BUTTERWOOD, APRIL 1917
‘Is everything to your liking, Captain Balfour?’ asked Miss Pigeon anxiously. The postmistress had sat the captain in the best blue velvet chair next to a carved table holding a stuffed owl in the parlour behind her post office. Tea was served in her grandmother’s silver teapot, with a plate of thinly cut bread and butter, another dish of salted celery, and the scones Milly had quickly made as soon as the captain had announced he wished to speak to the young telegrapher, Miss Jean McLain.
Captain Balfour leaned back wearily and shut his eyes for a second. ‘As long as no one’s shooting at us, Miss Pigeon, I’m happy.’
Miss Pigeon blinked at him. Outside the window a mob of geese jackbooted down to the pond. A flock of sparrows flew in a more chaotic formation to the branch of an apple tree, chattering small peeps like Morse code signals.
‘Would you like a scone, Captain Balfour?’ Jean offered him the plate.
‘Thank you.’ Captain Balfour took it absentmindedly, and added cream, which they got from Miss Pigeon’s cow, who grazed the field behind the post office, topping it with raspberry jam from the fruit that grew down by the post office outhouse. ‘Miss Pigeon, would you mind if I spoke to Miss McLain privately?’
The captain handed Miss Pigeon a note. ‘I have her father’s permission.’
Miss Pigeon blinked at the thought of leaving her young employee with a man, unchaperoned except by a stuffed owl. But things were different in war time. If it hadn’t been for the war, Jean wouldn’t even have been working here.
Miss Pigeon flashed Jean The Look. It meant, ‘The honour of the post office is in your hands.’ It was The Look Miss Pigeon gave every time she left Jean in charge of the counter.
‘Yes, of course, Captain.’ Miss Pigeon bustled out, taking her knitting and leaving the scents of lavender water and ink behind her.
Jean looked at the captain curiously. He was Papa’s age, perhaps. He looked tired. But everyone was tired these days, trying to do the work of all the men who’d gone to war. Papa was teaching most of Butterwood Grammar’s sixth form subjects now, as well as being headmaster. Even Mama was teaching French and German, though unofficially, because of course a married woman could not be employed as a teacher.
Jean found the captain observing her as carefully. ‘Do you know why I am here, Miss McLain?’
‘No, sir.’ Why would a captain want to speak to a post office assistant? If anything had happened to William or Arthur, Papa would have sent a message, or told her when she got home. Jean still lived in the house on the edge of the school grounds, of course. No telegraph girl could afford to support herself on wages of half a crown a week.
Papa had not wished a daughter of his to work at all, but with most of the men in the postal service in the army, he had allowed her to work for Miss Pigeon, who ran the post office now her postmaster father had joined the Post Office Rifles.
Anyway, if the dreaded yellow telegram announcing death or serious injury had come for her family Jean would have known about it first. It was her job to translate the beeping dots and dashes from the Morse, then type them out into words. She dreaded the bell that announced a telegram was due to arrive on the machine these days. Even if it wasn’t William, or Arthur, a military telegram would be about someone she knew, one of the boys who’d left school, or a farmhand, or Sam Cook, the draper’s son who’d died on the Somme.
‘You won the National Red Cross Morse Code Competition last week, Miss McLain?’
Jean flushed. ‘Yes, sir.’ It had been held to raise money for Comforts for Soldiers, so Papa had let her enter. The competition messages had come faster and faster, contestant after contestant failing to follow the beeping dots and dashes, until finally only Jean was left on stage.
It had been embarrassing. She could tell the older women from the big post offices in the nearby towns, and the few men too old to fight, didn’t like a chit of a girl beating them. But women could often send or read the Morse code signals five times faster than a man, and surely her young fingers gave her an advantage?
Jean was fast. Faster than her older brothers, who had learned Morse code for the crystal radio sets they’d built. Before the war they had tapped out messages to each other on their bedroom walls.
The newspaper reported that Jean had transcribed an incredible fifty-two words a minute. Privately Jean thought she might even have been faster if she hadn’t been so nervous.
Mama had framed the certificate and hung it on the drawing room wall. It should have made Jean proud, but instead she felt depressed each time she looked at it. The heroines in the Girl’s Own Annuals flew seaplanes or found amulets that sent them back to ancient Egypt. Jean just listened to beeps and wrote down what they meant, or sometimes grasped the rod and pressed the Morse key down herself when someone in the village was born or died, which were the only reasons to send or receive a local telegram. Mostly she tore off stamps.
Girls who tore off stamps didn’t have adventures.
‘You are twenty-one years old,’ the captain continued.
Jean looked at him, startled. ‘No, sir. I turned sixteen a week ago.’ She’d been fourteen when, just as life might get interesting, the war snatched it away, along with all the men of fighting age, most of the horses, half the trees in the Lower Wood, parties, dances, tennis and cricket matches, replacing them with endless knitting, tired, anxious women struggling to replace the vanished men and the men who had come back with scarred faces, missing limbs or hacking bloody coughs, who rarely left their homes and never spoke of what they’d seen.
Captain Balfour met her eyes. ‘I beg your pardon, Miss McLain. Your father says that you are twenty-one.’
Jean’s breath caught in her throat. Girls could not serve overseas till they were twenty-one. But she was just a post office assistant, despite her skill with the telegraph machine. She couldn’t drive a car, much less an ambulance. She was even too young to train as a VAD, a nurse’s aide. Those were the only kind of jobs women did in the army. Maybe they wanted her as a cook . . .
But she had also sworn an oath to serve her country when she joined the postal service, just as she had stood for the oath every day before school prayers. ‘I will love my God. I will honour my king. I will serve my country.’
And if you were twenty-one you might just possibly do something more than tear off stamps.
Jean said steadily, ‘I apologise for my mistake, Captain. Of course, I am twenty-one.’
‘You speak fluent French and German?’
‘Yes, sir, and Ancient Greek and Latin,’ she added eagerly. She’d learned the last two helping her brothers with their homework. Maybe they wanted her to translate messages from spies . . .
‘I doubt Ancient Greek and Latin will be of much use to you in France,’ Captain Balfour said dryly. ‘But one never knows.’
‘You want me to go to France, sir?’ She dug her fingers into her palm to try to hide her excitement. Maybe they needed canteen workers. She could serve cups of tea, make sandwiches . . .
‘Possibly, but other places are in need too. Miss McLain, will you give me your word never to speak of this? Not even to your parents, not now, not when the war is over.’ He gave a small smile. ‘I have already told your father enough so that he will not ask you questions. You will be asked to sign an oath later, but I need your promise now.’
‘I promise, sir.’
‘The army needs signallers, people who can translate and send Morse code quickly, who can be trusted never to say a word of what they’ve sent or received. Most of the post office men joined up in 1914 or ’15 and . . . and there aren’t enough of them left now for the jobs that need doing.’ He means they have all been killed, thought Jean, or too badly wounded to work again.
But women signallers? She’d never heard of such a thing. There’d been no reports of women doing any such work in the newspapers.
‘Orders need to be sent continuously from headquarters to the battlefront or the trenches and back again,’ Captain Balfour continued. ‘The generals have finally accepted that these new telephone machines are useful, but telephone calls can be intercepted by the Germans. Code is easier to send in Morse.’
Jean couldn’t think what to say. She just nodded.
‘It’s dangerous. You’ll be working at headquarters, not on the front line of course, but even headquarters can be bombed. You’ll be working with men, too, rough men sometimes, men who’ve been fighting this war for nearly three years already. You’ll be working seven days a week for maybe ten hours a day or more, living in barracks.’
‘I’d be in the army?’
‘No. You’d stay in the postal service, seconded to the women’s army, the WAAC. You’d get the same pay you get now, with a five pounds bonus at the end of each year of service, and two weeks leave a year.’
A year . . . Jean stared at him. She’d never even spent a night away from home before.
‘We need people we can trust to be loyal to Britain. You’re a headmaster’s daughter, with two brothers in uniform. Well, Miss McLain? Don’t say yes unless you’re sure.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You won’t scream, or faint, or have hysterics?’
She met his eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics. I won’t faint either. I’ve screamed sometimes, but I know how to be silent.’
‘Very well, Miss McLain.’ Captain Balfour stood and gave a small formal bow. Jean stood and made a tiny old-fashioned curtsey back.
‘You will receive a letter shortly telling you where to go, and what to bring. You will need to pass a physical, too, but I am sure that will be no problem. Have you been inoculated for smallpox?’
‘Yes, sir. Will . . . will I be able to come home for Christmas, sir?’
‘I wish I could say yes, Miss McLain. But truthfully, I do not know.’