BUTTERWOOD, APRIL 1917
Papa gave her ten shillings, a hot water bottle, a miniature edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, so tiny it fitted in her pocket and needed bright light to read, the warm travelling rug she had been advised to bring, as well as a suitcase no larger than its owner can carry unassisted, and a block of chocolate wrapped in oilcloth he told her ‘to keep for emergencies’.
Miss Pigeon gave her a notebook to use as a diary, which Jean already knew was not allowed, but she couldn’t tell Miss Pigeon that. Everyone in the village by now knew she was to be a WAAC, but no one knew she was to be a signaller. They probably thought she’d serve in a canteen, a bright young face to cheer men coming back from the front.
Jean thought Papa guessed at least a bit, perhaps, because he insisted she kept practising her Morse code in the week they gave her to get ready. He also explained cryptography to her, how to substitute letters or numbers so no one knew what a message said if they didn’t have the ‘key’, the solution to the puzzle.
It felt like a game until she remembered men’s lives might depend on her answers.
Mama’s knitting needles flickered from dawn till they went to bed, knitting her three new pairs of woollen knickers, two pairs of gloves that left her fingers free of wool, and three pairs of ‘combinations’. Mama also made her a small cloth sewing kit, which Jean packed along with her spare petticoat to go under the uniform she’d be given, pyjamas, bed socks, a Bible, a dressing gown and six handkerchiefs.
It didn’t seem much to take to war.
The day before she left Miss Pigeon made her a special tea, with a farewell cake topped with strawberries and cream, and pickled collar of pork with early lettuce hearts.
It was hard to say goodbye to the small post office that had been her world for over a year, starting the brisk walk from home in the dark and arriving home after dark in winter, or in the long, sweet dawns and twilights of summer, smelling of flowers or ripening wheat. In city post offices the women worked an eight-hour day, but here in the village Jean and Miss Pigeon had to begin sorting the mail at seven in the morning, and didn’t finish till eight at night, with two deliveries by the ‘outdoors’ mail women on foot a day, except on Sunday when there was only one.
But life moved slowly in the village, between its fields of wheat, with its placid cows who knew the routine of milking as well as their owners. There might be a ‘rush’ of three customers when the men walked home from the fields, or half a dozen customers at lunchtime when the women had the washing done on a Monday. There were also long hours when the letters were all in their pigeonholes, the ex-servicemen’s pensions were paid, the postal order forms neatly stacked, the penny and halfpenny stamps waiting to be torn from the top left-hand side, the correct way to tear a stamp from the sheet, just as there was a correct method for all post office work.
Jean had hours free to read a book borrowed from the Literary Institute, knitting socks, balaclavas or bellybands for Arthur or William while she read, or to sit with the brown pot full of tea and a pile of potato cakes with Miss Pigeon, who knew everything about everyone in the village, and was happy to share the gossip as she knitted. Almost every woman in Britain knitted these days, and many of the men too.
Mrs Wilson waited for letters from her daughter in Australia; Mrs Smith had two daughters in service down in London. Nearly all the village waited for letters or postcards sent by sons fighting abroad. Post office employees knew everything, which was why the oath had to be taken. I will not pass on anything I read or hear or see.
Jean had thought Miss Pigeon might expect to be told why the army wanted a chit of a girl. But Miss Pigeon was no fool, despite her old-fashioned long skirts and the corset she’d had fitted twenty years earlier. Whatever Jean would be doing with the army, Miss Pigeon knew it would not be selling stamps, and even possibly suspected she would not be serving cups of tea in a canteen.
Papa and Mama were the only people on the platform the day she left for basic training at Folkestone, suitcase in hand and travel rug under her arm, with a small linen bag of sandwiches and an apple for the journey. It was only when she saw Mama’s resolute smile, despite the tears she refused to wipe, that Jean realised how empty the headmaster’s house would be, two sons gone, and now their daughter too.
For an instant even Papa, who could quell a hundred boys with a lift of his eyebrow, looked frightened as the train snorted to a halt, hissing steam, and the conductor opened a carriage door for Jean. But then he too forced a smile.
People were always saying, ‘We must all make sacrifices for the war,’ now that sugar and meat and cheese were often impossible to find in the shops, fences were left unmended and thatch roofs were leaking. For the first time Jean realised that perhaps the hardest sacrifice of all was to let your children go.
‘God go with you, my darling,’ said Mama, still valiantly smiling as the train conductor reached down to help Jean with her suitcase.
‘Off to the seaside for a holiday, young lady?’ asked the conductor.
‘My daughter has joined the WAACs,’ said Papa quietly.
‘A chit like you?’ The conductor laughed, as if he didn’t quite believe it, but wasn’t going to say so to Papa in his dark suit and top hat. He winked at her. ‘Well, you give the Jerries what for from me.’
The train was full of uniforms, but Jean found a ladies’ carriage in which five women sat, none of whom seemed to know each other, for they were reading while silently knitting. The women glanced up at her curiously as Jean bent down to wave to Mama and Papa through the window, and then her parents were gone, as well as the woods where she had walked all her life just coming into leaf, the station with its beds of early primroses, and everything she’d known.