Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys (31 page)

Ignored by the girls, Ronnie shrugged up the collar of his camel coat several times before banging out of the pub door, accompanied by their laughter. As the woman went to get the drinks, one of the other married girls, whose husband was in the forces, leaned forward to Peggy and said quietly, ‘You’re not the only one to have a bit of fun, love. I met a smashin’ soldier up the West End. What the old man don’t know can’t hurt him, eh?’

Peggy was grateful that the girls asked no questions and gave her only sympathetic looks, but, for her, the evening had been ruined, and not long afterwards she’d made her escape.

Their Christmas Day was a sad one. They sat squashed into her little kitchen, trying to be cheerful, all the women in her fractured family. No Grandad, no Dad, no husband, but most painful of all no brother. And May, whatever she said to the contrary, was forlorn without Bill, the sweetheart who had never been. And she without her Harry, the sweetheart who never should have been. The war had robbed them of all their men, one way or another, and she was glad when the day was over.

*

Before May returned to her base she made good her promise to take Peggy to see Harry’s child. There was no hint of condemnation in Mrs Gilbie’s face, as she showed them through her front room, where paper chains draped the ceiling and in one corner stood a decorated Christmas tree. How they’d managed to get one of those, Peggy couldn’t imagine, but the place certainly had more festive cheer about it than her own flat.

‘Come into the kitchen. Jack’s in the playpen, where I can keep an eye on him. Little terror’s into everything now!’

She would have known he was Harry’s son, just by the eyes. So bright and alert, he spotted her, curious about this stranger in the kitchen, and pulled himself up on the wooden bars. Mrs Gilbie lifted the toddler out of the playpen and he clung a little shyly to her.

‘Get the present out, Peg,’ May said, and Peggy brought out a toy car from her bag. Immediately the little boy wriggled down from Mrs Gilbie’s arms and trotted over to Peggy. Sitting down heavily at her feet, he began playing with the toy and Peggy was happy to be ignored. She looked up, smiling, at Mrs Gilbie. ‘He seems a happy little thing?’

‘He’s good as gold. Bright as a button. He’s a bit shy at the moment, but wait till you hear him talk. You wouldn’t believe he’s never been here before.’ She looked proudly at little Jack and Peggy liked the woman, if for no other reason than her devotion to Harry’s son.

‘Have you heard from his dad?’ Mrs Gilbie asked

‘Daddy a soldier.’ Jack didn’t look up from his car, and the woman shot her a look ‘Earwigo!’ she said, and they all laughed at the clever little boy.

When Mrs Gilbie went to make tea, Jack stayed happily with them and Peggy turned to May. ‘Doesn’t it make you think, looking at him, he wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.’

‘And for Bill…’ May said.

‘What about Bill?’ Mrs Gilbie came in from the scullery with a tray of tea things.

‘Oh, we were just talking about the day we found Jack. It’s strange how things worked out…’ May said, a little wistfully, Peggy thought.

‘Well, they still have a lot more working out to do if you ask me.’ Bill’s mother sat back and looked from one sister to the other. ‘You two have got yourselves into a right pickle, haven’t you?’

Peggy found herself going hot. She had hoped Mrs Gilbie might simply ignore the reason she’d come to see Jack. There weren’t many people of the woman’s generation who wouldn’t condemn her, so Peggy was surprised when her clear blue eyes flashed with amusement.

‘My advice to you two is to take a leaf out of my husband’s book. Persistence pays off, was always his motto. He knew we were made for each other, right from the start, but I didn’t see it for a long while…’ She was silent, a small smile on her face, as she remembered that long-distant version of herself.

‘Ah well, it won’t be easy for you, Peggy, but there’s nothing more important than being with the right one. And that goes for you too…’ She shot a look at May, who seemed startled to be caught in the penetrating gaze of Bill’s mother. ‘Did you write to my Bill?’

‘I did, y-yes…’ May seemed flustered. ‘I told him I didn’t mean to lose touch… and, of course, I told him I was pleased for him, you know, his engagement.’

‘Of course you did,’ Mrs Gilbie said, with an inscrutable shake of her head. She paused to retrieve Jack who had wandered off and was now inspecting the knives in the cutlery drawer.

‘Let’s take him out in the yard,’ Mrs Gilbie said, coaxing him away from the knives. ‘I’ll show you our crater!’

The Gilbie’s backyard at first glance was like any other wartime garden: an Anderson shelter dominated, there was an outside lavatory, an iron mangle beneath a lean-to and a tin bath hanging on one wall. But as they stepped outside the scullery door Peggy gasped, for almost the entire area of the garden was taken up with a bomb crater.

‘Uncle Sam!’ Little Jack pointed a finger at the crater. But Mrs Gilbie quickly explained. ‘My husband was running to the shelter when the bomb fell, two yards away from him! But he’d just dug over all the yard to plant veg, lovely lot of manure he’d forked in. Anyway, all that soft earth must’ve taken the blast, because when I looked out from the Anderson, there he is, head poking up out of the crater!’

‘Was he all right?’ May asked.

‘Well, apart from being covered in horse shit, he was right as rain. I pulled him out and dragged him in the shelter. I think I was shaking more than him. Of course, the little one here didn’t miss a trick. He got so upset. But my husband says, “Don’t worry, son. I didn’t come through the last war just to get blown up in my own backyard!”’

They circled the crater. ‘Jack remembers everything, don’t you?’

The little boy grinned up at her.

Just then Peggy noticed a bent wheel with mangled spokes, propped against the back wall, and next to it the frame of what appeared to be an old bicycle.

‘What’s that?’ she asked. And taking charge, little Jack said, ‘Penny-farving.’

Mrs Gilbie led them further round the edge of the crater. ‘The old penny-farthing came off worse than Sam. I think my husband was more worried about the bike than himself, to be honest. It was his father’s, and he’s kept it all this time…’

Peggy watched May bend down to look at the old machine. She looked up sadly. ‘Oh, what a shame! Bill told me all about this – he said you used to ride it as well!’

And Mrs Gilbie threw back her head and laughed. ‘I did, and what a sight I looked on it too!’

Peggy left the Gilbies’ house feeling that, in spite of bombs in the backyard, Jack could not be in a safer place and that, like Mr Gilbie, she herself would emerge from the bomb crater of her life one day, perhaps able even to laugh at the experience.

The next day May was travelling back to Essex and Peggy made sure she set the alarm for an hour earlier. She’d been finding it harder to drag herself out of sleep these days. Perhaps it was the pregnancy, but she thought it more likely just a result of the long months burning the candle at both ends. But she wanted to send off her sister with a good breakfast. With so many train cancellations and delays, who knew what time she’d arrive back at the base. She had just wrapped a packed lunch of fish-paste sandwiches when her sister walked into the kitchen.

‘Look at you, late on parade! And them buttons could do with a bit of polishing,’ she joked, as May came to inspect the sandwiches. Peggy thought she looked good in her uniform, but it still seemed unreal that her little sister was a soldier in charge of a gun team.

‘Now sit down. I’ve made you porridge and a sausage sandwich for breakfast.’

‘Oh thanks, love, but you need to be saving rations for yourself!’

Peggy put the porridge in front of May and went back to the frying pan. ‘Got to feed the troops first.’

‘Well, you are the troops too. You know what they say about war workers, the girl that makes the thingamabob and all that…’

‘Oh yeah, I wish. They put me back on talcum powder last week!’ Her war work was obscure, but Peggy liked the idea that a plane part would have her stamp upon it.

‘Well, packing talcum powder for keeping soldier’s feet dry is all part of the war effort, I suppose,’ May said.

Peggy laughed, but the contrast with her sister’s return to the guns was stark and she began to have that old dragging sense of uselessness she’d had when George was home. Sometimes she’d felt like one of those ginger ale bottles, with the glass stopper pulled down tight. When he was put away, the glass stopper had come off and she hadn’t stopped fizzing since. She dreaded a return to that old life, which had never felt hers. But, whatever work she did, she had her independence and the WVS canteen, and she had Harry, however forbidden and far away he might be.

***

After May had left for Essex, Peggy felt the burden of family responsibilities as never before. She began to realize how shielded she’d been by her early marriage to George, and she appreciated for the first time, how much May had held things together at home while she had lived in her sheltered little palace on the Purbrook Estate. Now she was the one to jolly their mother along and keep her in the land of the living, but she could do nothing about her father’s lonely vigil in the bombed-out house in Southwark Park Road.

She worried about his health. Half the house was uninhabitable. January had come in with a deep frost, so that Bermondsey’s streets were six inches deep in snow. The house had only half a roof and he was living in the kitchen, with only a primus stove to cook on. When she went to catch the bus for work one morning, Tower Bridge stood like a white-laced web across the Thames and all the sky above it was grey, with swirling snow filling the space between the towers. She shivered as she got off the bus and hurried down the snow-choked alleyway leading to Atkinson’s gates. She made her way to the plane parts department, but was met by Hattie, the forelady.

‘Sorry, Peg, you’re still on talc,’ she said.

‘But I thought it was temporary!’ Peggy said, disappointed.

‘Still short-staffed. We’re not getting enough of the new conscripts – all seem to be going into the ATS!’

It was no use grumbling. She walked upstairs to the hoppers and began the first of her many trips, heaving buckets of talcum powder up the ladder.

‘Make sure you keep it steady!’ she called down to her partner Ada, who had never conquered her fear of heights. ‘No, don’t look up at me, you’ll get a crick in your neck – you just concentrate on holding the bloody ladder!’ she shouted down from the top, and began tipping in the first bucket. But she was caught by a coughing fit, and remembered the major drawback of this job, the fine powder invading nose, eyes and ears, so that at the end of the day her face would look ghost-like with its white mask. As she coughed, she felt the ladder wobble.

‘Hold it, hold it!’

But Ada’s hands had slipped and the ladder swayed. Peggy made a wild grab for the edge of the hopper, letting go of the half-empty bucket, which tumbled down towards Ada, banging against the side of the hopper and showering its snow-like contents all over the girl as it fell. Ada screamed, ducked out of the way and let go of the ladder altogether. As Peggy felt the rung slip from under her feet and fall away, she grasped the edge of the hopper with both hands, like a high-wire act on a trapeze.

‘Oh my gawd! Get the ladder back!’ she screamed down to Ada.

Legs swinging wildly, her feet looking for purchase somewhere, she daren’t look down, but heard a great deal of scrabbling and banging as the girl struggled with the heavy ladder.

‘Hold on, Peg!’ one of the other women shouted. ‘I wasn’t thinking of bloody well letting go!’ Peggy shouted. ‘Hurry up!’

Her arms were pulling out of their sockets and she felt her palms slipping on the powdery wooden edge.

‘Here it comes!’

The ladder thudded against the side of the hopper and she edged one foot out until she felt it. Gingerly resting her feet on the top rung, she tested it.

‘Are you holding it?’ she called down. When she was sure the ladder was rock-steady she put all her weight on it, coming down one rung at a time. But her legs were trembling so violently and her palms so sweaty that she lost her footing. She felt herself falling and, gripping the ladder so tightly that her hands burned, she tried to slow her descent. Five feet from the floor, she lost her grip and thudded to the ground, her legs twisting beneath her and her head thudding against the floor with a crack.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Peggy!’ Ada was covered head to toe in the white powder from Peggy’s bucket.

But Peggy couldn’t move her legs and she winced as a sharp pain shot up the side of her head.

‘Are you all right, love?’ One of the other women was trying to help her up. ‘I don’t know about munitions, but I reckon they should give us danger money! You nearly had your lot! That would’ve been a good ’un, the first war worker killed by talcum powder!’

From a long way off, Peggy heard laughter, a couple of other women chuckling with relief. Then the grating voice of the forelady broke through the fog.

‘Oi, oi, oi! What’s all the bleedin’ noise about? It’s not a soddin’ beano you know, you’re meant to be working!’

‘Sorry, Hattie,’ Peggy heard Ada say. ‘It’s my fault, I let go of the ladder.’

‘What d’you do that for? It’s all you’ve got to do! Don’t think I ain’t noticed it’s that poor cow going up and down it all day. Now stop pissin’ about.’

As Hattie bent down to help, Peggy saw two of her hatchet faces looming above her, before she slipped away into darkness.

*

Peggy reached up to pat her helper’s cheek. She was lying somewhere soft and comfortable, not the hard factory floor she remembered tumbling on to.

‘Dad!’ she said, her mind still a fog of powder. ‘Dad? What are you doing here?’

She knew he shouldn’t be here, but for the moment she couldn’t remember why.

‘I’ve run all the way from Southwark Park Road,’ he said, his chest heaving, and she could feel his heart thumping as he drew her in tightly. He smelled of burned ashes and snow. ‘Ada came for me. You’ve cracked your head, love.’