by Isla Dewar
When all the girls slept, the doubts and fears that had been tucked at the back of their daytime minds took over, loomed large in their dreams. The soft, sweet rhythmic breathing was often broken by shouts, bawls and wails of lament. When, at some point during the night, Lorna called out, ‘Help!’ Elspeth knew exactly how she felt.
Some of this dreamtime despair was, Elspeth knew, her fault. It was she who had discovered that nobody could leave the Timber Corps, unless they were seriously ill or pregnant.
‘But,’ Elspeth had protested, ‘I want to work with the Red Cross. I’ll still be working for the war effort.’ She longed to get back to the city, London preferably.
‘You think,’ said Duncan Bowman, ‘you can just change your mind. You get fed up of one thing, so you’ll do something else for a wee change. You think the government can afford to train you to do whatever it is that tickles yer fancy? You’ve been trained to work in the Forestry. And in the Forestry you will stay. There’s no leavin’.’
They’d been in his office, a hut, really. A small paper-strewn desk, a few shelves crammed with files, boxes, bottles of ink, a stuffed snarling wild cat, crouched ready to pounce. On the wall, a calendar and large picture of a seascape, tossing waves, gulls and a small boat grappling with angry water, a lighthouse in the distance. The place smelled of wood, tobacco and paraffin.
Elspeth said, ‘But . . .’
‘But nothing,’ said Duncan.
‘It’s my life.’
‘It’s not your life any more. It’s the Forestry’s life.’
‘I’ll leave just as soon as this war is won,’ said Elspeth.
Duncan had leaned back in his chair, put one foot on his desk, kept the other on the floor. He was lean-faced, weathered, annoyingly placid, spoke slowly, deliberately. A thin layer of white hair barely covered his scalp, not that anyone saw his head that much – he rarely removed his cap. ‘War or no war, you’ll leave when the Forestry says you can.’
Elspeth had walked back to the dormitory, sat on her bed and stared ahead, dumbstruck. Lorna said she looked like she’d seen a ghost. ‘What’s up?’
‘I can’t leave,’ Elspeth said. ‘They won’t let me. I’m stuck here, sawing down trees, eating carrot sandwiches, freezing cold.’
There had been cries of horror. ‘They can’t do that, can they?’ said Lorna. She’d been planning to leave, too.
Avril pointed out that before Elspeth arrived, Myra McDonald had left. ‘But she was pregnant and they sent her home. That would be one way you could leave.’
Elspeth hadn’t graced this suggestion with a reply. A scathing glance was all it got.
Avril said, ‘Bleedin’ heck.’ She slumped onto her bed. She had also thought about leaving. She picked up her teddy bear, her night-time companion, and cuddled him close. ‘Well, we’ll all leave soon as this bleedin’ war’s over.’
Elspeth had decided it was best not to mention she didn’t think they’d be able to do that. They were all stuck here till someone somewhere high up said they could go. She’d stared down at her muddy boots, tucked her icy hands into her armpits, numb with disappointment. They would all have to wait till they were demobbed. ‘Just like everyone who’s signed up for the war effort.’
‘Demobbed,’ said Avril. ‘I don’t want to wait for that. I want to go home.’ She wept. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. Then, as she rummaged in her pocket for a handkerchief, she lost control and started to sob. Face buried in her hands. Her whole body wracked with sorrow.
Elspeth gazed over at her. How flushed with emotion Avril had become lately. Laughing wildly one moment, tears the next. Why, only the day before, she had thrilled at the sight of a small bird, a crossbill, flitting among the branches of a pine tree. ‘Isn’t it just exquisite.’ Then, later, her eyes had welled up because her tea was too hot.
She’s getting hysterical, Elspeth thought. Not coping at all. She went over to Avril, put her arm round her. ‘Never mind. Look on the bright side.’ For a moment she couldn’t think of a bright side. ‘We have a roof over our heads. A stove to keep us warm. Think of the men out there fighting, sleeping in the open, under fire. We are so lucky compared to them. It’s not so bad.’
Avril hadn’t been convinced. But then, neither was Elspeth.
At around five o’clock, before the first glimmer of dawn, she was dragged from sleep by Avril’s coughing. It was a deep violent hack that shook her whole body. And it was relentless, causing Avril to bend double, handkerchief clutched to her mouth. She fought for breath between bouts. Elspeth propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Are you all right? I think your cough’s getting worse.’ A hoarse whispered hiss.
‘I’m fine,’ said Avril. ‘It’s just the damp and cold get to me.’ She struggled into her dungarees, pulled on her boots and stumped up the room. At the door she put on her oilskin coat, lit a lantern and, holding it aloft, went out into the chill December drizzle. The stables were half a mile down the track. Avril had horses to tend in the morning before she tended to herself.
Trudging to work, half past eight, the heels of her welly boots scraping on the rough track, the shaft of her axe digging a red weal into her shoulder, Elspeth considered her life so far.
She had loved her job at Selfridges’ perfume counter. A life filled with fragrance in the best department of the best store in the world. Mornings, proud in her smart blue coat with its nipped-in waist and fur-trim collar, she’d sit on the bus pleased to be a working woman. She had been eighteen years old.
At the time, she’d been living at home in Hammersmith with her mother, a piano teacher, and father, a banker. Every evening she’d sit at the supper table and recount her adventures of the day. ‘They’ve put a seismograph on the third floor. If we ever have an earthquake in London, or anywhere nearby, we’ll be able to record it.’
Her parents had looked bored at the prospect. ‘We don’t get earthquakes here, dear.’
She’d seen Jessie Mathews shopping one day. ‘Oh, you should have seen her hat. It was lovely.’ Once she’d seen Amy Johnson. ‘She was walking around the store buying things just like a real person.’
‘She is a real person, dear.’
‘No she’s not. She’s amazing. The first woman to fly to Australia. You wouldn’t think you’d see someone like that walking about on her own, buying perfume. Why, I very nearly served her myself. Except Miss Hartley got there first. That’s what’s so wonderful about Selfridges. You see everyone there.’
Elspeth’s parents despaired about her. She knew. She’d overheard them discussing her. ‘The girl is musically gifted,’ her mother had said. ‘She could have studied at the Royal Academy. Yet she chooses to work as a shop assistant, swooning at the sight of someone famous.’
Her father had agreed. ‘But one day, she’ll take a tumble to herself.’
In the forest, stripping giant pine trees of branches, slow cold rain dripping down the back of her neck, Elspeth thought that now, at last, that tumble was happening.
Working down the stem of the tree, her hands, blackened and sticky with resin, throbbed with cold and needles cut into her fingers. Every so often she would put them to her mouth and blow on them. The thick, oily scent of pine lined her nostrils. An icy merciless wind cut through the trees and whipped round her, cutting through her heavy jumper and the layers of shirt and vest, biting into her face. Her back ached from bending over the tree she was working on and from the pained effort of rolling it over to get at the branches underneath. Every time she straightened up, she groaned.
Behind her a slow fire crackled, sending gusts of woody smoke clouding round her. Not far off Newfies were singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’, a roar of male voices. Shouts of ‘Timber!’ Creaking, groaning, a tree crashed to the ground. The thud of horses hooves on soft pine-needled ground, the rattle of chains and scrape of logs being towed away.
Overhead, a low drone – American bombers, ferried across to Orkney from Newfoundl
and, now heading south. Everyone looked up, waved, cheered, sang a swift burst of ‘I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy’.
The surge of noise almost drowned the shriek from Lorna. A deep curdling howl split the air. Everything stopped. Lorna was standing by the tree she and Elspeth had been stripping. She was bent over, gripping her hand, her face frozen in shock, mouth agape, still screaming, though the scream had died and there was nothing left in her lungs to start it anew. Then she passed out.
Fleetingly, Elspeth thought Lorna was joking. She looked comical, silently screaming and slipping out of sight below a half-stripped tree. Elspeth smirked. Good one, you nearly had me there. Then she realised that this was serious.
On the other side of the tree, Lorna lay on her side, knees curled up at her chest, left hand gripped by her right. She was stricken, face ghostly white. On the ground, not far from her face, fleshy pink, bloody and grotesque among the dark green branches, was her finger.
Elspeth ran to her, put her arms round her and shouted for someone to bring the first-aid kit. ‘Quickly!’
Duncan Bowman pulled off his coat and wrapped it round Lorna. He said that the bloody first-aid box was in the bloody truck down at the road. ‘I forgot to bring it up.’ He heaved Lorna to her feet. Arm round her, he dragged her down the track to the road. ‘Got to get her to the hospital.’ Lorna’s knees buckled, she sank to the ground. She wailed, ‘My finger!’
Duncan lifted her off the ground. ‘Never mind yer finger.’ He started to run down the track jumping over rocks, long loping strides, a trail of blood dripping behind him.
Lorna kicked her legs, screamed and yelled for someone to bring her finger. ‘My finger, I need my finger!’
Duncan stopped, turned and, from where he stood, hollered for someone to get rid of that damn thing. ‘She’ll no be usin’ it now.’ He set off again towards the truck. All the way to the road, Lorna never stopped screaming.
Everyone had gathered to watch. They stood in small groups staring after Duncan. Then they turned to consider the finger. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.
The Italian POWs moved off first. This finger had nothing to do with them. If it had been an Italian finger, then, perhaps, yes, they would deal with it. But no, it was a Scottish finger. Not their business.
The other girls looked shifty. None of them wanted to touch it. In fact, most of them were revolted at the sight of it, and felt guilty about that. They slowly moved back to where they’d been working. Someone said that it must be time for tea.
Elspeth swallowed. It was up to her, then. She was closest to it, and Lorna was her best friend. She fished a handkerchief from her pocket and gingerly bent down and placed it over the finger.
‘I’ll do that.’ Tyler Bute had been watching. And he’d been waiting for months for an opportunity to get nearer to Elspeth. A woman who played the accordion, who could resist? ‘Been working in forests all my days. Seen worse things than fingers chopped off – whole legs, arms. There was a guy, a few years back, got his head chopped off. Saw it myself. He leaned down suddenly to pick up a few coins he’d seen on the ground, didn’t see the other guy who was working on a tree, whack. Lost his head.’
Elspeth went pale. She hated these stories, and the Newfies were full of them. Told them matter-of-factly. But that didn’t stop the gruesome visions they conjured up in her mind.
Tyler scooped up the finger, wrapped it in the handkerchief. ‘You want I should throw it away?’
‘No,’ said Elspeth. ‘Some animal might get it.’
Tyler shrugged, that was the way of things. ‘I could put it on the fire.’
‘For goodness sake, no.’ Elspeth was appalled. The smell of burning flesh? She didn’t think so. ‘We’ll bury it.’
At the edge of the forest, with a view over fields and snow-capped mountains in the distance, Tyler dug a hole – two feet deep, but not very long. ‘There. You want the handkerchief back?’
Elspeth shook her head. ‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘I’ll put it in the ground. Pointing east to the sunrise.’
But Elspeth said, ‘No. South. Pointing home.’
He put the finger still wrapped in the handkerchief in the hole. ‘You want to say a few words?’ He wouldn’t. But you never knew with women. They were sentimental.
Elspeth said, ‘No. What is there to say? Goodbye finger? Hope you touched happy things when you were attached?’
He smiled. ‘Yes. Something like that.’ He filled in the hole, stamped the loose earth firm. Put his arm round Elspeth’s shoulder and led her back to where they’d been working.
It was tea time. A hot black brew was being poured into tin cups. Tyler handed one to Elspeth, then, back to the group, opened his jacket, took a half bottle of whisky from his pocket and splashed a dollop into her cup. To steady her nerves, he told her. ‘You’ve had a shock.’
She didn’t approve of this. Alcohol and axes seemed like a very bad mix at work. But she drank it anyway. Felt the heat of it burn her throat then spread through her. It made her slightly giddy. She wasn’t a drinker. When he asked if she wanted some more, she put her hand over the top of her cup and shook her head.
‘Horrible things happen,’ he said. ‘You can’t get away from that fact. Life is messy.’
She supposed it was. ‘What will happen to Lorna?’
‘They’ll stitch her up and send her back to us.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that,’ he said. ‘What did you think? She’d lie in hospital being comforted by nurses?’
Elspeth nodded.
‘Ah,’ Tyler said. ‘If you want any comfort up here, you have to make it for yourself.’ He tapped the bottle in his pocket.
Then the whistle blew, and they all went back to work.
By the end of the day, Elspeth had two new blisters on her hands, her feet were cold and she ached all over. She carried Lorna’s axe as well as her own, one over each shoulder. She wanted to cry, but didn’t think she could. Perhaps she’d forgotten how. Behind her, on the walk back to the huts, Tyler and his friends sang ‘You Are My Sunshine’ again. Elspeth had a suspicion he was singing it to her, but didn’t respond.
Geese flew, honking, clattering, overhead. Keening in a long skein where the treeline met the sky, Elspeth stopped to watch them. It was always a joy to see them go. From the edge of the forest came the single crack of a shotgun, and the geese squawked and panicked. One lonely bird plummeted to the ground. Elspeth saw it tumble. Time was when she would have thought, Poor goose. Now she felt only envy – some lucky bugger was getting roast goose for supper. She had noticed recently that her heart was hardening.
After supper – three slices of Spam, mashed potatoes and cabbage washed down with a mug of tea – she washed her socks in the ablutions hut and hung them to dry near the stove. After that she sat on her bed playing her accordion.
It was an old thing she’d found in a second-hand shop in Edinburgh some years ago. At the time the only instrument she could play was the piano. But accordion music interested her. It was timeless. It was the music of peasants and gypsies, the music of village halls, drumming out reels and strathspeys on dance nights. Accordions play the music of the people, Elspeth had once told Izzy.
To her delight, once she had begun to master it, and realised the range she could get from squeezing and pulling back the bellows, she had found it easily played Bach.
That was what she had intended to play tonight. But sensing the mood in the room, and remembering the singing Newfies on the walk home, she played ‘You Are My Sunshine’ instead. She didn’t let it hurl and swing like she usually did. She moved the notes out slowly, let them glide. A sad blues tune drifted out. She followed her heart and let the song shift into something else – a refrain of her own, her sorrows released in a mournful melody.
‘What’s that?’ asked Avril
‘A lament,’ said Elspeth.
‘A lament for Lorna’s finger,’ said Avril.
Elspeth said, ‘Could be.’
Outside, at the far end of the hut and out of sight, Duncan Bowman stood smoking a cigarette, listening. That woman played a grand accordion. How could he let such a person go? He’d known he’d keep her here as soon as he saw her getting off the train at Inverness when she’d first arrived. A bit of music in the evening was always good for morale.
He liked Elspeth, fought hard not to show it. So he shouted at her, kept her snedding trees when he knew she hated it. Something happened inside him whenever he saw her. A ripple, a tremor, a small flock of butterflies swarming in his stomach. What was that? Love? He didn’t know and didn’t want to entertain that notion. His wife had died ten years ago. TB had taken her, a terrible way to go. But in all of the twenty-three years he’d been with her, he’d never admitted he might have loved her. ‘We get along fine,’ was how he had put it.
Whatever it was he’d felt for his wife, it was nothing like the feeling he had for Elspeth. This was a schoolboyish thing – a crush, perhaps. It made him hot inside, brought a lump to his throat, made him prone to silly daydreams. Sometimes, thinking about her, he whistled. He hated it. He hated himself for not being able to control it. And, in a way, he hated Elspeth for doing it to him. Though, of course, she knew nothing about it.
He lived in the forester’s cottage, a small house, set in a clearing several miles away with his black Labrador, Mac. Tonight, he’d finished his supper – a plate of potatoes and pigeon pie handed in to him by Ian McKay, whose wife had cooked it as a small thank you for turning a blind eye to his nightly poaching activities – washed the dishes, then come up here to stand in the dark. Still, scarcely breathing, listening.
He leaned against the wall, threw his cigarette to the ground, stamped it out. He’d been hoping for Bach tonight. He liked a bit of Bach, and had thought, considering the events of the day, Elspeth might be in the mood for the Goldberg Variations. But no, she was playing some tune of her own making. Still, it was a fine bit of music.