Poppy Day (18 page)

‘Jess? Wakey wakey – time for a break!’

The other girls were already moving out of the shed but Jess was oblivious to them all, peering into the neck of a grenade, checking it was full of powder. She jumped violently as Sis tapped on her shoulder.

‘Oh my word, yer gave me a fright!’

She went with Polly and Sis outside to the canteen shed where they were given a cup of milk and a bun. Polly pulled off the mob cap they were all obliged to wear and shook out her hair before replacing it again. All of them wore khaki, uninflammable overalls over their clothes.

‘Flaming milk again,’ Polly complained. ‘I’d rather ’ave a good strong cup of tea.’

‘S’posed to keep us from getting bad from the powder, ain’t it?’ Jess said. They’d been told that the better their diet, the less they would be affected by the TNT in the grenades.

‘’Ere – sun’s out for a bit,’ Polly said. ‘Let’s drink it out in the yard, eh – get some air?’

All year, with more and more munitions equipment needed to feed the war, factories had been going over to armaments production, and new ones springing up. A friend of Polly’s had told them about this one in Small Heath when it was recruiting workers, and offering good wages.

‘Why don’t we all go?’ she said. ‘We could work together. ’Ave a bit of a laugh. I could do with a change, and on money like that . . .’

Jess had been very pleased to move away from the Jewellery Quarter. She had seen Mary, more than once, in the street where she worked, and run guiltily away to avoid her. She didn’t want to be anywhere where she might meet her again.

The new factory consisted of a collection of wooden buildings built on a piece of waste ground, and they’d spent the summer in the TNT sheds, six or seven girls to each shed. They were moved about: some days they worked together, some not.

They stood out in the weak winter sun amid the clattering from the packing shed behind them. Across the yard, boxes of the grenades were stacked on wooden staging. Some of the other girls came to join them, their faces a sallow, yellowish colour from the powder.

Jess stared into her milk, not joining in the chatter round her. The other girls’ eyes followed the foreman, Mr Stevenson, as he walked across the yard. He was tall, slim and dark, in his mid-thirties. He called, ‘Morning!’ to them abstractedly as he passed.

‘’E don’t look too ’appy,’ one of the girls remarked.

‘Never does, does ’e?’ Polly had downed her milk and was dangling the cup from one finger by its handle. ‘Ole misery guts.’

Jess became aware of Sis’s freckled face peering round into her own with a grin which was so irresistible, Jess found herself smiling too.

‘Cheer up!’

‘I’m awright.’ Jess roused herself, giving Sis a look of caution. At work she never spoke of Ned or her circumstances. Didn’t want to have to explain, or have people judging her. But her thoughts were with him more than ever. Today his battalion was leaving for France. All year the news of the fighting had been so grim, from Ypres and Loos, from the Dardanelles. She dreaded the thought of Ned being sent into it. She still felt he was so close to her after his leave last week. Now she had no idea when she would see him again.

Polly gave her arm a squeeze as they went back in to work. Ernie had been gone since July, and Polly sometimes got very down about it.

‘I dunno – ’ere I am, still at home with Mom like a child. I might just as well not be married at all.’

But there had been a big change for her: she was expecting a baby the following spring. There wasn’t much to show yet, but the pregnancy had already filled out her face a little, softening the angles of her pointed cheekbones. Ernie had been over the moon at the news, and Polly too, although true to form she worried and fretted. ‘When will Ernie ever get to see the babby? This is a rotten time to be expecting. Why does there ’ave to be a flaming war – they said it’d all be over by now!’

They returned to their steady, monotonous work. The women filled the grenades, ramming the powder down inside with an aluminium mallet fixed to a wooden handle. Jess’s job was first to check the boxes of twelve to see that each was properly full of powder. Then she inserted an aluminium screw into each, securing it with red sealing wax, and checked the safety catch was in position before they were taken away. She could do the job almost automatically, leaving ample space in her mind for her own thoughts. And those thoughts today were poignant ones.

‘Jess—’

The day Jess left, Iris had stood forlornly in the gloomy hall watching her come downstairs with her small bundle of belongings. The sight of Iris brought tears to Jess’s eyes but she tried to smile.

‘I’ll come back and see yer, Iris. I hope you get a new lodger soon.’

‘Jess—’ Iris continued as if no one had spoken. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Well – I’m going back to Auntie’s.’

‘But you and your – and Ned? You say she won’t have him there?’

‘I – I don’t know, yet . . . There’s been so much to think about.’ After the enormous mental adjustments she had been through, first to the knowledge that she was carrying a child, then to its loss, Ned leaving Mary – then Olive coming to her . . . She didn’t feel up to deciding anything. She was nervous about going back, though she wanted to. That Ned loved her, had come to her, had seemed enough. She hadn’t, yet, faced all the consequences or made plans.

‘You don’t think ahead a great deal, do you, dear?’

Jess couldn’t help thinking this was quite a criticism from someone who had run off to Stafford in the snow after a man who might or might not have been there, but she looked chastened. ‘No – I s’pose I don’t.’

‘Well,’ Iris made a twitching motion with her shoulders, pulling her shawl closer round her. ‘I’d like to say this. You’ll have difficult times ahead of you, dear, any way you look at it. Now, I shall look to rent out your room up there. I have to keep going, you see. But there’s the front room. Never gets used very much. I’d like to offer it to you whenever you need it.’

‘Oh Miss Whitman! You’re so, so kind!’

‘Don’t go all weepy on me, dear, please. That’s the last thing . . .’

‘We’d pay you – to use the room, and . . .’

‘Pay me or not. No, pay me – then you won’t feel obliged. Keep it as business.’

‘But what about your lodger – what would people . . .?’

Iris waved a hand dismissively at this. ‘Oh – people. You soon find out who’s worth anything.’ There was a pause. With dignity, she added, ‘You will come and see me?’

‘Of course. As often as I can!’ Jess almost went to kiss her, but stopped. Iris was somehow untouchable. But her lined face lit into a smile and for a moment she was transformed, like an angel.

Jess kept her promise and visited Iris almost every weekend. Once she was earning better she took her little presents: fruit, or flowers, or a nice cut of meat, now things were becoming scarce in the shops. By February Iris had found a new lodger, a typist working in one of the firms nearby, a stodgy, very private woman.

‘Not much to say for herself,’ Iris whispered to Jess, raising her eyes to the ceiling where the woman remained silently in her room. ‘No trouble though.’

Jess was glad to be back with the family, but life over these past months had been full of tension. Living with Olive had become a difficult, delicate business. The woman was so wound up that the slightest thing made her lose her temper and Jess still felt she was an irritant to her by her very presence. Bert had sailed for the Dardanelles with the 9th Warwickshires. Ernie was gone, Polly pregnant, all things to make Olive tense and worried. Her sense of betrayal by Jess and Ned seemed to underlie everything that was said and no one dared mention his name.

Now and then, Mary appeared. She came twice, when Jess was out: both times when Ned was still in Sutton Coldfield and was back on weekend leave. Jess was with him at Iris’s, her snatched, brief taste of life with Ned, and the family did not tell Mary where they were. Then one spring day Jess opened the door and there she was, with Ruth sitting up in the pram. Her face was very thin, those arched eyebrows giving her the look of a frightened animal. Jess thought her heart was going to stop. Seeing Mary, her bereft sadness, her hurt and anger, she knew that what she and Ned had caused was terrible.

‘Oh God.’

She expected Mary to leap on her, swear at her, scratch her face. But whatever fury had possessed her for weeks on end, it seemed now to have burned itself out. Now the moment had come, she didn’t seem to know what to do with it.

For a time she didn’t speak. She and Jess stared into each other’s eyes, until Jess had to look away.

‘Yer bitch! I don’t know how you can even . . .’ Mary started to say, but burst into tears before she could finish. Slowly, weeping, she pushed the pram back along the road. Jess saw her shaking her head from side to side as if it was the only thing she could do. Horrified, she watched Mary walk away.

That weekend was the last time she saw Ned for a while, and it was an emotional one. He went, once more, to his family, to talk to them, to try and explain himself, and it left him distraught and tense. It was some time before he would talk when he got to Iris’s.

Eventually they made a makeshift bed on the floor with a few covers, and lay holding each other in the strained light through the net curtains.

‘I’ve done the worst I could do – to everyone.’ He lay on his back, one arm round her, one bent to rest his head on. Jess fitted beside him, head on his chest. ‘I’ve been a good son to them – the favourite really. Our Fred’d say that if yer asked ’im. ’E was always more trouble. But me – I’ve done what I’m told, gone on awright with my job. Married the way they wanted me to. I mean Mary was just . . . she was chosen for me before we’d thought really – either of us. And now, when I do the one thing I do for myself, out of . . . of
desire
for it, they don’t want to know – can’t see it. I don’t know, Jess.’ He looked back at her. ‘What’re yer s’posed to do – stick with things even if yer know they’re not right?’

‘We’ve done wrong,’ she said gently. ‘We have.’ Mary’s face haunted her, though she hadn’t told Ned she’d seen her. She couldn’t bear to talk about that and see his eyes fill with longing to see Ruth. She couldn’t face hearing how much he was missing his daughter.

Ned’s expression froze. ‘Are yer sorry – d’yer want out of it?’

Jess put her arms round his neck, pulling him close. ‘No . . . no,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want anything ’cept you.’

‘Come ’ere.’ He rolled over and looked into her eyes, then laid his cheek against hers, taking in a deep breath, smelling her skin, nuzzling against her. ‘I don’t know how long it’ll be before we can ever be normal – live without worrying.’

She knew he was thinking of his marriage, how long it would take to end it.

‘Don’t think about it,’ she said. ‘Just be here, now, that’s all.’

He moved his head down, seeking out her breast. They made love carefully. He waited until the pleasure mounting in him became impossible to contain, then, with an enormous effort of will, pulled himself from her, burying his face in her, gasping. She held him, kissing him tenderly. There must be no more babies – not now.

That week his battalion were transferred to Wensleydale. He wrote to say they had at last been issued with khaki uniforms, although there were still very few rifles. And to say he loved her, that he did not regret it. The letter made her ache for him. Throughout the summer he was moved around: Wensleydale, Hornsea, then in August, to Codford Camp on Salisbury Plain. While he was away, things were less tense at home, but Jess fretted, not knowing when she would see him again.

He had some time away on embarkation leave. Once more a difficult visit to his mom and dad who were begging him to heal the breach with Mary, to go back to her.

‘They talk as if you don’t exist – like I’ve left Mary for nothing, for a ghost. I can’t seem to get through to ’em.’

At the station, when he left, Jess couldn’t help her tears. The war was real now. Casualties had been coming in from Loos – one of the Bullivants from next door, a lad of seventeen, had been killed. She and Ned stood looking into each other’s eyes, then hugged, closely, in silence, for as long as they had.

‘I’m with you,’ she said, as he left. ‘Everywhere you go.’

He smiled wistfully, waving.

That was the picture of him she carried in her head. The uniform – not a black-clad fireman any more, but a soldier, smart, dignified, yet somehow passive: waiting for what was to come. There was nothing she could do about any of it except wait too, and hope, just the same as Polly waited for Ernie, the two of them making bombs day after day.