A Daughter's Secret (23 page)

She was waiting for them in the office with straightforward forms for them to fill in and then, when the first rush of girls had gone, she took them over to the time clock. ‘Every morning when you arrive and every evening when you leave, you have to take your card from this rack here,’ Miss Morris said, handing Aggie and Lily the cards she had made out for them. ‘Then put them in the slot in the side of the clock and pull the handle and it records the time for you.’

She watched while Lily and Aggie followed her instructions, then nodded in approval. ‘It will become second nature for you after a while,’ she said. ‘And the next thing we must do is sort out overalls for you.’

They were voluminous, dark green and quite hideous. The only consolation was that everyone else had to wear them too, Aggie thought as she struggled into hers. All jewellery had to be removed, including rings and watches, and even kirby grips had to taken out of the hair – anything metal that might cause a spark that could possibly lead to an explosion. Then every vestige of hair had to be tucked under the oversize hats.

Seeing them struggle with these, Miss Morris said, with a slight smile, ‘I know that it isn’t the height of fashion, ladies, and the hats are the worst, I think, but you will be glad of those hats when I take you into the factory, for the dust gets everywhere.’

Aggie knew exactly what Miss Morris meant
when she had been in the factory just seconds, for the swirling dust that danced in front of her made her eyes itchy and sore, while the stink hit the back of her throat and she started to cough and splutter. Lily was in no better shape.

‘Most people are like that to start with,’ Miss Morris told the two women. ‘I was myself, but you soon get used to it.’

Aggie hoped she would, because whatever happened she had to stay there as long as she could. Through her bleary eyes she saw that the long room was dimly lit generally, though above the tables round which the girls were grouped, a naked bulb sent a pool of light over everything. Miss Morris put Aggie with a woman she called Miss Potter, while Lily was taken further down the factory.

As soon as Miss Morris was out of earshot, Miss Potter leaned towards Aggie and said, ‘I can’t be doing with this Miss Potter lark. My name is Chris – Christine, if you want to be posh – but never Miss Potter.’

‘I feel the same—’ Aggie began, but the other woman interrupted her. ‘I know who you are. You are Aggie Sullivan.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘Can’t you guess?’ Chris said with a laugh. ‘I am Jane’s sister.’

‘Jane Potter, of course,’ Aggie said. ‘I always called her Jane, see; barely knew her last name.’ She scrutinised Chris and said, ‘Now that you have
told me who you are I can see the resemblance to Jane.’

‘Yeah, we have got the same ordinary brown hair,’ Chris said.

‘Ah, yes,’ Aggie said, ‘but it’s naturally curly. You should be grateful – mine’s as straight as a die – and you have both got lovely dark brown eyes and about the longest eyelashes I have ever seen.’

‘I know we are alike,’ Chris said with a grin. ‘People used to think we were twins, when we were younger. Course, there is only a year between us.’ And then, with a glance at her companions to see they were absorbed in their work, she whispered to Aggie, ‘Our Jane thinks a lot about you. She has told me all about you and you needn’t think it will get any further ’cos it won’t. I think you have had enough bad things happen in your life and this lot don’t need to know anything about it.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Aggie said in relief. ‘It will be lovely to start with a clean slate with everyone.’

‘No reason why you shouldn’t either,’ Chris said. ‘Oh God! Old Morris is on her way back up. I’d better start teaching you what I am supposed to be, or she will have me by the short and curlies.

‘These here detonators come to us semifinished,’ she explained, ‘and we have to fit three things on them in a special order. They are in the numbered trays in front of you and I will show you how to
fit them on. Then you clip them into the metal canisters in the basket to your right and put the finished article into the crates on your left. That’s all there is to it. I think you will pick it up in no time.’

Aggie did, though she was all fingers and thumbs to start with.

Jane told her to go slower. ‘Speed is essential, but that comes with practice. Accuracy is even more important. No good sending detonators out at a rate of knots if, when they get where they’re going to, they don’t flipping work, is it?’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I know not,’ Chris said. ‘So you concentrate on getting it right for the moment. The more you do, the quicker you will get at it.’

Aggie saw the sense of that and got on well with Chris, for all she was a good few years younger than Aggie herself, and she began to relax and not worry so much.

One thing intrigued Aggie, though, and that was how yellow the girls’ faces were. When they removed the regulation hats at home time she noticed most of them had a coppery tinge to their hair. She didn’t want to ask them, fearing they might be offended, so she asked Lily if she knew anything about it on their way home.

‘It’s the sulphur, bab,’ Lily said. ‘It’s what makes the dust and all, and the bloody stink.’

‘That dust gets everywhere,’ Aggie said. ‘It speckles all our clothes and I have seen it on girls’
eyelashes. And with older women with lined faces, it settles into the creases by the end of the day.’

‘Yeah, well, the sulphur works its way into the skin and the hair,’ Lily said. ‘People call them that work in munitions canary girls. Does that bother you?’

Aggie thought for a minute. ‘Not in the slightest. I’ve been called far worse things.’

As summer slipped into autumn, each day got a little easier for Aggie and Lily. Despite the depressing war news and the growing casualty lists, Aggie was enjoying her new life better than she ever thought she would. Though she didn’t particularly like the job, she knew it was a million times better than the alternative. It was nice also to feel you were doing your bit. The girls were a friendly bunch and they could have a good laugh together.

Each evening when Aggie and Lily arrived home, the Palmer children gave them a riotous welcome. Polly said it was doing them good to have other people in the house. Aggie had no problem playing with them and could even inveigle Lily to join in sometimes. Aggie liked nothing better than tucking them up in bed. She would tell them the stories from Ireland that she used to enthral her brothers with, or read the books Polly had got them from the library, and thought there was nothing like the feel of a little one’s arms about her neck, or their lips on her cheek as she bid them good night.

Polly was glad of Aggie’s willing help with the
children, and was more than glad that, with the children in bed, she wasn’t alone night after night. In no time the three women had become good friends, but Aggie and Lily knew there were certain things they could never tell Polly.

One day, she had said with a sigh, ‘I am so glad that you two came to live here. When Georgie suggested we get lodgers in to help out a bit, I wasn’t impressed. Please don’t be offended, but trying to raise two children decently is hard enough, especially on my own, and I know some who work in munitions are often heavy drinkers and rough types, immoral even. I am so glad I got two respectable ladies like yourselves.’

And, Aggie thought, anyone seeing them now would think them just like anyone else. Neither frequented pubs any more, nor bought gin or anything else from the carry-out, and wouldn’t know where to get their hands on opium if they wanted it. Being totally sober was safer in the work they did, for as Lily said, ‘Got to have your wits about you in that place, I’d say.’

‘And steady hands,’ Aggie said.

‘I’ll say,’ Lily agreed. ‘Remember that woman was telling me that early on in the war, a girl was working with detonators just like we do and she just suddenly dropped one. She was killed outright and the girl on her right had her arm blown off and the one to her left was blinded. Don’t pay to take chances.’

They didn’t tell this tale to Polly; she worried
enough about them working in such a dangerous place as it was. Polly was one of life’s worriers. As Lily said, if she had nothing to worry over, then that would worry her as well.

Aggie, though, could understand Polly’s concern for her husband, for she was often frantic if his letters were delayed.

‘You must think me very feeble, worrying about him so much,’ she said one evening. ‘But he has been gone since 1914 really, apart from one short leave, and I miss him dreadfully.’

‘I thought they didn’t take married men at first?’ Aggie asked.

‘No,’ Polly confirmed, ‘they didn’t, but Georgie volunteered. See, he was out of work, had been for more than two years and not a snifter of anything going. Then we heard of the Germans doing terrible things to Belgian women and children and that they might do the same to us if we didn’t stop them. Well, my Georgie said, he mightn’t be able to provide for us, but he could damn well fight for us and then at least he would be doing something useful. He thought I would have more money. He honestly thought the government would look after us properly if he volunteered for the army.’

‘And I bet you get a bleeding pittance,’ Lily said.

‘Too right I do,’ Polly said bitterly. ‘When Georgie joined up, he got a shilling a day – King’s shilling, see – and I got the grand sum of one shilling and one penny a day that they call Separation Allowance.
Then Georgie has to give me another sixpence, plus a penny for each of the children, and the government add another twopence each. If you add that up it comes to eight shillings and seven pence, and the rent was three shillings a week.’

‘God Almighty!’ Lily exclaimed.

‘Don’t mind telling you I was on my beam ends and terrified of being turfed out of the house because I couldn’t bear to hear the kids cry with hunger. So I sometimes had to hide from the rent man. Georgie sent me what he could but he hadn’t much either. Anyway, in 1915 they doubled his pay and he sends that increase direct to me. Not all husbands are so good. You must have seen the scrawny kids about, and not all of their mothers are wearing the widow’s bonnet.’

‘I have seen them,’ Aggie said, ‘and been shocked, to tell you the truth. They look so thin and cold and hungry, and some of them are barefoot. I mean, we wore no shoes in Ireland during the summer, but the nights are drawing in now and chilly with it.’

‘Yeah, and many that have boots have
Evening
Mail
stamped on them because they give them to the poor,’ Polly said. ‘They supply the lot sometimes; the kids couldn’t go to school else. They give out jerseys, gymslips, trousers and stockings all stamped so they can’t be pawned, see.’

Aggie didn’t see. She had never heard the word ‘pawned’ before, but she understood poverty all right. ‘We have a religious organisation do a similar
thing in Ireland,’ she said. ‘It’s called St Vincent de Paul. They get clothes for the poor and even give vouchers for people to trade for groceries in the shops.’

‘That would be a good idea here,’ Polly said.

‘Yes, but the wife and children of a man fighting for his country shouldn’t be reliant on handouts and charity.’

Polly sighed. ‘They are, though. It’s the way of the world. Mind you, no one expected this war to last long. Kick the Hun into touch and be back by Christmas, that’s what everyone thought.’ She stopped and then said, ‘I worry sometimes that the children will forget who their father is. I mean, he came home early last summer. He had been in some place called Gallipoli and so many men died there that Churchill resigned over it. So Georgie was one of the lucky ones. Anyroad, Clara was only three then, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and even Charlie was a bit off, though he was five. I show them the photograph I have of Georgie often and tell them it’s their dad, but what’s it all mean to a nipper?’

‘Not a lot,’ Lily agreed. Many children were without fathers now that the call-up had begun, and married men were included, and they all knew some of those men would never come back.

‘I don’t think you feeble,’ Aggie declared to Polly. ‘I think you are jolly brave, if you want to know.’

Despite all the dangers of the job, Aggie was happier than she had ever been. ‘This is the sort
of life I thought I would be having in Birmingham when I first arrived all those years, once that Gwen Halliday had helped me get rid of the baby,’ she told Lily.

‘There are lots of things to do and see in a city like this,’ Lily said. ‘I mean, we have plenty of picture houses on our doorstep. Maybe we should make use of living in such a place and go out a time or two after work.’

Much as Aggie longed to go to a picture house, she was reluctant at first, for she thought in some way it would be disloyal to Alan. Lily, however, wore her down in the end and Aggie began to enjoy herself so much that if it wasn’t for the rising casualty figures, she could wish the war would go on for ever.

One evening in early November, Aggie and Lily were hurrying through the dark, damp streets when someone called out to them. Aggie spun round, then cried, ‘Jane! How lovely to see you again. Are you waiting for your sister?’

‘Well, I will wait now that I am here,’ Jane said. ‘But I really came to see Mr Witchell. I am joining you lot on Monday. Finch has bought the bloody club.’

‘Finch?’ Aggie repeated aghast. ‘Oh, thank God we got out when we did, Lily.’

‘Not half.’

‘He went mad when he realised you’d gone,’ Jane said. ‘He couldn’t believe that we didn’t know where you were. I played dumb. It is easy enough for me to do, but Bessie said she had heard tell you had gone back to Ireland.’

‘Oh, good for her.’

‘She’s leaving as well,’ Jane told them. ‘She says anything she cooked for Finch she would lace
liberally with arsenic and he isn’t worth hanging for.’

‘He isn’t,’ Aggie said fervently. ‘And yet I have fantasised about doing the selfsame thing. But where is Bessie going to go?’

‘To her sister’s down south somewhere,’ Jane said. ‘Her sister’s husband died three years ago and she has been urging Bessie to go and live with her since. Mr Levingstone knew all about it; promised to set her up with a pension. Course, all that has gone by the board now, but she says she has saved a good bit over the years. Anyroad, her mind is made up. So Finch hasn’t a clue where you are and no way of finding out either.’

‘That’s the way I like it,’ Aggie said.

As they walked home that evening, Lily said, ‘I like that young Jane, though I thought she was a stuck-up miss when I went first to the club, after you had been attacked.’

‘Jane, stuck up?’ Aggie repeated. ‘I find that hard to believe and yet I have never heard you tell a lie.’

‘Believe it,’ Lily said. ‘She looked at me as if I had crawled from under a stone. When Alan asked me to help her to nurse you, I said that I would only do it if she gave me proper respect. Well, I don’t know what he said to her – we never discussed it after – but she came to find me before she went to bed that night and apologised. I always think it takes guts to apologise and so I shook her hand and said there was no harm done. We got on like a house on fire from then on.’

‘Well, I saw that as I recovered,’ Aggie said. ‘I wouldn’t have said there was ever bad feeling between you.’

‘There wasn’t,’ Lily said. ‘I didn’t let it develop into bad feeling. I nipped it in the bud straight away. Point is, will it be awkward for you at the factory with Jane working there too?’

‘I don’t think so. Why should it be?’

‘You know, you being the mistress and her the maid in a previous life?’

‘Oh, I never felt that way with Jane,’ Aggie said. ‘We were friendly from the start. I didn’t see why someone had to wait on me at the table and clear up after me. She had to do these things, of course – Alan employed her for that – but she was well aware of what I thought. Anyway, she has proved to be honest and reliable. I like her sister and I am looking forward to working with Jane as well.’

‘Me too, bab,’ said Lily. ‘Yeah, me too.’

Thomas John found it hard to shake off the despondency that had surrounded him since the news of Finn’s death. The fact that he was one of many fathers grieving depressed him still further and he hoped that 1917 would be a better year for them all. It didn’t start at all well, though. There seemed to be unrest everywhere, and then a revolution in Russia, of all places, and bad enough to make the Tsar abdicate.

But spring was a busy time on any farm, and Thomas John and his two sons were out every day.
Thomas John welcomed the work that ensured he slept each night, and he didn’t mention the vague pains he had in his chest now and again, which sometimes made him feel breathless. He knew what it was: heartache over losing Finn, because that was when they began and there were no pills or potions made that would ease that type of pain.

No one was surprised when America declared war on Germany in April 1917, for the Germans seemed intent on clearing the seas of any ships but their own. They sank two hospital ships, one of them called
Donegal
. When Thomas John read this he declared that any nation that could justify sinking hospital ships must be peopled by barbarians. Most people thought that of the Germans anyhow, but Tom was depressed over America’s involvement. Whichever way you looked at it, it was an escalation of a war that had already claimed so many young lives.

By June 1917 the rebels from the 1916 insurrection who had not been executed had all been released from prison, including Eamon de Valera.

‘The whisper is that the Irish Republican Brotherhood is regrouping,’ Joe said one Saturday after returning from Buncrana. ‘They say that lads are climbing over each other to join and they are calling themselves the Irish Republican Army.’

‘Bloody fools,’ Thomas John burst out. ‘Have they learned nothing?’

‘People don’t, Daddy,’ Tom said. ‘If they did there would be no wars ever again.’

* * *

Aggie was delighted to find that Jane would be working alongside her and Chris, and then in the spring Lily was moved to join them. The four women got on really well. Aggie could be open with them because they knew all about her and she found she could relax in their company. Chatting together also helped the day pass quicker and as long as they talked quietly and still got the same amount of work done, no one took much notice.

Aggie couldn’t help noticing and envying the close bond between Chris and Jane. ‘It’s even better now I am living back home again,’ Jane told Aggie one day in the canteen. ‘Me and Chris share the same bed again, like we did before I left to go into service with you and Mr Levingstone. It’s like old times. Mom and Dad prefer it too. They were never happy about me sleeping out, not that they were jumping about with joy that I was joining our Chris in munitions either.

‘I never told them about the goings-on in the club, you know. God, if they had known the half of it, they wouldn’t have let me within a mile of the place, and it would have been no good me telling them that I never met any of the girls and was not expected to set one foot inside the club itself. Still,’ Jane gave a shrug, ‘that’s parents for you, and I suppose at least it shows they care.’

Aggie couldn’t speak for a moment, she was so choked with emotion. She wished fervently the last fifteen years had not happened. She would still
have the love of her parents, the companionship of her siblings, and likely be married by now and have children of her own to love and cherish. She felt her eyes sting with tears she could not let fall. God, sometimes she found life very hard.

She could have blessed Lily and Chris who joined them at that point, their chatter slicing through the silence that had started to settle between Jane and Aggie.

The friendship between Polly, Aggie and Lily also grew deeper. Then one evening in March, Lily said she wasn’t up to gallivanting out to the pictures as she and Aggie had planned to do that evening. Aggie was disappointed but her concern was all for Lily.

‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Are you feeling ill?’

‘Nothing a quiet night by my own fireside won’t cure.’

‘Are you sure?’ Aggie said. ‘I could get the doctor in.’

Lily laughed. ‘I want no doctor, girl. Don’t fuss. I am getting no younger, have been on my feet all day and I am too jiggered to go out tonight, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘Absolutely certain,’ Lily said. ‘There’s no reason for you to stay in, though. Maybe Polly would like to go with you. I would be here to see to the nippers.’

Aggie didn’t need the surreptitious wink that Lily cast her way to know what she was about.
She had heard it in the tone of her voice. Only the other day she had said that she thought it a shame that Polly didn’t seem to have much of a life and that she never crossed the threshold of her house unless it was to go shopping.

‘Oh, I couldn’t,’ Polly said.

‘Why couldn’t you?’

‘Well, I’m a married woman.’

‘I had noticed that,’ Lily said with a wry smile. ‘Does that mean that you are chained to the house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?’

‘It’s just that it wouldn’t seem right, me going out to enjoy myself, especially when Georgie is maybe in the thick of it.’

‘Well, you staying in will not help him whether he is or not,’ Aggie said. ‘Look, what is wrong with going a few yards to the picture house and then afterwards going to a coffee house for a cup of coffee before we come home?’

‘Put like that, not a lot, I suppose.’

‘Well, that is all me and Lily do,’ Aggie said. ‘And if I can’t persuade you to come, then I must stay in as well because I can’t go on my own.’

Polly knew how much Aggie looked forward to a night out, and she hated to disappointment her. If she was truly honest she really wanted to go herself. ‘I’ve never been to a picture house,’ she admitted, ‘nor have I sat in a coffee house. As for the music hall … I can only imagine it, but I should think it would be magical. We hadn’t money for such things before, you see.’

‘Well, now you have,’ Aggie said. ‘Are you going to go out with me or not?’

‘I am,’ said Polly with an emphatic nod of her head. ‘And thank you, Lily, for making it possible.’

‘Huh, I did very little,’ Lily said. ‘And the only payment I want is a smile on your face when you come back in tonight.’

Aggie found that Polly was a different person when she was away from the house for a few hours. She had a very good sense of humour and was a lot of fun to be with. The two women had a wonderful evening.

‘We must do it again,’ Aggie suggested as they returned to the house. ‘It does you good to get out. It sort of refreshes you.’

‘You’re right,’ Polly said. ‘I can’t remember laughing like that in ages. With the war and all, there hasn’t been much occasion to laugh.’

‘No,’ agreed Aggie. ‘I know you worry about your Georgie every day, and with reason, but pushing it to the back of your mind for a couple of hours or so isn’t being disloyal.’

‘No,’ Polly said. ‘When I write to Georgie and tell him about this he will be pleased. He was worried about me coping on my own before you came. I have told him all about you and the fine woman that you are. Now I shall write and tell him that you are the very best lodgers anyone could have.’

Despite the success of Polly’s first foray out to the pictures the war news did dominate most of the
conversation around the table in the evenings. Aggie and Lily sometimes gleaned information from the girls at the factory and they always bought a paper on their way home from work.

When America entered the war, they didn’t know whether it was a good thing or not.

‘Couldn’t do owt else, though, could they?’ Lily said. ‘After all, no country can stand by, watch its ships blown clean out of the water and do nothing.’

‘You’re right,’ Polly said, ‘but what bothers me more than that is those towns that them dratted Germans bombed on the south coast, and I know there was some bombs in London before. I mean, what’s it all about? Soldiers kill each other, not ordinary people.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Lily. ‘And I think there has been enough killing in this war to satisfy anyone’s blood lust.’

‘Exactly,’ Polly went on. ‘So why bomb ordinary people? I mean, what if I’m sitting here with the babbies, minding my own business, like, and a bloody great bomb lands on top of us?’

It was monstrous, Aggie thought. War surely shouldn’t be waged on women and children. ‘Don’t,’ she said to Polly. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about. Birmingham is probably as safe as anywhere, though, for we are so far inland.’

‘Oh, yeah, there is that,’ Polly said with a sigh.

Aggie was glad she had allayed her fears a little and she just hoped what she said was true. What
the hell did she know about bombs or the planes that carried them?

‘It’s the kids I worry about most,’ Polly said. ‘Keeping them safe, you know?’

Aggie knew full well. It would be what any mother wanted. Polly loved Aggie’s company if she took the children out to the park on a Sunday afternoon. Lily would use this time to put her feet up, and Aggie didn’t blame her, but she loved those outings with Charlie and Clara.

Georgie had managed to procure a football for Charlie before he enlisted. It wasn’t a new one, but a ball was still a ball.

‘Don’t ask where he got it,’ Polly said, the first time she produced it from the cupboard, ‘because I haven’t a clue. He arrived home with it one day and when I asked him how he had come by it, he said them that ask no questions will be told no lies. So now you are as wise as me.’

However Georgie had got the ball, Aggie, Polly and Charlie spent many hours pounding after it in the park. Even little Clara joined in the chase, though she could barely keep up and seldom got near enough to actually kick it.

Eventually, though, other boys would sidle up and ask to play, and in the end, Aggie and Polly would sneak away and let the boys play their own version of football. Clara would usually find some little girls to play with and Aggie and Polly would talk together for hours.

‘It’s a shame that you haven’t children of your
own,’ Polly said one afternoon. ‘You are so good with them and they love you too.’

‘Children without a husband?’ Aggie said with a smile. ‘Shame on you. Anyway, I don’t think I can have children. I think there is something wrong inside me.’

‘Oh, that is sad,’ Polly said. ‘Is that why you are not married?’

Aggie paused before saying, ‘Oh, there are many reasons why I am unmarried.’

She didn’t say what they were, though, and after a few minutes of awkward silence she jumped to her feet asking, ‘Shall I start rounding the children up? It’s about time we were heading back.’

Polly never broached that subject again, sensing that Aggie didn’t want to answer personal questions about her past. The children had no such restraint.

Sometimes, though, Aggie brought this on herself. Polly remembered Charlie’s open-mouthed astonishment when Aggie told him the milk he was pouring on to his porridge came from a cow.

Charlie had never seen a cow, but the thought that milk came from any animal at all fascinated him, especially when Aggie explained how it was extracted.