Authors: Monica Dickens
When Joy grew restive, he let her go and work at a club which entertained the kind of officers to whom Archie could not object. The club also ran a canteen for Other Ranks, who did not use it if they could find anywhere else open, for the helpings were too small, the tea too weak, the wireless always on the wrong programme, and the whole atmosphere too rarified. Among the small folding tables which large men had to tuck on to their laps like trays, Joy and other exquisitely groomed girls passed unhurriedly, making muddles of orders and bills, squabbling in the kitchen with older and even more muddled ladies who pushed pans about in a wrought-up way and tried not to offend the professional cook.
A girl would then come out of the kitchen with an empty tray and say: ‘I’m awfully sor-ray but I forgot what you said. If it was ham and beans, I’m awfully sor-ray but we’ve run out.’
‘Well, what else is on then, Miss?’
‘I’II go and see. I’m not sure, actually.’ She would drift away, perhaps get deflected into the adjoining officers’ bar, and forget
all about the soldier. If he had a train to catch, he would go away hungry and warn his friends against the canteen.
One day, a soldier wanting ham and beans was Norman Goldner, in enormous boots, bullet-headed and broad as an ox with his Army hair-cut and battledress. He could not help a spontaneous delight at seeing Joy, but the sight of her diamond engagement ring recollected him.
‘Aren’t you married yet?’ he asked, with a crude kind of sneer which was meant to be nonchalance.
‘No.’ Joy wished he had not come. ‘My fiance is in Scotland. He’s in the Army too, like you.’
‘Like me, like hell. I don’t think,’ retorted Norman, becoming more common out of pique at her refinement. ‘What regiment?’
‘The Coldstream Guards.’
‘He would be. A ruddy officer, of course.’
‘Well, why not? Don’t be silly, Norman, someone’s got to be. You will be soon, I expect. What are you now?’ She frowned at his sleeve. It was fashionable in her set not to know about chevrons and badges.
‘No fear,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t take a commission if they handed it me on a gold plate. I got a good job where I am, working with guns and predictors – a real treat they are. Honest, I could laugh when I think I used to fancy myself working on them piddling contraptions at the Grand Metro. This is the real thing. I tell you, Jo,’ he leaned forward, forgetting himself, ‘we’ve got the finest equipment in the world. We can lick anyone with what we got. Talk about – ’
A girl called from behind the counter. ‘Oh Joy! Neville’s asking for you in the bar. Better go through.’
Norman shut up at once. His face darkened as all the hurt and jealousy she had caused him returned. ‘You’d better go.’ He jerked his head. ‘Why do I waste my time talking to you? We’re in different worlds. Joy indeed. It makes me laugh, honest, to see you haw-hawing it about in this mucking dump. I wish you
joy
of it. That’s a joke, see?’
‘But what about your meal? Oh Norman, I do wish.–’
‘I’ll go to the Y.M.,’ he said. ‘I prefer the atmosphere. You
get better grub anyway than in this upper-class brothel.’ He picked up his respirator and pack and clumped out, the back of his head square as a Scotsman’s, the seat of his stiff trousers sticking out; laden like a mule and shod like a cart-horse.
Joy was haunted by this, possibly the last sight she might ever have of him. Ashamed, she went home early, threw her hat at Rodney and said: ‘I’m not going to the club any more. I’ve told Lady B. I want to do some real war work. I want to go and make a gun.’
Rodney shook out the evening paper where her hat had crumpled it and said: ‘Don’t be absurd, child. We had all that out when you were so hysterical at the beginning of the war. You’re much more use where you are, being decorative. What do you know about guns, anyway? You wouldn’t be any help.’
‘I could learn. Other people do. Julie Harman can weld. Her mother told me, that poor old dame who always burns the toast. People say machinery’s fascinating. I might get quite good at it, and think how marvellous if one was making something that our soldiers were actually going to use.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’ Rodney’s pained eyes looked over the paper. ‘You make me squirm with that Our Brave Boys stuff.’
‘I don’t care. It makes me squirm being at the futile club. I can’t think how I’ve stuck it so long. I’m going to the Labour Exchange to-morrow.’
‘No, no, you mustn’t do that! Do it the right way if you
must
do it.’ He knew Joy well enough to realize when she was going to be intractable. ‘I’ll get hold of someone and ask what’s the best thing for you to go into.’
‘I’m sick of always knowing people. Why can’t I find a job on my own like other girls do?’
‘Like the girl you used to be?’ he asked. ‘Don’t forget you came to me of your own accord. You wanted to be Joy Stretton, and you must go on behaving like her. You cannot eat your cake and have it, as the loathsome expression is.’
The least objectional thing he could find for her was to be a trainee in a Government engineering school, which was supposed to qualify you for a superior job. The place was clean and newly equipped. The idea of Joy learning to be a fitter was
abhorrent, but at least it was not quite so bad as messing about in an actual factory.
At first, it seemed to Joy like an actual factory. She felt quite important. She enjoyed getting up in the dark and going off with a season ticket on the workmen’s train to Perivale. Alexander would not let her have an alarm clock. He insisted on getting up even earlier and waking her with tea, as impeccably dressed at six a.m. as he was at six p.m. Not that one could imagine Alexander in dressing-gown or dishabille. Once when he had flu, he had kept his bedroom door locked to everyone but the doctor and only crawled into the kitchen when the coast was clear to keep himself alive on hot milk.
He made her have a proper breakfast at the kitchen table before seeing her into the lift with his blessing, handing her her overall and packet of sandwiches as ceremoniously as four hours later he would hand Rodney his umbrella and
Times.
He approved of her going to Perivale. When she came home, he gave her an enormous tea, whether Rodney were back or not, and she would have a second tea when Rodney had his. She had not worked for a long time, and it made her hungry.
Not that they worked very hard. They were only there from seven until two, or from two until nine if they were on the late shift. Much of that seven hours was spent at the tea bar, or in the cloak-room, or fooling about. Sometimes they downed tools to listen to someone giving a talk on how they were being equipped to serve their country in her hour of need. You were exhorted to work, but no one
made
you work. It was rather fun really, and it was run by the Government, so Joy supposed it must be all right, although they did not seem to do much.
They did not make anything. They scraped away at small pieces of metal, measuring them hopefully with a micrometer to find that they had scraped away too much and must throw away the metal and start again. Even when you had achieved something that was passably the right size and shape, there was still nothing to do with it but throw it away, unless you took it home proudly and gave it to your mother. Everyone did this the first time; after that they lost their pride.
Joy worked at a bench with eight girls. They never stopped
talking all day long, and there never seemed to be a minute of the day when you could look round and not see at least one of them doing her hair or putting on lipstick. The school issued butcher-blue overalls, but most girls preferred to wear their own, rivalling each other in the chic of their dungarees. Bettine Blair, who had been a film starlet, had a different overall for every day of the week except Saturday and Sunday, when, being a kind of Government department, the school was closed. Once, her publicity agent sent down a photographer, and she posed with file and hack-saw. Then she was taken to the welding section and was posed in a mask and gauntlets and had to. be shown how to hold the iron by the star welding pupil, who managed to get his face into the picture, although the photographer kept waving him away.
Two of the other girls were Army wives who talked a lot about their husbands, which was quite impressive until you saw the husbands’ photographs. Another was a mannequin, two were secretaries, one was a pilot’s wife, a fierce little thing who left soon because they would not let her work any faster, and one was another floating girl like Joy.
The class had all started together, and they all became disillusioned about the same time, when they discovered how long it took to get through the course and be allowed to go to a proper job. Then they all, except the pilot’s wife, became mildly cynical and settled down to draw their wages and get what fun they could out of the place.
Their instructor was called Rupert Hemingway. He was only called Mr Hemingway for the first day. After that he was Roop, and presently Darling, or Sucker or Honey according to taste. He did not care. He had answered an appeal for skilled workmen and having had through his hands six sets of girls none of whom, he could see, would ever be competent fitters whatever he taught them, he was now quite resigned to the waste of his skill. The idea of teaching these dolls in three months one tenth part of what it had taken him twenty years to learn in a fitting shop made him laugh, honest it did. When they would not pay attention, or giggled, or drew pictures of him while he was delivering his little lectures, he said: ‘O.K. Don’t listen. I don’t
care. I’m paid to tell you about the gravity of metals. Well, I’ve told you.’
‘Isn’t it nearly tea-time?’ someone would moan.
‘Ten minutes to go, but it don’t make much odds. Scram, the lot of you and give us a chance to get a pipe going.’
They learned elementary mathematics in a proper class-room with rows of desks and a blackboard and a teacher with a walrus moustache and a pointing rod longer than himself. It was surprising how much one had forgotten since school. Much gusty sighing arose over fractions, and long divisions brought cries of dismay. Joy sighed and cried with the rest, and sucked her pencil, or wrote letters, while the little old teacher, his hand dry as summer earth from centuries of chalk and dusters, pottered and peered among them, and tied himself in knots trying to explain decimals to some girl who was destined to go into a factory and pull the same lever for the rest of the war without enquiring what she was making.
From time to time there were examinations. There was much agonizing beforehand, but on the day, no matter how lopsided your bevels, nor whether one could, as Rupert said, drive a bus between your male and female square, you passed, because taxpayers’ money had been spent on you and there must be something to show for it.
When you were graded an expert fitter, you were given a handsome certificate and sent, if you were lucky, after a job. At the interview, you often found that it was a greaser or an inspector or a floor sweeper that was wanted, so back you came to the school to be received with open arms as an old comrade and tucked away on a brushing-up course.
Sometimes when they were on the late shifts, Joy and the other girls took Rupert Hemingway to the Devonshire Arms on the way to the station. They were there one evening buying Rupert drinks – for they nearly all had more money than he – playing darts and dancing to a penny-in-the-slot gramophone. Bettine was leading Rupert on in an unfair way, although they all knew that he had a waif-like wife somewhere who did not like him doing this sort of job at all.
Joy had been picked up by an A.C.2, who had laughed at her
when she said she was learning to be a fitter. His laugh was uncouth, and displayed decaying teeth that the Air Force should have had out long ago.
‘I don’t see what’s funny about it,’ Joy said. ‘You’ll be glad of me one day.’
The A.C.2 showed his horrid teeth again and suddenly made some shockingly indecent remark, which was neither funny nor clever nor even particularly apt. He put his head on one side to watch how she would take it. She had the feeling that he would not have said it if he had thought she was his own kind. That was what you got for going into a pub in a fur coat. It was cold, and a lot of the other girls wore their fur coats to go to the engineering school, so Joy did not see why she shouldn’t. She gave the A.C.2 a withering look and left him, feeling unclean.
She went home with one of the Army wives, who talked about the party she was going to hold in the Perivale tea-bar for her birthday next month. Next month? Would they still be there? Joy seemed to have been there for an eternity already. When she had asked the other day how soon she could have a job, they had soothed her with the old story of not running before she could walk and cunningly started her on a supplementary course of drilling. They were like spiders, loth to let go their prey. The war would be over if she did not get out and into it soon.
It was ten o’clock before she got home. In the lift, she remembered that Rodney had asked her to come home as early as possible. He was giving one of his little dinners, and he liked Joy to be there, even if it was only having supper on a tray in the drawing-room while they were having coffee. This added a nice touch in fact. He liked to show her off half jokingly as a factory hand, although no one could have looked less like a factory hand than Joy, spotlessly clean, for all the female trainees spent at least half an hour in the cloak-room before the whistle went at nine o’clock. Rupert Hemingway did not mind. He had grown tired of teaching them long before half-past eight.
Mellow from their dinner, Rodney’s guests would pamper Joy and pour drinks for her and prop her with cushions, saying that she must be tired, and tell Alexander he had not brought her
enough supper. This was early in the war, remember, and it was still a Thing to be at work.
Tonight, however, the conversation was turning on the news that there was to be a more general call-up. Age limits would be extended. Non-essential workers and women might be directed. When Joy came into the drawing-room, someone tasting the perfect coffee was saying: ‘Suppose they directed Alexander? My God, the horrors of war! You’d die, Rodney. Quite gradually and decently, but you’d die.’