow. I’ll be at home in a hot bath. I’ll leave the bathroom door open so I can listen to the wireless as I soak. There’s often good concerts on in the evening on the Home Service.’
Duncan overheard her last few words. ‘And where are you going for your hot bath and your Home Service?’
‘Home,’ said Elspeth. ‘I’ve applied to join the Red Cross in Glasgow. But I’ll spend a few days at my cottage before I go there.’
Duncan snorted. ‘You can get all that baths and Home Service nonsense out of your head. You’re not going anywhere.’
Chapter Three
Making Friends with the Loneliness
SKIMPTON WAS A tiny place, cobbled twisting streets, small cottages and Victorian terraces spreading up from the river. Emily Brent had lived there all her life. The furthest she’d roamed was Blackpool, ten miles away. She liked living here. ‘No need to travel when you’ve all this good air and countryside around you.’
She cycled every morning from the cottage she’d lived in since she married William fifty-five years ago to the cottage Izzy shared with Julia and Claire. She pedalled slowly, upright in the saddle, plodding through familiar streets nodding hello to everyone she met, even if she didn’t know them. The village was full of strangers these days, Americans, Canadians, even Poles. ‘All sorts,’ she said.
She wore a crossover apron under her brown tweed coat. On her head, a small navy felt hat with a brisk, no-nonsense brim. Her thick stockings were wrinkled at the ankle. She puffed as she went. ‘Not as young as I used to be.’ She was in her seventh decade.
It didn’t surprise her to find a huge hulk of a man standing by the sink in the cottage she’d come to clean. There was often a man or two here. Friends of Julia’s, usually, she was a one for the men. Well, Emily thought, there’s a war on. A little bit of hanky-panky would keep their minds off things.
‘Not that I approve,’ she said to William. ‘But there’s a war on, we all got something to lose. Better it’s your virginity than your home or your life.’
She bustled in, hung her coat on the hook by the door, though the hat stayed on her head, and told Jacob he shouldn’t be washing up. ‘That’s for me to do.’
He shrugged and said it seemed polite. After all, he’d been given a bed for the night and some breakfast.
‘And where did you sleep?’ asked Mrs Brent.
‘The spare room.’
‘Well, that’s more sheets for me to change. You’re not English, then?’
‘Polish.’
She told him to put the kettle on and eased herself into a chair. ‘There’s weather coming. I can always tell. My knees are giving me gyp. Crackin’ with every step.’
She sat quietly drumming her fingers on the table, then heaved herself up again. ‘I can’t sit here and watch you wash dishes. It’s no job for a man and your hands are too big for them cups you’re doing. You sit down. I’ll make tea, then I’ll get on with the cleaning up.’
She brought a brown teapot to the table, pulled a knitted tea cosy over it and sat back. ‘Give it a minute or two, can’t be doing with weak tea.’ She patted the pot tenderly, old hands used to hot water, bleach and dusters, liver-spotted.
They sat watching the teapot, till Mrs Brent said, ‘That’ll be it now.’ She poured two cups, added milk and said, ‘Tell me all about yourself. I need to know.’ When Jacob asked why, she said, ‘I’m nosy.’
‘Do I get to ask about you?’
‘Nothing to tell. I was born here, lived here all my days, never been more than ten miles away from here and I’ll die here. Been married to William since I was nineteen. Five children, all boys. All living hereabouts, working on the land, doing all sorts. The youngest turned forty-five last week. That’s me, that’s all there is to me. What about you?’
He was Jacob, thirty-two years old and married to Anna. He took a battered photograph from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Anna,’ he said, handing it over.
Mrs Brent studied the face in the picture. She fancied she was good at faces. This one she was looking at was thin, with high cheekbones, full lips. ‘She�
�s not so much pretty as beautiful.’
Jacob agreed.
‘Like Claire and Julia, they are proper English beauties. Izzy, though, is just plain pretty.’ Her voice warmed when she mentioned Izzy, her favourite of the three. ‘She is a good pilot, so I hear, anyway. It probably suits her to be in the air. She’s not much use here on earth.’
Jacob raised his eyebrows. ‘No?’
‘Oh no. She’s never got the knack of mingling. Other people puzzle her.’
Jacob said, ‘Ah.’ He somehow couldn’t bring himself to say that he hardly knew Izzy. Still, this interested him.
‘She doesn’t have a boyfriend. The only place she ever goes out to is the fish and chip shop. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. She lives for flying, that one. Loves it. Loves being up in the air, away from the world. And she loves her dad, too. That’s Izzy.’
Jacob nodded. He knew enough about women like Mrs Brent to know you didn’t interrupt when they were in full flow. He’d seen people like her back in his boyhood village. Women and men of indecipherable age who had accumulated huge stores of wisdom and dubious opinions, and who, he thought, died of surprise.
‘See,’ said Mrs Brent, ‘Our Izzy’s a lonely one. That’s all right, I suppose. But it doesn’t do if you don’t make friends with your loneliness.’
Yes, Jacob thought, old, and brimming with strange notions. She’d die of surprise. He’d seen it before. One day, she’d look in the mirror and see her final face. It would be creased with time, loss, tragedy and the realisation that there was nobody left who would hold her close. Her eyes would be swimming with the shock of it, a haunted look. ‘Oh my,’ she’d say. ‘That’s me. How did that happen?’ Then, soon after, she’d die. She’d be ninety-eight, or roundabout that, anyway. The doctor might say it was a heart attack, or just old age. But, really it would be the surprise that got her.