‘Huh!’ Alice half laughed, ‘Eldon shouldn’t have the say of what we wenches can and can’t do, it’s our life after all.’
Shaking droplets of water from her hands Alice crossed to the communal towel, stained with oil and dust, on the wall of the washroom.
‘Is it? I often wonder about that; if it ain’t your parents telling you what you can’t do then it be the government, and if not them then it’s the folk you work for.’
‘Well I think you should go tell Eldon that!’ Becky’s blue eyes gleamed affront.
Alice slipped the turban-tied scarf from her head. ‘Wouldn’t do no good.’ She ran fingers through the wealth of brown hair. ‘Seems it don’t be Eldon’s decision.’
Becky was indignant. ‘Well if it don’t be Eldon saying no then who is it, who else has joined the queue?’
A fitting description! Wasn’t that what life seemed to hold for her? A long queue of people all wanting to direct her life, all so eager to tell her the wrongs of it, all more competent at running it than she was? She stared at the colourful paisley design of the scarf in her bag. Her life was like the pattern on that cloth, its colours like her actions, following a line only to come up against another solidly blocking its progress.
‘Well!’ Becky demanded of the silence. ‘So who is it has said you can’t?’
Alice answered dully, ‘It was Mr Whitman.’
‘What!’ Becky’s exclamation brought glances from several other women washing their hands prior to leaving the factory. She lowered her voice. ‘You reckons it were Whitman?’
‘I don’t have to guess, seeing it was his signature on the paper Isaac Eldon showed me.’
‘I don’t think you should take what Whitman says.’ Becky waved goodnight to the gateman in his cubicle. ‘You should go see him, tell him he’s got no right to object . . . ain’t that so Kate? I was saying as how Alice ought to go see Whitman, tell him boss of Prodor he might be but that don’t make him boss of us girls, it ain’t up to him to tell any woman her can’t go leavin’ the factory.’
‘Sorry!’ Katrin said, a small frown lending illustration to her voice. ‘I don’t know what it is you are talking about.’
‘Whitman!’ Becky answered hotly, with fresh outrage at what she saw as an insult to her sex. ‘Men can go, oh yes, he can’t go refusin’ them, but let a wench ask and it be a different story.’
So Alice Butler had been given the verdict, informed of her rejection. A rejection whose grounds had been so carefully construed by Katrin Hawley.
‘I don’t understand, Becky.’ She answered quietly though triumph shouted in her brain. ‘What has Mr Whitman done that has you so annoyed?’
Clambering onto the loaded bus, juggling with handbag and gas mask while holding onto an overhead metal rail, being jerked almost off her feet as she felt for the return ticket in her coat pocket, Becky let her irritation ride. ‘Done!’ she snapped. ‘He’s turned Alice down flat, that’s what he’s done.’
Katrin glanced at the silent Alice.
‘Mr Whitman has turned you down?’
‘Tell her Alice, go on . . . tell Kate what he’s done, tell . . .’
‘Turk’s Head!’
The three of them squeezed past other standing passengers until they were free of the vehicle.
‘Ain’t good enough!’ Becky declared emphatically. ‘Ain’t as though we was kids at school, they need be told what they can do, but shouldn’t be the same for a wench who is eighteen and more, what do you reckon Kate?’
The cover of blacked-out streets hid the smile curving Katrin’s mouth, but she carefully maintained her previous act of innocence as she answered. ‘I really can’t reckon anything seeing as you have not yet said what appears to have gone wrong.’
‘It be my application,’ Alice blurted. ‘The one to join the Forces, it hasn’t been granted.’
‘But you can’t know that. C’mon Alice, you didn’t complete the forms until yesterday, they can’t possibly have been processed by the recruitment centre and returned to you already.’
‘Ain’t the recruitment centre, they couldn’t have found any fault, you know that Kate. It were you filled out them forms, you seen everything I said was true.’
But not everything Katrin Hawley had said. Alice Butler had been so very thoughtless, so trusting. She had accepted all that had been told to her, all she had been led to believe.
Led! Katrin hugged the word. Alice Butler had been led along a painful path and Katrin Hawley had held the halter.
It was all becoming too much for him. Miriam Carson looked at the figure slumped in an armchair, weariness written in deep lines across his face. It had been a kind thought on the part of Arthur Whitman: promotion to works manager had been a vote of his confidence in her father, but with promotion had come problems. Arthur Whitman ought to have foreseen that. He knew Isaac Eldon for a man who would not forego one task in favour of another, but would do both. That was what he was doing now, two jobs at the same time. She had tried reasoning, tried to get him to agree he was overworking, but he had simply smiled and shaken his head.
Going into the kitchen, Miriam added salt to the potatoes she had peeled earlier and set the pan to boil.
‘
I have no liking for bein’ tied all day in some office
.’
He had admitted that much, so why had he consented?
‘
Just for a while. It be difficult finding somebody suitable what with so many men being called up; but not to worry yourself, I’ll manage until Whitman can find the man he wants
.’
So her father believed, but managing two jobs was wearing him out . . . when would he believe that? Shredding cabbage, Miriam blinked against her own weariness.
‘. . .
not to worry yourself
. . .’
Words so easy for a man to say, but how easy for a woman to accept when her every day was filled with anxiety for those she loved, when every hour held the possibility of war depriving her of them?
Crumbling an Oxo cube into a half cup of hot water, Miriam stirred it into a pan of fried onion.
War! She watched the mixture brown and thicken.
War was the Devil’s instrument, a multi-purpose tool designed to persecute; and how many ways he used it. Bomb, shell, bullet they were all his bringers of death, but death was finite, an ending of pain. So when that was not the outcome? When fire and falling buildings burned and crippled the body, when heartbreak and worry tortured the mind, when desolation maimed the soul? That was when the Devil smiled.
‘Shall I set the table, mum?’
She wanted to take her son into her arms, to hold and not let go.
To hold and not let go. Smiling through her tears, Miriam looked at the lad taking cutlery from a drawer. What would Reuben say to that!
‘Just you and me mum, granddad said to put his meal in the oven.’
‘Oh did he!’ Miriam glanced toward the living room. ‘Well you just tell your granddad he is to come eat it now, with us.’
‘Can’t mum, he’s already gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Two minutes ago. Said he had to go back to the factory.’ Setting condiments on the table Reuben gave a puzzled look. ‘When I asked why, seeing he had been there all day, he didn’t answer . . . have I done something has made him angry with me?’
‘No . . . no, of course not.’
‘But granddad always talks to me, yet tonight . . .’
‘Granddad is tired.’ Miriam replied quickly.
‘Then why go back to work? Why not stay here and rest?’
Why indeed? Miriam returned to the pans bubbling on the stove. She knew war was driving everyone to do their utmost, but what was driving her father beyond that point?
What was it had Isaac Eldon at Prodor all day and much of the night? After the meal, Miriam sat beside the fading living-room fire. As much in short supply as every other commodity, coal was too precious to allow holding fire in the grate any longer. She reached for a blanket always kept ready against a night raid and drew it about her shoulders.
Reticence, withdrawal into himself, reluctance to be drawn into conversation – Reuben too had noticed the change in his grandfather.
Was it the death of his sister? He had grieved for months for those two brothers killed at Ypres during the Great War, two whose photographs hung on a wall in his bedroom. Two brothers dead on the same day. How could he forget? Now that sorrow was added to by fear of his son risking his life in an equally horrifying war. That she could understand, it was an agony ate at the heart, hadn’t she suffered the same? That fear which rose afresh when letters from her brother did not come.
But she sensed this was a new cause of concern, one he could not bring himself to speak of her father’s sadness had been obvious when standing at Violet’s open grave. It had been made abundantly clear Violet Hawley’s relatives were not there with the blessing of her daughter. Though Isaac and Ella had been brother and sister to Violet, it appeared quite plain the invitation to attend her funeral found no favour with her daughter. It had been Jacob Hawley had met with them at the church, Jacob who had talked with them while the girl had kept a cool distance. She had spoken to none of her mother’s family, had not acknowledged them by so much as a nod, then as the priest finished the final invocation she had turned from the grave and walked away with no glance in their direction.
She had seen the hurt flash its signal across her father’s eyes. Miriam’s fingers clutched the corners of the blanket. Even as a young girl Katrin Hawley had shown no affection toward her mother’s kin; now she was a young woman filled with spite, a vindictiveness it seemed she was ready to vent upon anyone. Jacob and Violet had reared her with all the care they could give, but it was to be regretted they seemed not to have taught her that malice and spite has a way of bringing its own reward. One day Katrin Hawley would find that out for herself.
12
‘Eh Alice, I’m sorry you was turned down, it’s a right shame, really it is.’
Katrin smiled remembering the words she had heard Becky Turner say as she had left the two to walk home. So it was a shame Alice would not be free of her mother, would not get to wear any glamorous uniform; but then Alice Butler should never have accused another girl of being a liar and a cheat.
Table cleared of the meal she had prepared for her father, she glanced about the kitchen. Everything was in its place, tidy, ordered, dealt with just as she had dealt with Freda Evans and Alice Butler. They had hurt the feelings of a young girl but had given a great deal of pleasure to a young woman.
She checked her father had locked the front door when leaving for his fire watch duties then went upstairs to her room.
Yes, repaying those two had been very pleasurable and it was an experience she would enjoy again.
‘
Eh Alice, I’m sorry
. . .’
Catching her reflection in the mirror of the dressing table she stared back into eyes hard as stone.
‘Don’t waste all your sympathy, Miss Turner,’ she murmured, ‘save a little for yourself – you are going to need it. But you will not be alone in that, there are others also will know the way Katrin Hawley repays a slight.’
Pulling open a drawer, she touched a finger to a lavender silk scarf then drew the delicate fabric aside to touch the box it had covered. These two things were all that remained of Violet, the only personal possessions of the woman she had called mother. The rest, clothing and shoes, had been packed into boxes and donated to the Civic Centre where volunteers could hand them out to people who had lost everything to bombs and fire; but the scarf and the box she had kept.
As a memento of Violet Hawley?
She rippled the fine silk through her fingers.
No. She smiled, watching the cloth move and shine like water reflecting the pale mauve of early evening. No, she had not kept them in memory of Violet, but rather of what she and others were responsible for.
‘No,
mother
! That memory will never die . . . but it will be avenged.’
She drew aside the heavy blackout curtain and allowed the clear moon to light the bedroom, then lay watching the reflection of breeze-tossed leaves dance their graceful movements on its walls.
Her father’s cherished silver birch. Memories as soft as the silvered beams pirouetting to the silent music of the night whispered in Katrin’s mind. He had planted the tree on the day she had come to them; he had nursed her beneath it, soothed her to sleep with the branches swaying in unison with his gentle words.
‘Katrin’s tree.’ That was what her father had called it. Every birthday for as long as she could remember a prettily wrapped gift had hung from its branches and each Christmas Day he had gone with her to stand beneath it while he lifted down the special present left for her by Santa Claus.
Special days. They had been special days. It was before her teen years she had realised that only on those days, in the shelter of that tree, had the haunted, unhappy look disappeared from his eyes, a look they held even now on the rare occasions his mental guard slipped. It had slipped the evening he had returned from identifying his wife’s body, the look she had taken to be that of guilt.