Authors: Janet MacLeod Trotter
‘Read about you in the papers,’ Eve crowed, peering at Maggie over her spectacles. ‘What a shock you gave us all! It’s no wonder they’ll not have you back here.’
‘No,’ Maggie smiled at her old colleague, ‘I didn’t really expect them to. I’m glad to see you again though. Eve.’
‘Aye, pet,
’
the older woman nodded awkwardly. Then she blurted out, ‘Did they treat you badly inside?’
Maggie’s smile was strained as she quipped, ‘Not half as bad as me own kin have done.
’
‘Eeh, pet!’ Eve gasped in sympathy.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Maggie assured her with a pat on her plump arm. ‘Nowt keeps me down for long.’
‘Listen,’ Eve said, lowering her voice. ‘I could have a word in Mr Tindall’s ear - see what he can do. They’re taking on women in the workshops now - short of men since the autumn.’
Maggie’s face lit up with hope. ‘That would be canny of you, Eve.’
A week later Maggie started in Number 16 workshop, packing munitions into wooden crates under the huge dusty arc of glass and metal that resounded with the banging and hammerings of scores of aproned workers.
The tasks were monotonous, the atmosphere noisy, the discipline strict, yet Maggie revelled in the company of the other young women who had taken up the jobs of men now at the Front. Dressed in her anonymous overalls and cap, she felt relief at not being singled out for special attention or abuse as she had grown used to over the past years. To the others she was just Maggie, the girl with the quick tongue and a sharp joke when the foreman’s back was turned. No one knew where she lived exactly or what she did after the buzzers blew, but everyone nodded and called in a friendly fashion on her return the following day.
And there was money for Christmas! Maggie came home laden with parcels and treats on Christmas Eve. She had stopped at the shops on Alison Terrace on her way home from work and bought a leg of pork from John Heslop and sausages and black pudding for George’s breakfast. It was even more of a sacrifice and treat than usual because meat was becoming scarce - Heslop had secured the pork especially for her. Maggie had felt obliged to promise the butcher that she would attend chapel on Christmas Day.
She had found some second-hand books at the pawnshop for George’s Christmas present and stopped to buy roast chestnuts at a brazier on the corner, unable to resist the sweet aroma of the grilled nuts.
A few days before, Maggie had decorated the cottage with holly and red ribbon and hung mistletoe above their bed in the hope of rekindling George’s appetite for lovemaking. They had been abstinent for too long, Maggie reflected.
Returning up the hill, she could see the faint glimmer of firelight through the green blackout blinds, beckoning and welcoming her home out of the dark night. Behind her she could still hear the faint melody of a hurdy-gurdy churning out Christmas carols.
Entering the cottage, brimming with holiday spirit, Maggie was dashed to find it empty. The fire had been banked up but there was no sign of George anywhere. For weeks she had been urging him to go out and now she was vexed not to find him in.
Still determined to make it a happy Christmas, she unpacked and busied herself preparing the meat and vegetables for the next day’s feast. Stoking up the fire, she boiled up a pease soup and baked bread and currant buns. She was just pulling these out of the oven when the door opened.
She turned to see George standing in the doorway with her brother. He had gone to fetch Jimmy to please her, Maggie thought with gratitude.
‘Jimmy!’ she cried in delight ‘You’ve come for Christmas! Haway in and sit yourselves down. There’s a pan of soup on the boil. I’m that pleased to see you both - thought I’d be seeing in Christmas Day on me own. I’ve been that busy at work, I’ve hardly set eyes on you for weeks, Tich.’
She saw him bristle and laughed apologetically. ‘Sorry, Jimmy it is.’
George pushed the youth towards the fire and blew on his hands, holding them out to the flames. Maggie sent her brother out for more coal and then sat him down at the table.
‘So what you been up to of late?’ Maggie asked, her face glowing with the heat of baking.
‘I’ve got summat to tell you, Maggie,’ Jimmy said, his face animated as he sniffed the soup. ‘You’re the first to know - except for Geordie, of course.’
She threw George a quick look of enquiry, but saw him glance away and move nearer to the hearth.
‘Well?’ she smiled, intrigued.
‘I’ve enlisted with the Fusiliers,’ he grinned. ‘We’ve been out celebrating!’
‘Celebrating!’ Maggie cried in dismay. ‘But I thought they wouldn’t have you.’
‘I’m eighteen now,’ Jimmy pulled back his scrawny shoulders proudly, ‘and anyways, they’ve reduced the height for recruits - I’m not too small anymore.’
She saw the look of triumph on her brother’s lean, childish face and felt a pang of sympathy for him. All his life he had been constantly told he was too young or too puny to do the things he wished, but now he had achieved recognition as a raw recruit into Uncle Barny’s old regiment - into the British Army that was guzzling up young men with a voraciousness never seen before.
Her sympathy for him turned at once to anxiety. She rounded on George in annoyance.
‘Why didn’t you try to stop him?’ she accused. ‘I thought you’d have better sense.’
‘Stop me?’ Jimmy laughed. ‘It was Geordie gave me the courage to try again.’
‘What?’ Maggie shouted.
‘Aye,’ George turned and looked at her directly for the first time since entering. ‘I’ve joined up too, Maggie.’
She stared at him in open-mouthed disbelief, her slim face flushed and framed by tousled dark curls of hair. His stomach lurched as he noticed for the first time in months how pretty she was, how much he wanted her. What a waste of fruitless months, he thought with regret, while he wallowed in depression about his unemployment, his worthlessness. He had been so angry with Maggie for being partly to blame for his sacking and then making him feel doubly inadequate by going out and supporting them with her wages. He was no use as a worker and no use to her either, he had told himself brutally.
So he had been left with no option but to join the war. No longer could he look at the maimed men in the street or even his own damaged brother without pangs of guilt at his safe, directionless life.
‘There’s talk of conscription coming in soon,’ George tried to justify his decision to Maggie. ‘I’d be one of the first to be called up anyway as a single unemployed man.’
He saw her flinch at his words and hated himself for inflicting the pain that showed in her grey eyes. But he could not go back on his decision. Joining up had given his battered pride a sudden lift; his life now had purpose again. He had convinced himself that he could best support his comrades by joining them in the trenches. But looking at Maggie’s stricken face, George knew that she would never see it that way. The price he would have to pay for regaining his self-esteem might be losing the woman he loved more than anything in the world. They looked at each other helplessly, aware of the gulf that yawned between them.
Maggie felt too sick to speak. Without a word, she handed the soup ladle to Jimmy, then walked out into the night.
Looking back several months later, Maggie could remember little of that Christmas Day in 1915. Jimmy had gone by the time she had returned from pacing the town, body frozen and mind numbed. On Boxing Day, George went too.
‘It’s all I can do,’ he said defiantly. Then, less sure, ‘Will you stay here?’
‘It’s my home isn’t it?’ Maggie answered robustly. ‘I’m earning enough to pay the rent and have a bit put by, so don’t bother yourself about me.’
‘I didn’t want it to turn out like this, Maggie,’ George insisted. ‘I’ll send back money.’
‘I don’t need your money, Geordie,’ Maggie answered proudly. ‘Send it to your Billy if you want to send it anywhere.’
And so he had gone, with a brief peck on her turned-away cheek and she had not seen him since.
It was spring now and Maggie had got through the past months by plunging herself into her work at the factory and returning exhausted to the cottage to sleep. New families had moved into temporary huts at the bottom of the hill, drawn to the riverside by the offers of work in the munitions sheds. But she heard their children being told to stay away from her cottage, suspicious of her solitary existence. In their games they called her a witch and threw stones down her chimney for dares.
Maggie ignored the jibes and stayed within the close surrounds of the cottage, working in the garden or reading by the hearth. Her one weekly trip to town was to the penny library on Alison Terrace. Increasingly, she avoided places and shops where she might encounter her family or past neighbours, for she had lost her appetite for sociability. She had grown accustomed to her own company, for at least that was reliable. What, she asked herself, was the point of allowing a new friendship to blossom when the people she loved were always taken from her?
Then her ordered, uneventful life was disturbed by a letter from George. He was writing from camp. His training was over and they were about to be sent to France. Could he see her before he went?
The letter arrived on the Thursday and the following day on her return from work, she found him digging in the black earth of the garden, beyond the spring daffodils. The sight of him in uniform filled her with nervous foreboding, so that her words of greeting lodged in her throat.
‘Thought I’d do something useful while I waited,
’
he grinned at her, unsure.
‘If you’ve dug up me spring vegetables, there’ll be hell on!’ Maggie replied, unpinning her hat and letting the wind ruffle her black hair. ‘Come in and I’ll make some tea.’
‘I’ve made some,’ George answered, pulling on his army jacket.
‘Well, come in and drink it,’ Maggie ordered.
They sat either side of the fire, awkward and tongue-tied.
‘When do you leave?’ Maggie asked.
‘Catch the train from Central Station on Monday,’ George told her. ‘I’ll stop at home if you don’t want me here.’
Maggie cocked her head and replied thoughtfully, ‘Funny how you still call your father’s house your home. You haven’t lived there in donkey’s years.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘I know what you mean,’ Maggie cut him off and abruptly stood up. ‘You’ll stay for tea, won’t you?’
George stood up too and rummaged in his knapsack. ‘I’ve brought some sausage and sugar - a few other things. You’ll not have time to stand in queues.’
Maggie moved around the kitchen, preparing the food.
‘Do you see anything of Tich?’ she asked.
‘Once or twice,’ George answered. ‘We’re in different companies. But he seemed in good fettle when I last saw him.
’
‘He seems so young,’ Maggie sighed. Whereas she, at twenty-three, felt so old, as if she had lived ten years in the past two.
‘The lad has a stout heart,’ George commented. ‘You lasses treated him like a bairn for too long, that’s all.’
‘And throwing him at the Hun will make a man of him, I suppose,’ Maggie mocked. ‘You lads are all the same, not happy unless you’re scrapping.’
‘You used to like a fight, remember?’ George countered.
‘Aye, well, not now,’ Maggie replied, tossing the sausage into a heavy pan. ‘I want a quiet life. I’ve done with protestin’ and all that.’
‘I doubt it,’ George grunted.
After they had eaten and Maggie was about to clear the table, George caught her hand.
‘Come and sit a while by the fire, Maggie,’ he said quietly and led her to a chair.
They sat together while George talked of his months at camp and the men who had become his companions. Maggie watched his face grow animated and realised that he was enjoying his new life. She felt a stab of envy, recognising the heady pull of comradeship. She had experienced it herself among the suffragettes and the knowledge of it had fortified her flagging spirits in prison. Yet somewhere along the way, her ardour had been extinguished, Maggie thought with regret. Or maybe it merely lay untended but smouldering like the embers of a fire that refuses to die?
She looked at George and accepted for the first time that she should not condemn him for what he had chosen to do. The war was hateful, but he wanted to fight not just for his fellow comrades but for his own self-esteem, his own sense of justice. When Pearson’s had sacked him they had robbed him of his work and his reason for being; now he had found it again among the Tyneside Scottish.
‘Read to me,’ Maggie suddenly requested, interrupting George’s tales. ‘Read to me like you used to - poetry, anything.’
George drew the blinds and picked a book from the mantelpiece and read. From time to time, he would pause to put coal on the fire and then continued his story. Maggie closed her eyes and listened to his strong familiar voice, recounting the words of Dickens.
Sometime in the night, he roused her from sleep on the chair and carried her to their bed in the corner. For the first time in months they made love and George whispered his longing for her, his regret at the wasted period of growing apart.
‘I love you, Maggie Beaton,’ he declared. ‘When I come back I’ll wed you. You’ll not put me off any more, do you hear?’
‘I hear,’ Maggie laughed and kissed him.
‘We should’ve done it long ago. Why didn’t you let me marry you, Maggie?’
Maggie sighed and put her head on his shoulder. ‘I was happy as we were - our own little Utopia,’ she answered. ‘Besides, everywhere I looked, married women seemed imprisoned, unhappy, like our Susan. I didn’t want that.’
‘It wouldn’t be like that with me, lass,’ George insisted.
‘No.’
‘So you’re agreed?’ he persisted. ‘When I come back, we’ll get wed?’
Maggie shivered. ‘Don’t you mean
if
you come back, Geordie?’
George gripped her to him and kissed her hard, as if he could smother her doubts.
‘Course I’ll come back, Maggie, so you better wait for me!’
They stayed in the cottage for three brief days and nights, like creatures reluctant to give up hibernation. They ate and read and slept and made love and talked of plans for the future. All talk of the war was avoided, but it hung over them, like a storm cloud, intensifying their last bitter-sweet moments together.