Authors: Anne Bennett
‘That’s how it used to be, girl,’ Winnie said. ‘It ain’t like that any more. We’ll have to wait and see what he’s got in store for us.’
‘Ooh, don’t, Win,’ Violet said with a shiver. ‘You’re giving us all the willies.’
‘Talking of war, I’m going up for my gas mask after work,’ Elsie said. ‘You coming, Glor?’
Gloria made a face. ‘Do you think we need those horrid things? I can’t see myself ever putting it on.’
‘You might be glad of it, girl, if them Jerrys launch gas attacks like they did in the last war,’ said Winnie. ‘Even if you have the slightest whiff of it, it buggers up your lungs good and proper.’
‘Anyroad, you ain’t got no choice,’ Maureen said. ‘You have to carry it round your neck in a box. Our Charlie’s is red and blue, not the usual black, and it looks a bit like Mickey Mouse.’
‘Bet it don’t make it smell any better,’ Winnie said.
‘No, it don’t,’ Maureen grumbled. ‘It stinks to high heaven, to tell you the truth. He said it makes him feel sick and I am not surprised. But he will have to wear it the same as the rest, and I bet he won’t play the teachers up like he does me when he goes off with the school tomorrow.’
‘Oh, ain’t you going to miss him, Maureen?’
‘Course I will, and my old man says we’ll bring him home again if there ain’t a lot doing. They don’t expect you to send much with them, though. We had a list and all he had to take was one vest, one pair of pants, one pair of trousers, two pair of socks, handkerchiefs and a pullover.’
‘Is that all? No coat?’
‘Yeah, there is a coat and toiletries as well, but that is all he has for goodness knows how long.’ Maureen gave a decisive sniff and went on, ‘Point is, when we decided to let him be evacuated, I got him kitted out and I’ve packed
a case of stuff. I’m having no one think that mine’s a pauper’s child.’
‘Ah, bleeding shame, ain’t it?’ Violet said. ‘Hope you packed plenty of grub. My lads are always claiming they’re hungry.’
‘He has enough to feed an army, don’t worry,’ Maureen said. ‘And a couple of comics – and the government recommended barley sugar, in case any feel sick, I suppose.’
Gloria thought it monstrous to send young children all over the country to unknown destinations. Maureen’s son, Charlie, was only seven years old.
She was still thinking about it that evening as they collected their gas masks. Just as Maureen had said, all the children’s masks were red and blue, and, stretching the imagination, did look a bit like Mickey Mouse. That didn’t impress Ben in the slightest. He said it was still horrible and he wasn’t going to put it on. Gloria said nothing. Time enough to fight with him when she had to.
The next morning Maureen came in late, her eyes were puffy and there were tear trails on her cheeks.
‘I don’t know how she is able to bear it,’ Gloria said that night to Joe. ‘Mind you, she isn’t bearing it so well because every time I spotted her she was awash with tears. She doesn’t know if she has made the right decision or not, that’s the trouble. You are persuaded to do this and then you begin to have second thoughts and it’s too late. I don’t think I could ever send Ben away.’
‘No,’ said Joe. ‘Nor me, but war has moved one step closer today.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘It was on the news on the wireless just before you came home,’ Joe said. ‘Germany has invaded Poland, and the Poles are fighting for their lives.’
The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was giving an address on Sunday 3 September, at about eleven fifteen in
the morning. Everyone knew what he was going to say, but when he actually said those words, that Britain was now at war with Germany, Gloria felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
The wail of the air-raid siren suddenly rent the air and Gloria felt as if the blood in her body had turned to ice. She looked at Joe in sudden terror. Neither of them knew what to do. Then she ran, frantically collecting coats and gas masks as the all clear was sounded.
‘Must have been a false alarm,’ Joe said.
‘Thank God,’ Gloria said fervently. ‘But we are at war now and the attacks
are
going to come. That showed me that I am totally ill prepared and for a few minutes I had no idea what to do.’
‘Neither did I,’ Joe admitted.
‘It said in the paper to pack a shelter bag but I didn’t,’ Gloria said.
‘A shelter bag?’
‘Yeah,’ Gloria said. ‘It said to put in rent books, insurance policies and identity cards, and things you value that you couldn’t replace, like treasured photographs. And then you could have maybe a packet of biscuits and drinks and things for the kids – books they especially like and a pack of cards or a set of dominoes. The point is you haven’t time to hunt around the house for these things when you should be busting a gut getting to a place of safety as soon as possible.’
‘So it’s good advice then?’
‘Yeah, it probably is,’ Gloria conceded. ‘There are lots of government guidelines and articles about coping in wartime like crisscrossing tape over the windows. I mean, flying glass can cause a lot of damage, but I didn’t do it because I hadn’t wanted to think about war and yet I’ve known for ages that this day would come. How stupid is that?’
‘What is war?’ Ben said.
‘A terrible tragedy that should never ever happen,’ Joe said. ‘But Hitler’s armies keeps marching into other countries and taking them over and they have to be stopped.’
‘How?’
‘Well, lots of our soldiers are probably going to have to go over there and fight the German soldiers.’
‘One of the kids at school said Hitler will send planes over here full of bombs and that they will blow us all up,’ Ben said.
Joe couldn’t refute what the child said and claim he was spouting rubbish, for he knew that he couldn’t protect Ben from war and the effect it would have on his life. It was far better, though, for Ben to get the facts from him or Gloria rather than listening to the lurid and gruesome talk in the playground.
‘The planes will carry bombs, and they will try and blow us up,’ Joe said, ‘but the government know all about this and they have built shelters for us to stay in while the bombs are coming down.’
‘So we will be all right then?’
‘I sincerely hope so.’
Later that night, when Ben was in bed, Gloria said, ‘One of the women told me the other day that there aren’t half enough shelters for the people of London.’
‘I read it too,’ Joe said, ‘but it wasn’t something that I thought I should share with a five-year-old child.’
‘It is right, then?’
Joe shrugged. ‘I would say that it is true enough. But if they had a shelter on each street corner, it would hardly suffice.’
Gloria shivered. ‘Some of the women I work with say they’re going down the Tube if the raids come. They say they would just feel safer so far underground.’
‘Yes, and the sounds of it would be sort of muffled,’ Joe said. ‘But I doubt the authorities would let anyone do that. There’s bound to be some regulation about it.’
‘Yeah, there probably is,’ Gloria agreed. ‘There is about most things these days.’
Cinemas, theatres, dance halls and other places where a lot of people might congregate together were closed, and Ben’s school didn’t reopen after the holidays because most of the teachers had gone with the evacuated children. Ben was very lonely and missed his friends a great deal, and Gloria had to take leave from work to look after him.
Then she missed the company of the other women and the money. However, the biggest bugbear to them all was coping with the blackout. It made life very difficult for those who wished to go about their daily business and it was hard to see the point of it when there had been no raids at all.
Eventually, towards the first Christmas of the war, so many people had been injured or even killed in accidents because of the blackout that the rules were relaxed. Shielded torches could be used and shielded headlights were allowed on vehicles.
Immediately torches disappeared from the shops’ shelves at a rate of knots and batteries were at a premium and often unavailable. But Joe was successful and he showed his to Gloria with great pride.
‘Make it easier to get about,’ he said.
Gloria turned on the torch’s feeble light. ‘Huh, not very.’
‘Better than the nothing we had before.’
‘I suppose so,’ Gloria said. ‘I hear they’re thinking of reopening the cinemas and theatres. I wish they’d reopen the schools too.’
‘They’ll have to,’ Joe said. ‘Half the kids that were evacuated are trickling back home, according to the papers. Mothers don’t see the point of them living with strangers when not a single bomb has fallen anywhere. School will probably be open again in January.’
‘January,’ Gloria repeated, and gave a sudden shiver. ‘The government said rationing will come into force then. It’s
supposed to be a fairer system, but there is little in the shops now. Every time I hear of another merchant ship being sunk I feel sick. It’s Christmas in less than a fortnight and half the things I wanted I can’t get, and there are hardly any toys either to make the day a bit special for Ben.’
‘And if you complain about anything they remind you there’s a war on,’ Joe said.
‘Yes,’ Gloria agreed. ‘Just as if that fact might have slipped your mind.’
Ben’s school did reopen in January with some teachers that had been brought out of retirement, and Gloria was delighted to be back at work. She had also registered with a grocer and was allowed four ounces of bacon, four ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sugar per person per week to start with.
By March, meat had been added to the rationed goods, and most of the evacuated children had come home again, including Maureen’s son. The war was being dubbed the Bore War, and Joe had been thinking about his role in it for a week or two. Then when he went for his weekly pint with Red, he told Joe that he and his cousin, Pete, had both received their call-up papers, and this galvanised Joe into making a decision.
Why should he languish at home in a war that threatened to imperil them all? A war in which everyone had to do their bit if Britain wasn’t to be overwhelmed by Germany, as so many nations already had been. He didn’t tell Gloria until the next evening, after Ben had been put to bed.
As the play drew to a clese. Joe stood up, switched the wireless off and then, with his arms around Gloria, told her he would like to train as a volunteer fireman. Gloria jumped out of his arms as if she had been shot and stared at him as if she was unable to understand what she had heard.
‘But you know nothing about putting out fires, and anyway, you already have a job,’ she said eventually.
‘This is as well as the job, not instead of it,’ Joe said. ‘And I would be trained to do it properly. That’s why I want to join up now. I mean, it’s no good waiting until the bombs are dropping and fires blazing all over London, is it?’
‘I see that,’ Gloria said. ‘But why you?’
‘Why not me?’
‘Isn’t it dangerous?’
Joe didn’t answer that. Instead he said quietly, ‘Gloria, Red and his cousin got their call-up papers last week. He told me when we were down the pub together. How dangerous do you think that is?’
‘It’s just—’
‘Look, pet,’ Joe said. ‘I will not be asked to fight, because I am too old, and anyway, I am an Irishman and so couldn’t be conscripted. That suits me, because if I was, I would feel then I was working for the British Government. I can understand Ireland’s neutral stance in this war. But I am staying put, not because of any government, but because of the people. I want to feel I am doing my bit just the same as you.’
Gloria knew by the determined look on Joe’s face that she would be wasting her time saying anything more about it. His mind was made up. But later, in bed, she lay thinking about that. Once Joe had decided something he wouldn’t allow himself to be deflected from it for any reason. That could be deemed a good attribute, but he seemed to make his mind up without taking the thoughts and feelings of those closest to him into consideration.
She didn’t want him to be a fireman, but he would go ahead anyway. She wondered about the future, whether there might come a time when he went totally against her wishes, and how she would feel about that.
Joe and Gloria took more interest in the war now that Red would soon be involved in it. He had almost finished his
training when Hitler turned his attention to Belgium and the Netherlands. Gloria always bought a paper on her way to work and read with horror of the raid on Rotterdam the previous evening that it was estimated had killed nine hundred people. The scale of it was shocking and everyone at the factory was talking about it.
‘All those poor people,’ Gloria said. ‘You can only imagine what they went through.’
‘Aye, and what was done in Rotterdam could be done just as easy in London,’ Elsie remarked dourly. ‘The thought of it gives me the creeps.’
‘Listen to this then,’ Winnie said, still scrutinising the paper. ‘The Germans have taken a fort in Belgium thought to have been impregnable and broken through the French defences.’
‘You mean the Maginot Line that the French were always crowing on about?’ Maureen asked. ‘They always claimed it was unbreachable.’
Winnie shrugged. ‘Maybe it was, but from the map in the paper it looks like, by gaining control of the fort, they were able to avoid the Maginot Line altogether and get to France through Belgium.’
‘God Almighty!’
‘It gets worse,’ Winnie went on. ‘It says here that lots of our soldiers are there too and in retreat.’
‘Where are they retreating to?’ Maureen asked. ‘Hitler seems to rule more than half of Europe.’
‘Well, if you study this,’ Winnie said, ‘there is nowhere but the sea, so I suppose they will eventually be making their way to the beaches.’
‘Come, come, girls,’ the supervisor said, coming in at that moment. ‘The news is bad, I know, and I also know many of you have loved ones in the forces. But if we talk about it from now till doomsday it will not make a ha’p’orth of difference, so let’s get back to work, eh?’
Grumbling slightly, the women bent to the task in hand, for they knew the supervisor was right. She wasn’t that hard a taskmaster as a rule, and she knew what many of the women were going through because her only son was in the army now, and in the same danger as everyone else.