April 1943, The Boar and Hound, Sussex
It was an especially dark shade of red, the blood, like pickled beetroot. Bettina got out her handkerchief, licked a corner, and wiped it off – her boot was lacquered and it came off clean. She drank her scrumpy. She’d do well to remember that particular shade of red because she was going to write about it.
Ha! She wasn’t going to write about a damn thing.
The scrumpy was lukewarm with a gorgeous tang to it. Even in these days of scarcity she knew exactly where to look for it. This pub was an hour’s bike ride from the farm – absolutely worth it – and it had a scruffy garden with picnic tables. There was a closer pub but it often ran out of stock and was frequented by resentful old farmers. She took her tobacco out of her knapsack and started to roll a cigarette. Writing was for writers and she was no writer. She was something altogether better: she was Brighton’s second-best rat killer.
Good name for a book, actually.
When she’d first come to Hathaway Farm she’d been appallingly unfit. She’d heard stories that some farmers were in the habit of giving all the heavy, horrible work to the wealthy girls, to teach them some kind of lesson (poor people are jealous and bitter – lesson learned!) but that hadn’t happened – possibly because she’d voluntarily enlisted. Or because she was old. All the same, they hadn’t liked her at first, owing to a joke she’d cracked on first being shown around her spartan bedroom – she’d looked around the room snootily and said, ‘What a dump.’ It was, of course, a line from the Bette Davies film Of Human Bondage. The landlady curled her lip in a muddled half-smile – she’d got the reference (they’d chatted about the film ten minutes earlier in the kitchen), but she didn’t find it funny. Too close to the bone. I will shut up from now on, thought Bettina – she worked in silence, only opening her mouth to swap pleasantries or feign enthusiasm: soldiers are dying and I’m picking apples – whoopee.
She hadn’t been happy at this time. Tabby and Monty had just been shuttled out to Betws-y-Coed after a fighter plane had fallen out of the sky, landing in their garden and flattening a wrought-iron bench and a bird feeder. And her husband – well, never mind him. He was currently stationed in Nice, entertaining the troops. A plane could land on him for all she cared. Mid-monologue. His precious brains splattering out onto the audience.
One day a group of women in grey coats had appeared at the orchard hauling machinery in a cart. The rats had been getting to the apples and they were going to gas the little bastards. Bettina watched as the women got to work. One of them, a tall masculine woman with a long scar up her face, told the apple pickers to stand back – they were going to be using some ‘jolly nasty chemicals’.
Soon a bundle of fat rats came out of their den, crawling in slow dizzy circles, most of them collapsing onto their sides, but some of the more resilient ones ran for it. One rat killer started bashing at a rat with a cricket bat. Another, seeing this, took off her gas mask and sprayed vomit into the grass. ‘Not another squeamo!’ the masculine woman said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Bettina saw a sleek grey rat running in her direction. Calmly and unthinkingly, she lifted her boot and stomped on it. Its tiny skull crunched and crackled.
The masculine woman pulled her gas mask up onto her head and came over. ‘Fancy a new job?’ she said, in a booming Oxfordshire accent.
Bettina said, ‘Yes, why not?’
The woman held out her hand to shake. ‘I’m Maggie but everyone calls me Mags. Welcome aboard.’
Bettina took to the killing of rats quite naturally. She could remember the cook in her childhood home chasing rats around with broomsticks and laying down traps in the larder. Jonathan was always allowed to look at the dead rats – Henry would come to him whenever he found one in the shed, saying, ‘Tell your mother or father and we’ll both be in trouble.’ Bettina would follow along, excited, but Henry always caught her at the last minute. ‘No girls!’ Jonathan always came out of the shed five minutes later, looking pale and withdrawn, his eyes twitching like a – well, like a rat in a trap.
The trick to catching the rats, along with instinct and a strong stomach, was knowledge, and Bettina, being a keen reader, quickly devoured the pamphlets provided by Mags. They were armed with zinc phosphide, gas pumps, Cymag powder and oatmeal, which they used as bait. Every Friday they went around collecting the dead rats, throwing them into a trailer hitched to the back of the dilapidated Morris that only Mags could drive, and once, at an infested stable sixteen miles east of Hathaway Farm, they bagged a total of 287. It became a kind of competition – who could bag the most. The younger girls always won. But – and this was much more important – Bettina and Mags killed the most. Mags having a slim advantage.
Mags was forty but looked fifty. She’d spent the first two years of the war as an ambulance driver, collecting wounded people during the Blitzes. On one shift a car had exploded some yards from her and a twisted chunk of bumper got her in the face, accounting for the scar. She spent six months recuperating in hospital (her ribs had also been shattered) and then came to Hathaway Farm to work, ending up on rat duty because her father and grandfather – all her fathers going back to the 1700s – had owned farms, so she knew all about the havoc these creatures could wreak on fruit and vegetables. Bettina had a strong feeling that Mags was a lesbian – she’d never been married. And Tuna had once told her that all the ambulance drivers were ‘Radclyffes’.
Bettina liked Mags but not in that way. She talked like Monty’s ancient brigadier friends – all ‘what what’ and ‘tally-ho’. And she suffered from hay fever and was constantly wiping her nose. There were other women on the farm who she suspected might swing the same way, but how does one, she thought, go about confirming one’s suspicions? ‘Psst, Mabel – do you enjoy cunnilingus? Giving or receiving? Righto. Sorry I asked.’ She was starving for women – it was a tangible ache. Luckily, she didn’t have enough time to dwell on it. These rats won’t kill themselves, she’d think, laughing to herself at the resulting image – a rat with a little noose around its neck, and a note: ‘This world is too cruel.’
Bart would enjoy a joke like that. But to hell with him.