Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys (16 page)

Peggy wasn’t at all sure the order had come from the office.

‘With your old man in the nick I’d have thought you’d do anything to keep this job. Ne’ mind about voluntary work! Anyhow, the talc’s for soldiers’ packs, going out to the Far East. That useful enough for you?’

Peggy wasn’t sure what she’d done to upset Hattie, but she’d obviously made up her mind about a woman whose husband was spending the war in prison. The forelady was right about her needing the job, but for Peggy being back at Atkinson’s still felt less like work than a sort of holiday – from her old life and that perfect little flat.

*

She could have wished for a more efficient partner, but she was stuck with Ada for a week of nights. A sweet young girl, who turned out to be a niece of her parent’s neighbor Flo, she was so nervous of heights that Peggy was the one spending most of her time atop the ladder.

On their last night shift, as she was standing on the top rung, leaning forward to tip a bucket of white powder into the hopper, the room suddenly exploded. The wooden boards of the hopper blew outwards, the ladder toppled backwards and Peggy found she was swaying on top of it. Any minute she would crash to the floor below; instinctively she threw all her weight in the opposite direction. The ladder sprang back towards the hopper, but instead of the comforting thud of solid wood against the ladder, there was only air. She could see nothing. The room was filled with clouds of choking white powder, and from her unsupported perch, she glimpsed through the high windows what looked like swirls of snow. Time seemed to freeze, the blast turning the room into a snow globe, and she was trapped inside. Peggy screamed for help, but her mouth filled with talcum powder as she fell forward. Bracing herself for the bone-crunching landing on the hard factory floor, she felt instead a soft thud, as if she had fallen on to Granny Byron’s feather mattress. She had landed on top of a yielding mound of talcum powder, spilled from the hopper. She lay spread-eagled, mouth, eyes and ears full of the cloying snow. Her hands curled into it. She didn’t know if she were facing up or down, or if anyone else had survived the bomb blast. For now her senses were returning, she knew a bomb was the only explanation.

She spat clay from her mouth and shouted. ‘Help! Anyone there?’

Immediately she felt a hand grip her ankle. ‘You’re all right, Peg, just let yourself fall.’ The small hand pulled her firmly down the side of the snowy mountain of powder, till her feet touched the floor and she was helped to unsteady feet. As she rubbed her eyes, she could see it was her young helper, Ada.

‘Christ, you look like a snowman, Peg!’ she said.

Wiping powder from her lashes, Peggy looked at her rescuer. ‘And you look like a bloody ghost!’ Putting her arm round Ada’s shoulders, she hobbled across the powder-strewn floor to where the door should have been. It had been blown clean off and now she could feel a draught. The back wall of the factory was breached and she saw it was raining outside. As sheets of rain blew in through the powder room, the mountain of talc began to turn into a slushy china clay.

‘Come on, Ada, let’s get out of here.’

Outside they were greeted by a scene of panic. They had been hit with a lightning raid. It seemed there had been no warning, perhaps because of the moonless night and the driving rain, the spotters hadn’t seen the plane coming. But the ARP wardens were now in action, stretchering the injured and leading the walking wounded slowly out of the building. Out in the street, shivering with shock and cold, she found herself being draped in a blanket and guided towards a Red Cross van. But before she reached it, she noticed that Babs had already turned up in the mobile canteen and was doling out mugs of tea to walking wounded and rescue workers.

‘You go on, Ada,’ she said, straightening up. ‘Looks like I’ll be on the canteen tonight after all!’

She rolled up her sleeves and, still covered from head to foot in white powder, got into the back of the van – much to the amusement of Babs.

*

She should have been exhausted. For weeks she kept up a relentless routine of working all day at the factory, dashing home for her tea, then spending most evenings out in the mobile canteen. If she was lucky, she’d get a nap before setting off for the WVS station and then try to catch a few hours when her stint had ended. But she was exhilarated more than exhausted. Since returning to Atkinson’s she’d been moved all over the factory. Working in the powder room was the most tiring, and she found herself praying to be sent to the perfumes section, where the only part of her that was exercised was her index finger. As rows of filled bottles of California Poppy passed before her on a conveyer belt, Peggy had to dip her finger into a pile of black bottle-caps and dot a cap on to the open bottle-top, ready for a woman further down the line who screwed on the top. It was so monotonous that sometimes Peggy’s eyes closed and she did the work almost in her sleep. But the foreladies were like ferocious guard dogs prowling the lines and wouldn’t hesitate to dock her pay if she was found to be slacking.

Yet nothing about her new life could dampen her spirits. Whatever boredom she experienced during the daytime was more than made up for in the drama-filled nights, as she went about from bomb site to shelter, dodging incendiaries and skirting blazes. Between the factory in the day and the canteen van at night, she felt that her life was fuller than it had ever been. She loved the camaraderie of the girls she worked with during the day. They would bring in their stories on Monday morning about dances and the chaps they’d met. Even the married women, with their men away in the forces, seemed to be joining in the free-for-all. It felt as if the restraints of pre-war days had been loosened, that with death always at their shoulder the priority had become living life to the full. But she had no time or interest in straying. In her secret heart of hearts, she was glad to be solitary.

*

It was Saturday afternoon in late spring, a half-day at the factory, and she was making the weekly journey to Brixton to visit George. With buses frequently cancelled and roads often blocked by debris or closed because of unexploded bombs, it was a laborious trek, sometimes lasting two hours, all for an hour’s visit. It was a duty she was determined to keep up: whatever she was learning about herself in his absence, George was still her husband and she had promised to stick by him.

She hated the sight of the ugly brick slab of a building, with its rows of identical barred windows. The worst part for her was the feeling of claustrophobia as she walked under the arched entrance, though whether this came from entering a prison, or from the prospect of seeing George, she couldn’t tell.

As usual, he was sitting behind the table in the visiting room. He was thinner, his pale face touched with high colour on his cheeks, his eyes bright, eager as always to see her.

‘Hello, princess! Have you missed me?’

‘Of course I’ve missed you! How’ve you been, love?’

‘Oh, you know, can’t grumble. Grub’s not getting any better, but the blokes in me cell are decent enough.’ He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘Matter of fact we’re pulling a fast one, and you can help me with it. Got a screw in me pocket, gets me in whatever I like. But it’s fags we need.’ He was growing breathless.

‘Well, I hope you’re not smoking them yourself – your breathing don’t seem any better!’

‘What yer talking about, fags do me good, clears me chest. Anyway, that’s not the point. Can you get your hands on any, from that WVS van of yours?’

She looked at him askance. ‘What do you mean? You want me to nick some for you?’

‘They get boxes and boxes delivered to their depots. They’re not gonna notice the odd one here and there.’

Peggy was silent, genuinely shocked. She knew that George had purposefully avoided involving her directly in his thieving. She wasn’t an innocent; after all she’d lived on the proceeds. But he’d always seemed to want to keep her ‘clean’, maintaining the illusion that she was a cut above all his dodgy dealings.

She shook her head. ‘No, George, I’m sorry but I’m
not
doing that! Half our stuff’s donated, by people worse off than us sometimes, and I’m not nicking nothing from the WVS.’

It was only when she registered George’s look of surprise that she realized she’d just said ‘no’ to him.

‘Well, I never wanted you volunteering for them anyway!’ He took in a wheezing breath. ‘Least you could do is make it a bit easier for me in here.’

His high colour intensified as he took a few short, angry gulps of air. ‘You was glad enough of all the bent money I made, though, wasn’t you?’

Peggy scraped her chair back and a look of alarm crossed George’s face.

‘You’re not going yet, are you?’

‘No, but I will if you keep on about it, George.’

‘Sorry, princess, but it’s not easy in here. You don’t know what it’s like,’ he said morosely, ‘when you’ve been used to coming and going as you please, and then someone’s on your back day and night, telling you what you can and can’t do.’

Peggy wanted to tell him that she understood perfectly. But instead, she sat down again and asked him about his visit to the infirmary, where they’d told him there was little they could do to help his breathing. Conversation was always hard work on these visits, and like a dog with a bone, he returned to his usual complaint.

‘I’m not keen on you joining the WVS, but it sticks right in my throat, you back at that factory. I never wanted a wife of mine working in a shithole like that.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, George, give it a rest,’ she said, her face flushed with uncharacteristic anger. The warden looked their way and she lowered her voice. ‘It’s not so bad as some places, and you need to get your head out of your arse! There’s no money in the house and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Ronnie Riley, nor any of your other so-called friends. It’s only my wages paying the rent, so if you want a home to come back to, then you’ll just have to get used to it!’

George banged his fist on the table and she flinched away in fear.

Peggy had always been grateful he’d never been physically violent towards her, but his outburst made her realize there were other ways to be a bully, and she remembered all those times he’d sapped her confidence, controlling every choice, from her clothes to the food she ordered in a café, so that now she hardly knew what sort of person she could have been if she’d never married him.

She stood up, hoping that her trembling legs wouldn’t betray her.

George ducked his head. ‘Sorry, Peg. Don’t go yet.’

‘I’ve got to, I’m on the van tonight,’ she said, turning to leave without her customary kiss on the cheek.

‘Don’t go like that, Peg!’

But she didn’t look back. Was it that she had changed, or did her bravado spring only from knowing that he was locked up? She didn’t care. All she knew was that she had defied George in a way that would once have seemed unthinkable.

In fact, she’d been thinking of asking for an evening off from the canteen round, but the van was beginning to feel more like home than the flat and so, as soon as she got home that evening, she changed into her uniform and reported in.

But it was a tough night. The German air force seemed to be throwing every last bomb and incendiary at them. The papers had been full of the unbreakable spirit of Londoners, and how after nearly eight months of bombardment Hitler was getting desperate to break their morale. On this particular night it seemed to be raining fire, as they drove to Butler’s Wharf. Babs put her foot down, speeding through a gauntlet of flame which leaped from warehouses, the contents of which were spreading into a molten river across the road. It was probably from the sugar store, as the smell wafting up from the amber lava flow was just like toffee apples.

‘Don’t want that stuff sticking to our tyres!’ Babs said, as she swerved suddenly to avoid a lake of toffee.

Peggy hung on tight, glancing back into the van’s interior, where a couple of bun trays had toppled over. ‘Steady on, Babs, or we’ll have nothing left to give ’em by the time we get there!’

‘Oh, those boys’ll be filthy by now, they’re not going to worry about a bit of dust on their buns!’

They’d been told about a crew of Tommies, seconded to rescue work down by the river, who’d been clearing debris without a break for almost twenty-four hours. Without street lamps and only the merest slits for headlights, they relied upon the incendiary fires to light their way.

‘There they are!’ Peggy had spotted them, at the remains of a warehouse, a chain of tired-looking men, passing bricks and lumps of rubble from hand to hand across the ruin.

They pulled up and Peggy ran out to lower the counter. Within minutes they were surrounded by dusty, parched soldiers and the work of supplying endless cups of tea began. She and Babs had a well-oiled routine going. The cups and saucers, all pre-washed at the previous stop, were laid out by Babs, while Peggy filled the cups from the urn, then she served the men tea and buns, while Babs took orders for cigarettes, razor blades and even stamps. The men were haggard but cheerful, every crease in their faces accentuated by a thick coating of mortar dust.

In one face, a pair of blue eyes of startling brightness caught her attention. He was at the end of the queue, and she took his order, noticing the dented helmet he wore at a jaunty angle.

He must have followed the direction of her gaze, for after taking a long gulp of tea, he rapped the helmet and said, ‘Took a direct hit!’ With the cup still in one hand, he spread his arms wide. ‘Rock as big as this. Good job I had the tin hat on, or that would’ve been the end of my war!’ He looked at her, with a bold amused look as he sipped at the tea, and for some reason, perhaps because the night was so dark, or his face so white with dust, his eyes seemed lit from within, like clear blue skies on a summer day.

She realized that she hadn’t said a word and now she smiled foolishly. ‘You were lucky.’

‘Well, I’m alive.’ He gave a rather sad, slow smile. ‘And the things I’ve seen… well, that counts as lucky these days.’

She would have liked to delay him, to carry on talking to him, for the bold look and the sad smile had acted like two tiny hooks and as she leaned forward to take the cup from him, his fingers brushed hers. Some impulse made her want to take his hand. But before she could, Babs called back from the driver’s seat.