Things a Bright Girl Can Do

  ‘If the guns are like this here, what are they like at the Front?’ said Evelyn.

  ‘Unbearable,’ said Father. He closed his newspaper, laid it very deliberately on the breakfast table, and walked out of the room.

  On the first of July, the guns stopped. Hetty ran into Evelyn’s room to tell her, as though it might be something she wouldn’t have noticed.

  ‘What does it mean?’ she said.

  ‘Juggins,’ said Kezia, following close behind. ‘It means the battle’s begun.’

  A letter from Christopher arrived that morning. It was scrawled in pencil on a dirty scrap of paper and read simply:

  Frantically busy – no time even to read Treasure Island. Soon I shall find out how brave I really am. I hope and pray I shall make you proud. Kisses to the girls, and best love to you all,

  Kit

  Which was queer, as Kit had never been religious, and, so far as Evelyn knew, had never prayed for anything in his life.

  That evening, the newspapers were singing.

  GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE

  ATTACK ON A TWENTY-MILE FRONT

  GERMAN TRENCHES OCCUPIED

  BRITISH GAIN IN TERRIFIC DRIVE

  The days when the newspaper belonged to Evelyn’s father and to Evelyn’s father alone were long gone. Now even Cook – who had two brothers on the Western Front – could take you through every last intricacy of the Verdun campaign. The family spread the paper open on the drawing-room table and crowded around.

  ‘OUR CASUALTIES NOT HEAVY,’ said Hetty, pointing to one headline. ‘Look!’

  Evelyn’s mother gave her a scornful look.

  ‘Nobody,’ she said, ‘attacks on a twenty-mile front without heavy casualties. Aren’t you old enough to know better than to believe newspaper headlines?’

  Hetty looked hurt.

  ‘Well,’ she said, defensively, ‘the battle’s over now, anyway.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said her mother. ‘It’s barely begun.’

  Teddy, who’d never been one for long or descriptive letters, sent not a letter at all but a picture, which did not arrive until almost a week after the battle had started. The picture showed himself, in uniform, leaning against the wall of a trench. All around him were men, also in uniform, clutching rifles. Evelyn recognised Kit and Stephen and Herbert amongst the soldiers, although she knew for a fact that Herbert was not involved in the offensive at all, but was in a London hospital with enteric fever. The other men were staring out over No Man’s Land, waiting for the order to attack, but Teddy was looking in the opposite direction, down at an open letter in his hands. Floating above the letter, like a djinn in an illustration from The Arabian Nights, was an incredibly detailed pencil drawing of Evelyn’s face. Evelyn was astonished that he could produce so accurate a picture of herself, apparently from memory and the two rather formal photographs she’d given him. She remembered suddenly that day in the courtroom, the day they’d sent her to Holloway and she’d tried so hard to fix his face in her memory. Now, she found herself struggling to remember what he looked like, conjuring only a vague mental picture of curly, laughing Teddy-ness. But his drawing of her was perfect, right down to the tilt of her head and the strands of hair tumbling out of their grips.

  Teddy often sent drawings of himself. Usually these were caricatures, laughing at Evelyn, blowing her kisses, reacting with horror to senior officers shouting in his ear, or army food, or a rat poking a comical head out of a tea-mug. The Teddy in this picture was not comical. His uniform was dirty and threadbare. His boots were covered in mud. The hand that did not hold the letter held a rifle. And his expression as he gazed at the pencil-Evelyn was old, and wistful, and sad.

  Underneath it he had written, Is it worth dying for, Evelyn? It was signed with his name and the date. Edward Moran, June 1916.

  The picture had been sent a week ago. Evelyn stared at the pencil-soldier. She felt sick. She had no idea whether the man who had drawn it was even still alive.

  Factory Girl

  TWO YEARS, THEY’D been fighting. Would the war never end? To Nell it felt as though it had been fought for ever, and would continue to be fought for ever, and every day the news seemed worse. The Fall of Kut, the death of Kitchener, the awful, bloody, dragging battlefields of Verdun. Nobody ever exactly said the British were losing, but everyone thought it, and below every conversation about the war was the thought, How much longer can this go on?

  Nell wondered if ever again people would care so much about things that were happening so far away in other countries. Good news could lift your spirits for the whole day, but bad news sent them plummeting. And there was so much bad news. It ground you down, it really did. It made you wonder what had happened to the world? What had happened to people, that they’d make a world as desperate as this? And what sort of world would be left when it was over?

  Nell was living in a boarding house set up for girls who worked in the shell factory. They were almost all older than she was, but not by much – the eldest was nearly thirty, but most were around eighteen or nineteen.

  She was not entirely sure how she’d found herself there. The weeks after the break-up with May had left her in a daze. She’d wake up with a start and realise that she’d got up, got dressed, eaten breakfast and was halfway through the morning and could remember none of it. She supposed she – or, more likely, her mum – must have found the boarding house somehow (she remembered vaguely a conversation about an advertisement in a newspaper), but there were whole days and weeks that seemed to have muddled past without her even noticing. And then one day, a whole month had passed, and for the first time she found herself able to look around and see where she had landed.

  The boarding house was a large Victorian terrace in a grimy street that must once have been a fashionable place to live. The girls slept in dormitory-like beds, eight to a room, with a small curtain you could pull around the bed for privacy. Some of the girls complained about this, but to Nell, who had never had a bed of her own since she’d grown too big to sleep in an orange crate, it was an astonishing luxury.

  Breakfast and dinner were provided by the woman who ran the house. The food was fairly basic – ‘There’s a war on!’ – and Nell was sure they were being overcharged, but it beat bread and margarine. There was a small kitchen where the girls could make tea and cocoa, and Nell would buy bread and potted meat and make up sandwiches to take into work the next day. She felt absurdly grown up and important. At first she had missed the noisy, cosy muddle of family. It had felt very strange, that first night, sleeping in a room where she knew nobody. She’d been surprised, however, at how quickly she’d settled into her new life. The days were so long, you didn’t have time to feel homesick.

  The other girls twitted her less about her clothes than she’d expected. The first day had been awful, walking into the shared dormitory, the other girls’ eyes like flames at her back. The whispers, then the inevitable comments.

  ‘Look here, I ain’t being funny, but you know this is a girls’ dorm, right?’

  What on earth were you supposed to say to that?

  And then, ‘I ain’t trying to cause offence, right, but what are you? Peggy sez you’re a girl, but you ain’t, are you?’

  What are you? What was she? How could she ever explain, when she wasn’t sure of the answer herself?

  But after the first couple of days, it had settled down. Being so young helped. She was such a child – it wasn’t much fun to tease her. Or maybe it was just that everyone else had their own worries; brothers and sweethearts in the war, money troubles, boy troubles. Or perhaps because everyone was a little older, so it didn’t matter quite so much that you didn’t look exactly the same as everyone else.

  Even so, the boarding-house dormitories were incredibly female. On Saturday evenings, they filled up with clouds of scent, powder compacts spilling open on the windowsills, stockings hanging on the sides of the bed. Nell had never felt more awkward, more like an imposter than she did sitting there i
n Bill’s old breeches, watching the girls dolling themselves up for a night at the pictures. There seemed to be so many different ways to be a woman. There was Mum’s way, all babies and housework and rough affection. There was the munitionette’s way: curlers, and lipstick, and meeting men round the corner from the boarding house, so the landlady didn’t see. And then there were the Suffragettes. Sitting in the dormitory, watching the girls, Nell realised perhaps for the first time how lucky she was to have encountered women like Miss Pankhurst, for whom being a woman meant doing something. Fighting. Working. Even May’s mother, with all her committees … at least she did something. Nell had mixed feelings about May’s mother, but she would rather be her than a girl like Gertie who slept opposite her, whose one interest in life seemed to be finding a fella.

  For work in the factory, she had to wear a uniform. This was a long, shapeless blue dress, and a blue cap to tuck her hair under. None of the girls were allowed to wear their own clothes into the factory, for fear they’d bring in metal which might spark and set off an explosion. Even the metal hook-and-eyes on corsets were banned, as, of course, were jewellery, hairpins, and Nell’s hobnail boots. They had to wear clumsy wooden clogs, like mill-girls. The floor of the factory was carpeted in asbestos to prevent fires; they had to wade through it to get to their workstations.

  All of the girls hated the uniform. They complained loudly, ‘They doesn’t have to guy us up like this, does they?’

  Nell hated her own uniform, of course, but privately she thought there was something rather exciting about the similarity of them all. When you first came into the factory, all you saw was the mass of blue dresses. Then, as you got closer, the features resolved into individual faces – an eye, a cheek, a strand of hair escaping from the cap. There was nothing whatsoever erotic about the lumpy uniforms. But there was something exciting about how different each girl looked in the same dress, how somehow, just by the bag they carried, or how they set their cap, or whether they wore powder, or lipstick, or no make-up at all, they changed the whole timbre of their appearance.

  The days were long, the work was hard and – despite what the press said about munitionettes in fur coats – poorly paid, although Nell earned more than she had in the jam factory. This was a Suffragette issue too, Nell knew. The Pankhursts had fought hard for equal pay for male and female munitions workers, but had succeeded only in securing equal pay per shell made, something the factory neatly circumvented by paying them by the hour. Still, Nell earned enough to have some left over to give to Mum and Bernie when she went home on Sundays. And she knew that it helped her mother, not having to feed her.

  Her job in the factory was filling up ‘gains’ – which were like cartridges, only bigger. She had a table with a glass dome on top of it, into which she had to put her hands, and fill up the gains tight with a kind of black rock, which was the explosive charge. The principle was easy enough, and she soon got used to it – it wasn’t much different from any other sort of factory work, really, for all the recruitment posters boasted about girls who were helping win the war. The only difference was, whatever it was in the black rock dyed your skin bright yellow. It dyed your hair too, if you let it slip out of your cap, and most of the girls had a few ginger locks around their face. You got used to it, when all the others looked the same. Some of the girls would scrub and scrub at their skin in the evening, trying to wash away the dye, or whatever it was, and spend hours covering their faces and hands with powder. Others saw it as a badge of honour – a medal of service, as it were.

  Nell had little time for thinking about May, for which she was grateful. There had been six days in Poplar while her accommodation and travel necessities were arranged which didn’t bear thinking about. She’d been in an agitation of nerves, shouting at Dot and Johnnie for getting in her things, screaming at her mother for ‘fussing’, and arguing with everyone about nothing at all. Luckily, they’d put it down to worry about leaving home and starting the new job, but she knew she couldn’t behave like that again. She would have to keep better control of herself in future, and so she welcomed the long days, the strangeness of the new environment and the sheer physical exhaustion. Even if May had forgiven her the munitions work, she would have seen very little of her anyway; what days off she had, she spent with her family in Poplar, helping her mother with the washing-up and the younger children. Siddy was two now! Johnnie was five! Bernie was twelve, and had shot up over the last two months. He was still too skinny, though; they all were, but you noticed it most in Bernie. He looked like a weed in the dark. He’d taken a long time to recover from the pneumonia, and Nell knew her mother still worried about him. Probably she always would. And then there was her father, who was finally back with his platoon in Belgium. Nell and her mother didn’t know how to feel about that; they needed the money he sent them, but now the fear that something would happen to him had begun again.

  Mostly what she felt was a sort of dull weariness. A kind of ache. A sense of something important, that had been there before and now was gone. Nobody, she thought wearily, understood what it was like to have your whole life transformed by something you’d believed to be the most important thing in all the world, and then to have it suddenly pulled away from underneath you.

  It didn’t help that she wasn’t at all sure whether the most important thing in all the world had been the Suffragettes, or her family, or May.

  By Your Leave

  AS THE DAYS went by, it became clear even to Hetty that this battle – the Battle of the Somme – was something different to the others. With every day that passed, the newspapers seemed to get more hysterical about it. Her mother’s friends were able to talk of nothing else but whose son was ‘in’ it and whose had escaped. The week after the battle started, Evelyn’s father took the whole family to a concert in London. On the way there, they saw the wounded soldiers coming off a hospital train at Charing Cross. Dozens of them, hundreds perhaps. Everything from the walking wounded to men lying comatose on stretchers or wheeled in bath chairs. Men missing limbs. One man whose whole face was covered in bandages. It was horrible, and rather terrifying.

  Evelyn’s mother said, ‘Come on, girls, don’t stare.’ But she was staring herself. Evelyn couldn’t take her eyes away. She was sure that one of the men she saw would be Teddy, like something in some awful story in The Girl’s Own Paper. But of course, none of them were.

  It had been nearly a fortnight, and they had heard nothing from him. A postcard had arrived from Christopher nine days after the battle began, saying he was well and a letter would follow shortly. Teddy’s parents received a letter from Stephen saying that his battalion had not yet been involved in the battle at all, although they expected to move up the line in the next few weeks. But from Teddy, there was nothing at all.

  Evelyn couldn’t stop thinking about the last time she’d seen him. It had been about a month before he’d gone out to France, and he’d cabled from camp to tell her he’d been given an unexpected three-day leave. She’d been wildly excited and horribly nervous; what would it be like to see him again after so long? What ought they to do? Would he want plays and concerts, or quiet walks on the Heath? It had to be absolutely perfect, she knew, because it might be the last time she ever saw him alive.

  She had completely forgotten, of course, that it might also be the last time his parents, grandparents, art-school friends and brother ever saw him alive. And none of them had realised he would come back from camp with a list of last-minute kit it was apparently essential to have before one went out to France. When it came to it, they spent all of one day rushing from shop to shop trying to buy alarming-sounding things like ammunition clips, and morphine, and gun oil. And another confusedly trying to see various family members, and a hurried evening at a music hall. It might be the last music hall he ever sees, Evelyn remembered thinking, and then told herself not to be such a goose.

  On the last day, his parents, with unexpected tact, seemed to wake up to how little time the two of them h
ad had together. They said their goodbyes at the house, and left Evelyn to see him off at the station.

  They took the Tube to London Bridge, and waited on the platform. There was a frightful lot of people waiting for the Brighton train, including an awful lot of soldiers, presumably also going back to camp. Some also had sweethearts or family there to see them off, others were alone. If Teddy recognised any of them, he didn’t greet them.

  Evelyn thought, as she had been thinking all leave, how strange it was to see him in uniform, with his curly hair all shorn off, and a straggly attempt at a moustache. She was struck once again by how unlike himself he looked, as though the man she loved had been trimmed and squeezed into an unfamiliar and rather frightening mould. She wasn’t at all sure she liked it.

  They stood awkwardly on the platform, not touching. Both, though neither would admit it, were rather dreading the goodbye. If this were to be the last time you ever saw him, then nothing you could say could ever possibly be enough. And yet one simply couldn’t be such a scab as to weep and cling and make a scene, like that awful mother down the platform was doing. Evelyn knew one was supposed to be brisk and cheerful and encouraging, and all that rot. But since she had never been remotely brisk or cheerful in her life, and since what she really wanted to do was howl, she was left feeling awkward and bad-tempered and resentful.