A Woman's Place (36 page)

The next day they were again firing at each other from their trenches with intent to kill as if Christmas had never been.

‘It’s horrible when you come to think of it,’ Connie said on reading the account. ‘How can they start killing again after that?’

But it was the appalling truth that they could, pushed on by generals and their commanding officers.

‘War is so senseless and wicked! If women were able to vote and be in charge of things there would be no more wars.’

‘If that day ever comes,’ Eveline returned with a bitter laugh to which Connie didn’t respond.

In the coming weeks all Connie could think about was the possibility of George being sent to the front, a bullet making a widow of her.

‘You mustn’t let yourself keep dwelling on it,’ Eveline told her sternly. ‘We all feel the same way but we have to be strong. If we’re not, we’re just letting our men down.’

That was easier said than done. Eveline going about as if Albert could never be in any danger was only hiding her head in the sand as far as she was concerned, though sometimes she wished she could do the same.

Mid-January gave them something else to think about as the war was brought almost to their very doorstep, newspapers reporting that during the night a German Zeppelin had crossed the Norfolk coast and dropped bombs on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing twenty people and injuring twice that number.

There was a photograph of the devastation: three cottages completely destroyed, a mass of rubble and splintered wood, the homes on either side wrecked and gutted.

‘To think of people under that,’ Connie whispered when she came over to show the paper to Eveline. ‘A small boy and his sister were killed in one of those cottages. What did two little children ever do to the Germans to be killed like that? It’s inhuman. I can’t bear to think of it.’

For once, Eveline didn’t upbraid her for her horrified reaction, causing her to feel suddenly resolute.

‘We simply have to win,’ she said. ‘We have to stop people like that!’ The words made her feel a lot better.

It was in March that her worst nightmare became reality. George’s letter told her that that his and Albert’s battalion was being sent forward; she fled to Eveline’s, Rebecca in her arms, as though the enemy was at her heels.

‘We’ve got to be strong,’ Eveline repeated as Connie sat in her kitchen trying to stop her insides trembling. Eveline was holding her own letter, and although she sounded calm, her fingers kept creasing and uncreasing the folds of his letter until they were razor-thin.

‘I’m trying to be,’ Connie replied.

In a way she wished it had been Eveline who had come over to her instead of the other way round. Sitting here she felt like a child who had lost its mother in a crowd. But Eveline was her strength, her prop.

‘I shall be,’ she promised although her voice wavered. ‘I shall be strong.’

With Eveline beside her, she would face this. It was Eveline who for years had helped her face so much – her parents’ silence, trying to make a new life here in the East End, even helping her becoming a better suffragette than she might have been alone.

‘We must throw ourselves into helping our country,’ Eveline went on a little dramatically, but she was right. There was much they could do. They were the only ones left to do it, with their men away.

The government had issued an appeal to women to serve their country. Workers were desperately needed in industry, trade, public services, agriculture, and, most importantly, armaments.

None needed telling twice; women flocked to sign on at local labour exchanges, responding to the Register of Women for War Service the government had organised.

Within days Emmeline Pankhurst was rallying every WSPU member and declaring that its members were only too willing to be recruited.

‘That’s what we’ll do,’ Eveline said excitedly when they heard. ‘It’ll be just like old times.’

Leaving canteen work, which had quietened down with dwindling numbers of refugees and women starting to earn money of their own and no longer needing handouts, they went off to the Labour Exchange. Gran, bless her, had offered to have Rebecca while Eveline’s mother agreed, somewhat begrudgingly she felt, to relieve her of Helena.

‘Though you do know I’ve got a shop ter manage but I suppose we’ve all got ter do our bit,’ she said. ‘I just ’ope it won’t be too much for yer gran looking after Connie’s little ’un. After all it ain’t as if she was ’er blood.’

Typical of her to make everything sound like a chore, but Eveline said nothing except to thank her and hope it wouldn’t be for long, adding that every hand was needed to get this war over as quick as possible, which Mum had to agree with.

It was amazing what women were proving to be capable of, doing jobs hitherto seen as men’s work: heaving coal, adeptly managing horse-drawn milk and heavy coal carts alike, delivering post, so-called delicate women handling not just light but heavy industrial machinery, alongside men too old to be accepted for military service. Eveline and Connie, accepted for work, now became just two of a fifty-thousand strong female labour force employed in industry alone.

‘Anything we can do will be worthwhile,’ declared the chairwoman of their local WSPU branch in Hackney. Branches had sprung up everywhere again, this time in aid of government rather than against it.

‘At last we are needed,’ she’d gone on. ‘And Mr Lloyd George has promised that women will receive the same pay as men for war work.’

Having been a comptometer operator and good at figures, a broad scope offered itself to Eveline, while Connie, never having had to work in her life, was skilled at nothing. Feeling she had little choice but to keep together for Connie’s sake, the only thing open to two women refusing to be separated was factory work. But with a promise of being given the same wage as men, factory war work had its attraction, even if it did mean long hours from eight in the morning to six in the evening with half an hour for lunch.

‘I don’t suppose it’ll be very clean work either,’ Eveline warned. Working on a factory floor would be new to her too, the old biscuit factory having of necessity been a clean place. Besides, she’d been in the office.

She hadn’t reckoned on just how dirty munitions work could be. Not just dirty but smelly and noisy and at times hazardous, but this was what they had chosen and there was no going back to the Labour Exchange crying that they’d changed their minds, that they didn’t like the work.

With their hair bundled up into mop caps, wearing thick coveralls, they’d been taken to their work bench that first day and shown what to do, a simple and what promised to be a repetitious and boring task of putting shell cases under a machine that made a screw thread. Before the first hour was up their palms were stained from contact with metal, their backs ached, their ears buzzed from the constant racket of machinery.

‘We’ve got to stick at it,’ Connie shouted above the noise and with a ring of determination in her voice that surprised Eveline. ‘If our boys can endure what they’re enduring, then we can endure this. What we’re doing must be heaven in comparison to what they must be going through.’

Their husband’s letters increasingly told what it was like even though they tried to fill the page with cheerful trivia. The press was far more explicit and who’d want to look that hell in the teeth after what the papers were saying?

‘Maybe it won’t be for too much longer,’ Connie added, clinging to that hopeful phrase that was steadily becoming more and more hackneyed.

Albert sat with his back to the slimy mud wall of the trench, writing to Eveline, his notepad propped on one knee. It wasn’t easy to write with rain trickling off the groundsheet draped over his head and shoulders. It seemed he’d never be dry again, would live and die in these wet clothes he wore.

Licking the stub of pencil, he stared at what he had written so far. It wasn’t much. What was there to write about? The conditions? Nothing ever dry? The rivulets of rain streaming down the trench walls? The duckboards at the bottom of the trench almost a foot under water these last two months, so that men were starting to get trench foot? He would examine his own feet to see if the damp, dead-looking skin was the start of that miserable condition or just cold, rub them dry as best he could, holding them out to air, but not for long as another bombardment would have him hastily getting back into wet socks and boots.

He’d already spoken in his letters about the poor food. Ration parties would be sent off to bring it, then return with it all bunged in one sack, loose tea leaves and sugar mixed up with everything else. He had made a joke of it in one of his previous letters.

He could never tell her about the constant bombardment, or being moved from one trench to another to relieve others already there. Or about the tension, the fear, the strange moments of either apathy or hilarity that came during a lull. Or of dropping with fatigue, absolutely whacked after twenty-four hours non-stop trench mortars, high-explosive shelling, tripping over bodies or parts of bodies before the medics and stretcher-bearers could do their job. Most of all, he felt unable to mention the strange lack of sorrow for a fallen man under bombardment.

He’d already written about going for weeks without a proper wash or a change of clothes, picking lice out of the ones he was wearing. He couldn’t write that again. Nor would he ever write about going through each day dazed by relentless bombing, trying to carry out duties while mind and body became rigid under the scream of enemy shells and the jarring of explosions, or the almost abject gratitude at being relieved by replacements and told his company was being given a day’s rest.

All he could do was say that he was well, that he was cheerful, search for some funny little anecdote to tell her, add that he loved her dearly and missed her, longed to be back home with her, hoped she was coping and that little Helena was fine, that he admired what she was doing for the war effort and thought her a real brick to be doing such work and for sticking by him, with her letters always cheerful and full of encouragement and hope. The problem was, he’d said this or something like it in every letter he had written her so far. She must be getting bored with it. One thing he hoped she realised – his letters might be pitifully repetitious but each one contained his heart.

One thing writing to her did, it helped him forget what was going on all around him, if only for a short while. Licking the pencil again he ended, ‘Will write again soon. Can hardly wait for your next letter. Hope it’s not too long coming. Our mail is awful. I love and miss you, my dearest.’

He was about to write, ‘Your loving Albert,’ when a brief barrage of bursting shells had him ducking down into the mud, praying it wouldn’t be his turn yet. One shell exploded near enough to collapse part of the trench on top of him to cover him and George, crouching nearby, in mud.

Next thing, a blessed voice was yelling, ‘Move, yer lazy buggers! The relief’s arrived.’ Words like the singing of an angel!

She’d only been able to glance at Albert’s letter before she and Connie rushed off to catch their bus to work, but what she had read had heartened her considerably. Now in their lunch break, she could open it to read in more detail.

‘He says him and George have been at a rest camp,’ she told Connie. ‘Their company was sent there and they both made the most of it, eating, sleeping, having a bath, being given clean clothes, and getting deloused like he was some flea-ridden stray dog. I suppose that’s a joke. He says George is sitting next to him in the mess tent writing his letter to you.’

‘I’ve not had George’s letter yet,’ Connie said dismally.

‘It’ll come, Connie, don’t worry.’

She returned her gaze to her letter. ‘He says that though they’ve now been sent back, it’s to a support trench, a lot safer, out of harm’s way.’

The relief that had flooded over her at that dissolved seconds later as she read on. ‘Oh dear, he says it was only temporary and they’ve been told they’ll be sent forward very soon to relieve a battalion at the front line. Oh, Connie …’

Her hand flew to her lips, unable to help herself as the courage she’d been clinging to all these months drained away. ‘Oh, Connie, what if …’

She couldn’t finish, Connie’s face registering the same fear. ‘And George will be with him,’ Connie whispered.

Eveline didn’t reply. Slowly she folded the letter on Albert’s closing words, ‘I miss you, my darling. Keep well. Your ever loving husband, Albert.’

The next day George’s letter came. Connie didn’t read it out as she normally did, sharing the impersonal bits, but Eveline guessed from her friend’s bleak face that it bore the same news as Albert’s letter. All she could do was take Connie’s arm in a firm grip as they stood in the noisy factory that smelled of oil and metal shavings.

‘They’ll come through, I know they will. We have to take heart and carry on.’

They were being given plenty of encouragement to do so with Mrs Pankhurst calling for every woman who had been a suffragette to do her bit. She was also planning a huge peaceful July demonstration to show support for the war effort. It was to be as large as any of the peacetime marches.

They came readily to her call, working themselves to a standstill as a way to ease their fear for their men away fighting and dull the thumping of the heart whenever the mind was allowed an idle moment to turn to all that was happening in France, now being called the Western Front, and also in Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, making the Zeppelin raids on London seem trivial.

So much was happening in the world: Russia was fighting Germany on what was being called the Eastern Front. The liner
Lusitania
had been sunk off the Irish coast by a German submarine on her return from New York with several hundred Americans among the passengers; fourteen hundred lives were lost. People were again attacking shops owned by those with foreign names, lumping them all together as German. Zeppelin raids were killing British civilians while along the Western Front there was complete stalemate.

Through it all, like everyone else, Eveline and Connie worked on at their tedious jobs trying not to think of what their husbands might be going through, each day dreading the telegram that would turn their fear to grief.