An End of Poppies

caught in the machines; I tie mine with a colourful paisley headscarf. We look like row upon row of char-ladies; colourful heads bobbing as we work. I mostly I work at the end of the production line where the CENSORED and the CENSORED are put onto pallets. I have a chamois leather with which I polish the CENSORED; they have to be perfectly clean and shiny so that they don't CENSORED when they are CENSORED from a CENSORED. Janine Evans is the quality control checker and you be careful that every one that you polish is gleaming otherwise Janine will report you. Especially if she finds that your quota of finished CENSORED is not filled because you have been shoddy. If you get reported it is another thing they will dock your pay for, so it is wise to always be on the best side of picky Janine Evans.

  At ten past eleven we get a tea and cigarette break. The breaks are spread out amongst the girls so that they don't have to switch off the machines. Production never stops here. Twenty four hours a day they whirr and clank and the stamping machines snap their jaws down with a thumping clang. The metal pressed into all kinds of shapes as if it were plasticine. The noise can be terrific and most of us stuff cotton wool in our ears. I wonder if it has made me slightly deaf. Another similarity between us Jimmy; perhaps we are both slightly deafened by the incessant noise of this war. The only break from this cacophony is when there is a power cut.

  Last summer a stray bomb took out the underground power cables and the factory was shut for four days. You would think that the girls would be happy for a few days off but if the factory stops then we don't get paid. So there were a lot of complaints.

  A fairly sizeable gaggle of woman had a meeting at the factory gates. Sort of like a protest. They had banners and placards and they all tied their coloured headscarfs around their upper arms, like armbands. When I told Aunt Mathilda about it she said the armband is a sign of the women's movement. 'Feminists' she calls them; 'Radicals' arguing for women to have the vote and more say in government and the war. Mother says that this is 'dangerous talk' and such women should keep their unpatriotic opinions to themselves, and that girls like Dulcie and I should pay no heed to them.

  At the demonstration there was lots of talk of women's rights and some shouting and chanting. Shouting about how women should form a 'union'; which as you know is illegal, and about 'fair pay' - how women should be paid the same as men. Sally and I watched from across the road. Some of the passing women shouted at them, calling them 'pacifists' and suchlike; insults and obscenities I couldn't possibly repeat. But somehow I don't really think they are so unpatriotic; after all you wouldn't work in a munitions factory if you were really against the war would you? I think they were just fed up with losing their wages. Those women who shouted at them probably don't realise how hard it is when you aren't getting paid. Maybe those women who are so quick to judge are ones of independent means; those who don't have to work, perhaps because they have inherited money or property from their fathers or grandfathers or dead husbands.

  It wasn't long before the wardens and the police turned up and moved them along. There were some scuffles and it got quite violent. The policewomen had their truncheons drawn and CENSORED so there was CENSORED and it was beastly how they CENSORED CENSORED. I think both Sally and I found it rather shocking. One of the women was on the floor, and I could see the blood staining her headscarf, and they CENSORED CENSORED. I think a few women got arrested though Sally and I thought it best to leave pretty quickly so that we weren't seen as being part of it. On the way home we saw an ambulance coming. I don't really know what the upshot of it all was. All I know is that some of those women didn't turn up for work once the factory was up and running again the next week. Perhaps they were sacked; I don't know.

  Anyway, to continue with a description of my day. At lunchtimes we eat our sandwiches in the canteen. All they serve there is tea and a few buns. We get half an hour’s break and then it's back to work. Again the breaks are staggered so the production line can keep going. This is the time when the women chat and gossip and the talk is invariably about shortages or the progress of the war. The younger girls I sit with like to talk about some boy or other, perhaps a soldier they know or have met, or they swoon over some American film star or singer. I often wonder if some of them make up stories about boys they have met so as not to feel like they are being left out. But the fact is that they cannot all have met a boy. There are simply not enough boys to go around. Be reassured Jimmy, that I do not mention you in such conversations. I am not one to boast and some would be jealous of our correspondence. This is not to say that I am really that unusual to be writing to a soldier at the front; I know lots of other girls who have soldier pen-pals. Lots hook up with pen-pals through the W.R.V.S., but it is rare to have actually met the soldier they write to, like I have met you. I do not mention you simply because I would so hate the gossip and whispering that may ensue.

  After lunch we return to our work. Each shift is nine hours long so I don't get that much time to myself. Apart from the odd week off here and there where they are re-tooling the machines for new kinds ordnance. The CENSORED and the CENSORED always seem to get larger and more ominous looking. On those weeks we are lucky enough to be on half pay. I don't know if I told you but it was during one of these weeks when we got to visit Brighton and I met you. So we can thank the Ministry of Production for that fortuitous meeting. The pressing machines also always seem to get bigger and more impressive, not to say louder, when they re-tool the factory, production never stands still; Jenkins says the bigger the better, all the better to defeat the Hun. They are even going to extend the factory in the summer, though there is talk of even longer shifts when they do. Perhaps that may mean that they pay us more. Who knows?

  As I have said, at this time of year I walk home in the dark and today there was still snow on the ground when I visited the covered market. Have you been there? It was only built the year before last. You have to enter through the makeshift black-out blinds and then into a twilight world where busy women jostle between the candle-lit stalls. A smell of cigarettes and soup hangs in the air. Most of the stalls are pretty threadbare, but I usually manage to pick up some basic stuff like vegetables or flour. There are second hand clothes stalls and reclaimed furniture and always a big queue at the meat counter. It could be a place where women argue over filling their ration cards with what little is there, though it often amazes me how kind and thoughtful everyone mostly is. There is a certain resigned practicality and camaraderie to it all. This is not to say that I haven't seen arguments; it just strikes me that they are rare and most women just seem to be doing their utmost to make the best of what they have.

  When the butcher has briskets and goat and poor cuts of dog there is just about enough to fill everyone's ration card. But more often than not she has to call out that there are only twenty portions of horse or some such left that day, and only the first twenty women will be lucky. She stands in her bloodied butcher’s apron wiping her hands with a look of sadness; like she is letting everybody down. I think the women mostly feel sorry for her and, despite the rare protestations of a few moaners, most take it in good spirit that there will be no meat for them today.

  Today at the market I was lucky and managed to get some ribs with my ration. Mother put them into the big pot to boil with carrots and potatoes. We grew our own potatoes and quite a bit of veg in the garden last summer. Although these stocks won't last forever; we store them beneath dry sacking under our beds and the bunks in the air-raid shelter.

  You remember the gardens Jimmy. You must have had a garden very similar to ours at your house. I walked past your house last week. It is true that number 120 was bombed and, I am afraid to say, that both houses were done for. That end of the street is being cleared for rebuilding, an old steam bulldozer pushing the rubble to one side. Already on the far side of the street from where you lived they have begun to construct some prefabs. Mother says we are lucky that our end of the street is still intact after all these years. We are lucky to have a house near the city, built back
in the thirties back when there were enough bricks to go around. I think mother would hate to live in one of those thin-walled prefabs. She says they must be pokey and cold.

  We are lucky that the gardens at our end of the street are so big. Our garden is presently a big rectangle of undulating white snow. There used to be trees at the end but they were felled a long time ago; now there are simply four big round rotting stumps. Dulcie used to use them as tables for imaginary fairies to have tea parties when she was a little girl. Now she says they look like huge white toadstools, for the elves to sit on in the snow with Jack Frost. I love her imagination. She went out after school and built a large snowman on the vegetable patch in front of the Anderson shelter, complete with pebble eyes and a carrot nose.

  Apparently mother said she was too old for such stuff and nonsense, but Aunt Mathilda went out into the cold and joined in with her games anyway. Or so Dulcie tells me. She begged me to look at the snowman as soon as I got in from the factory, so I stepped straight through the house and out of the back door.