A Woman's Place (41 page)

Simple! Eveline wanted to laugh, but she didn’t. Connie could be so giddy at times. Yes, they had struggled, and fought, and suffered, and some had died. They’d endured imprisonment, forced feeding, ridicule, had been ignored, loathed and often viciously handled by men averse to them. Perhaps Connie was right, it had to take a simple thing like countries going to war against each other to achieve what they had been striving for so long to gain.

She looked at the newspaper column again. So few words, as if it was merely a throwaway decision. Last March, Asquith, who had always been opposed to women’s suffrage, had stated that women should work out their own salvation. And they had, thousands of women doing what had once been men’s jobs, working for their country while men were away fighting, and all there was to be seen of it in the papers was this one small column. Well, grand!

She handed the paper back to Connie. ‘You can call it a start, but it hasn’t been passed yet. It still has to go through a third parliamentary reading. Goodness knows when that will be.’

The same old routine: an encouraging beginning, then a few months later, the bill thrown out. She would lay no store by it. The proof of the pudding was in the eating.

‘It
is
a start,’ Connie pouted, for once stubborn, but Eveline couldn’t feel that convinced.

‘We’ve had so many starts, all false,’ she added as she folded her empty paper bag to save for tomorrow’s sandwiches, got up and went back into the shade of the factory floor, stifling though it was, ready for an afternoon’s grind at a gaping machine making shell cases.

Even so, the news was mulled over at their Wednesday branch meeting, though with the same sense of not having achieved it by their own campaigning, as if they had been done out of some triumph. In fact after the first flurry of chatter over it, conversation turned to the recent air raids on London, not by Zeppelins but aeroplanes. These proved far more alarming, being swifter and harder to hit; at one time fifteen had been counted in one air raid. Worse, they caused far greater loss of life. One had hit a school, another a railway station, wrecking a train.

‘I don’t know what things are coming to,’ said one member, going on to complain of the government’s decision not to install air-raid hooters in factories in case workers used them as an excuse to take time off work. ‘It could cause more loss of life and I think it’s disgraceful.’ Her listeners murmured agreement, any more talk of women’s enfranchisement taking second place to the events of the times.

Len married Flossie early in September. It was a quiet wedding, with him on crutches; his new false leg had been rubbing his stump so badly that it had become infected and was still being treated. She hung on to his arm at the altar as if fearing he might fall down. But they were happy, even though after a hot, dry summer it decided to pour with rain on their wedding day.

The church smelled of wet macs and umbrellas left inside the porch as Flossie divested herself of her mac to reveal a somewhat crumpled wedding dress. Afterwards it was almost a sprint to Len’s parents’ flat for the celebrations, a sign on his dad’s shop saying SORRY – CLOSED FOR THE WEDDING OF MY SON.

This time it was the Fentons’ flat that smelled of rain-soaked macs and umbrellas hanging on the coat stand in their narrow upstairs passage, but the weather didn’t diminish the fun of eating, drinking and singing – jolly old songs: ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kitbag’, and ‘Goodbye-ee, Don’t Cry-ee’, and specially ‘The Bells are Ringing for Me and My Girl’, which felt very appropriate to the day.

For a few hours they could all forget, or try to forget, the desperate fields of Flanders, the pictures of the gaping craters of Ypres and the quagmire Passchendaele was becoming, where their fighting men had got bogged down by mud. It was raining there too. Three women who couldn’t forget for one minute were Eveline’s sister Tilly, her husband having recently been sent out there, and Eveline and Connie, who was more like her sister than Tilly. Their husbands they now knew were already there, training camp having ended many weeks ago.

Eveline wrote a long letter to Albert all about the wedding, hoping it wouldn’t be too delayed. She wanted to tell him about his brother Jim, but thought it best not too. Jim’s girl had broken it off with him, while he was away somewhere in France. It seemed such a terribly unfair and cruel thing to do, though from the way his mother had described her perhaps he was better off without her. But it was hard to be told that sort of news when a man’s away fighting for his country unable to do anything.

The shattered remains of the small town of Ypres seen from a distance resembled a jumble of rotten teeth, but Albert’s mind was too blasted to even look at it as he and a team of wet and weary men heaved and pushed and pulled at a field gun bogged down in the mud. It hadn’t stopped raining for so long, he couldn’t remember when last it hadn’t rained.

‘Get yer shoulders to it, yer useless buggers! Move it!’

At the hoarse bellow of the corporal, he heaved harder. Out here in the open wasn’t good. But most of the trenches had caved in, from shelling and subsidence from incessant rain, some with three feet of water in them, just like the shell holes, just like the one he could see to the left of him, the water it held deep enough to drown a wounded man if he fell into it. No getting out again up those steep, wet chalky sides. Calm the water looked, calm as any country pond, calm and treacherous, benignly reflecting the overcast sky and other toiling figures on the far side of it.

‘Adams! Stop gazing ararnd like some bleedin’ lovesick woman! Put some bloody weight be’ind it.’

He saw George grin briefly at him, and saw his feet slip in the slimy morass as he heaved, threatening to send him almost flat on his face, his puttees thick with mud. He couldn’t see his own boots, ankle-deep in it; one or two of the others were in halfway to their knees. And they were being expected to haul this perishing gun out? Some bloody hopes! What a blooming life!

He saw the aeroplane, heard the rattle of its machine-gun fire and ducked instinctively as it swooped. Something disengaged itself from the plane and he threw himself flat as the bomb hit the ground with a terrific explosion. He caught a glimpse of George describing a strange revolving movement as though dancing in slow motion and knew George had been hit.

Automatically, with the roar of the aeroplane and racket of returning rifle fire from men on the ground seeming a long way off like in a dream, he leaped towards him with some idea of protecting him.

Others had been hit but he didn’t see them. Showered by mud and debris, he caught George’s arm as he began to slide down into the newly formed crater along with tons of thick mud. All he could see of his friend’s right side was a mass of bloody flesh as if he’d been sliced in two, but he still hung on, he himself almost sliding into the hole. If he went in too he’d never get out again and he knew instinctively that George was already dead.

Letting go, he lay face down in the mud, watching as if in a trance as the limp body slid away from him, slipping slowly downwards amid a flow of wet clay and silt. He saw it come to rest at the bottom while the disturbed sides of the crater continued to flow, slowly, inexorably covering the body, a ready-made grave. He realised he was crying as someone got him on his feet and began helping him away.

There were other bodies nearby, but all he could see was George sliding away from him; he might never be found in this forsaken acre of mire men were fighting over. The gun they’d been trying to extricate was nowhere to be seen; that too had gone into the crater.

‘I’m so sorry, mate,’ someone said. ‘So sorry.’ But Albert hardly heard him.

Connie’s grief was awful to see, not because she hadn’t stopped crying but because she hadn’t cried at all – two months had gone by since getting the telegram and not a single tear had Eveline seen her shed, this girl who usually wept at the drop of a hat.

These days of war, grief was kept behind locked doors. With so many men being lost every single day, who would dare to insult the grief of others with public tears as if they were the only one bereaved? And so Connie hadn’t cried and Eveline felt utterly helpless to comfort her. In fact any attempt at comfort seemed lost on her.

It was like watching someone in a trance to watch her going about her daily life. Even the day the telegram had come, she’d gone to work as usual, the admirable young widow refusing to let her loss get the better of her, but Eveline believed she knew different.

That day she’d waited for Connie at the school gates as usual, having seen Helena into school. As Connie arrived, Eveline noticed how rigid she seemed and when she straightened up from kissing goodbye to Rebecca, her face was stiff as a mask.

She had held out the buff-coloured telegram every family dreaded. ‘It came this morning,’ she said, her tone steady, while shock spread through Eveline’s system with no need to read the words that began: regret to inform you …

An instant later, her breath escaping in a heartfelt cry, she had flung her arms about her, but Connie had pulled away to tug her coat straight as though embarrassed that other mothers might have witnessed the gesture.

‘We’ll be late for work,’ she’d said in such a quiet tone that Eveline could hardly believe she’d heard her right. Never had she seen her so calm, Connie who usually resorted to tears at any given moment. It was unnatural.

‘You can’t go to work,’ she’d said, wanting to cry for her. ‘I’ll stay with you. I’ll take the time off. You can’t be alone.’

Connie had shaken her head. ‘We have to go to work. It’s what we have to do.’ And that was what she did.

Now Christmas was upon them, their girls on school holiday sitting in Connie’s flat, heads together, making paper chains. Connie had said at first that she wasn’t having any, but had meekly submitted to Eveline’s urging to have some sort of Christmas decoration for Rebecca’s sake. After all, the girl did not seem to be missing her dad, having not seen him for over three years except for the few brief days of his leave.

‘She still needs to enjoy Christmas, Connie,’ she said and saw the slight, careless shrug of Connie’s shoulders.

It was upsetting to see her like this. But how would she have behaved if it had been Albert? Where they had once happily exchanged snippets from their husband’s letters, she felt it better not to share the bits of news in Albert’s letters. Connie never asked after him, which was understandable, but sometimes she would catch Connie giving her a sideways glance that, if she hadn’t known her for her sweet nature, she’d have said bore a touch of pettiness. Perhaps it went with bereavement.

It was, of course, asking too much to expect her to perk up because it was Christmas, but she had hoped it might have made a difference. It didn’t.

‘You go on and enjoy Christmas Day at your parents’,’ she said when Eveline told her she was naturally invited. ‘I’d sooner stay here at home.’

To brood, Eveline thought, but said, ‘For Rebecca’s sake. She’ll have other children to play with and she’s almost like Helena’s sister. She’ll miss her, being here on her own.’

But Connie remained stubborn, and the last thing Eveline wanted was to speak her mind and say she was wallowing too much in her grief, because that’s what it seemed like to her.

She went off to her mum’s, but without Connie it was a miserable day for her. She was glad to pop in on Boxing Day and, although no laughter abounded there, it made her feel better.

Thick fog hung over the low ground, everything silent as the grave. Albert stood at his post, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette, its glowing tip screened with one hand though, in this fog, who would see it?

Four thirty in the morning, March 1918. He felt he’d been here for all his life. Life! He swore silently. George would never again know life beyond this miserable one – to him this ugly world no longer mattered. After six months he still pined for him. But the war had gone on without him, a job had to be done and there was no time for pining. It was so quiet. Wrapped in fog, it felt as if he too was in a world other than this one – was that what it could be like to be dead?

‘What time is it, sir?’ he whispered to Captain Thoroughgood. The man looked at his watch.

‘Four thirty-five … No, four thirty-nine. Be getting light in an hour.’

‘Not in this fog,’ Albert whispered.

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than the air split apart. He didn’t know it but some six thousand German guns had crashed out together and for five solid hours the bombardment stunned every man along the whole depth of the British defence line. None of the now-decimated troops noticed the sun rising at six o’clock, the fog still as thick as ever. It held another vapour, invisibly mixing with it. It was in Albert’s trench before he realised. Still fumbling for his gas mask, he fell to the ground, choking, blindly trying to drag it from its container, already unable to coordinate his movements. Other men found themselves in the same straits while some, having had the presence of mind to get into theirs, were trying to help the less responsive.

Overwhelmed by the great German push, the Allies could only retreat, the next several days seeing every road packed with units and transport in retreat, followed across the old battlefields of the Somme by an unremitting onslaught of shell bursts, machine gun and rifle fire and the flames of burning buildings.

‘’Ow yer making out, mate?’ Albert heard the words but couldn’t reply. His throat burned, his chest burned, his eyes burned. He hung between two comrades he couldn’t see for the rag binding his eyes, his legs automatically walking, his weight taken off them. He knew he was dying. All he wanted was to be put down by the roadside and left to it. But somehow, after what seemed like days of this Great Retreat, he ended up in a clean hospital bed, nurses bending over him, soothing mixtures being administered. But still his chest burned and he could hardly breathe.

It would soon be Helena’s birthday. Eveline was preparing to give her the best little party possible within the confines of grave food shortages that were beginning to bite. Hardly any flour stocks could be had, meat was rationed to twenty ounces a week per person, now butter and margarine were rationed too and few goodies were available. But she meant to do it, somehow. Since being told of her husband’s injuries, she’d resolutely saved up her rations so as to give their daughter something to remember her eighth birthday by.