ROUEN, JUNE 1917
The stretcher cases waited on the quay, row after row of wounded men groaning or stoically silent or unconscious, the white of bandages, the vivid red or dark black of blood, the sweet smell she was to learn meant gangrene, rotting wounds that would need immediate surgery once the men reached in England, and already flies buzzing, arrowing in on blood.
It was early morning, a high and cloudless sky, already hot, seagulls screaming, a breeze wafting between the bridges and the river glinting in the sun. Nurses, VADs and women in Red Cross uniforms leaning over stretchers, orderlies efficiently moving one after another onto the ship, so by the time Jean had crossed the quay it was empty, apart from the blood, and sunlight brighter than she’d ever known, and a skinny cat strolling as if it owned the docks, and hoped someone would have time to catch a fish.
The city was the biggest and most bustling she had visited. Soldiers were everywhere, puffing at cigarettes: not just English and French soldiers but Indians too, in turbans, with great swords at the sides and fierce-looking beards and moustaches, and the strangest thing of all was that no one seemed to think it strange.
Even the air smelled different, but faintly familiar too. At last, she recognised it: coffee, mingling with the scent of newly baked bread, all under a cloud of city dust.
There were seventeen women in her draft, all with their kitbags, hers as new as theirs. She had got to know them slightly, but none of the others would be a signaller, and once they reached the headquarters camp they were all assigned to different Nissen huts, eight women to each. Jean had been allocated a bed in one of the signallers’ huts. Each little house already had a bed of flowers blooming in front of it, and gardens of salad vegetables too. The WAACs had only been formed a few months earlier: the gardens must have been planted by the men, so there would be flowers to greet the women.
For the first time since she’d left home she felt truly welcomed as she opened the hut door.
‘Hello. Just arrived in France?’ The speaker looked at her blearily from her bed.
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.’ Jean had assumed everyone would be at work.
‘What’s the time? Oh, I’m due to get up about now anyway. We have to man the machines twenty-four hours a day so there’s always someone trying to sleep. If we want to natter, we go down to the parlour. Stow your kit and I’ll take you there. I’m Hattie, by the way. That’s your bed: the empty one down there.’
‘Thank you. I’m Jean,’ said Jean, as Hattie swung her bare feet out of bed and stripped off her nightdress without embarrassment and began to don her uniform.
A narrow iron bedstead and a hard, thin mattress, two blankets but no sheets, a pillow in a calico pillowslip, and a shelf that was ‘hers’, with two rough towels on it. The end of the hut had been partitioned off with a cold water tap and two zinc washing bowls. Jean had already learned to wrap the towels from her monthlies in oilcloth and store them in the pockets of her bloomers till she could wash them. Another partition hid two lengths of rope on which these could be dried, out of the gaze of men.
‘You’re just in time to go on duty, and thank goodness,’ added Hattie. ‘There’s a rush on, and we’re working extra-long shifts. Usually it’s a ten- or twelve-hour shift, but more if there’s a rush on.’
It was beginning to get dark as she followed Hattie outside. She could hear the far-off guns, a rumble like constant thunder, broken by a metallic shriek or explosion. The war seemed very close. It had been all around her the past few years, of course, but this was fighting, battles, and she was on their edge . . .
‘Right, a few ground rules. No talking inside the hut, unless you need to explain a mistake or if you’ve missed something. Don’t make a mistake, and don’t miss anything. Otherwise you just summarise whatever the person who takes over from you needs to know, and that’s it.’
‘When will I know when a shift is over?’
‘When someone taps you on the shoulder and you can give her your headphones. Otherwise just keep going. We have girls collapsing at their posts sometimes. If that happens, one of us has to try to do two jobs till someone finds a replacement. But the messages must be sent and received. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘No breaks to go to the loo, so don’t have a cuppa before you start, even to help keep you awake. Wet your pants if you have to, but don’t leave your post. If you’ve got your period or a weak bladder, wear a double napkin, but don’t leave your post. I wear a napkin half the time, just in case — our bodies get so mixed up with day and night shifts your periods will probably become irregular — but don’t leave your post. If we’re bombed, don’t leave your post till you’re told to. If the kaiser or Santa Claus or the king walks through the door, don’t leave your post.’
‘I get the message,’ said Jean dryly.
‘Good. I’m glad you’re here, old thing. If only the brass hats would send us another twenty. There are just too few of us.’
The camp was too dimly lit to see much in this far corner. Jean had already been warned that all was kept as dark as possible to make it hard for enemy planes to bomb them.
‘Here’s the hut,’ said Hattie, as they came to a substantial building. She grinned in the darkness at Jean. ‘I know it’s not a hut. There’s room after room, but the army calls it a hut so we do too.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Of course. This is the army, love. Get used to it.’
Hattie opened the door, then quickly shut it behind them. Jean blinked in the sudden light. Women in headphones sat along endless benches against each wall, listening or scribbling down messages, biting their lips intently, or blinking hard, probably trying to stay awake and focused. None even looked up as Jean and Hattie came in. The room was silent, except for the rustle of uniforms and a chorus of beeps almost too muffled to hear, as if a mob of sparrows chattered ten miles away.
Hattie moved to take the place of a tall pale girl who groaned, standing up and quickly handing Hattie the headphones so no message might be lost. Hattie immediately looked at the scrap of paper on the bench and began transmitting.
The girl next to Hattie smiled wearily as she saw Jean. She stood, still in her headphones, and moved slightly so she could hear any transmission as well as talk to Jean. ‘Thank goodness you’ve arrived. I haven’t moved for twelve hours. My back feels like a horse trod on it. I’m Betsy. Sorry to race you through this, but I need to explain fast before another message comes in. Nothing coming through just now, but there’s never a long gap. Right, you sit here next to Hattie. We work in teams of two from the same station, so messages can be sent and received at the same time — she’s transmitting and you’re receiving tonight. Write down each message on a different piece of paper. The message is in code, so you won’t know what they say, and you need to be extra careful to get each letter right. Think you can manage that?’
‘Yes,’ said Jean.
‘Good. Once you’ve written down the message give it to one of the WAAC clerks. They’ll usually be hovering behind you once they see you’re writing, but give one a wave if you need her. She’ll decipher the message with the codebook — it’s locked away in an iron strongbox with battle orders and other hush-hush stuff — then hand it on to the officer on duty.’
‘What if we work out what the code is?’
‘You probably won’t have time, but there’s no point. Every few months the old code is destroyed and we get a new one. Pip-pip, old thing. I’m off to din-dins and beddy-bye.’
Jean sat, pulling the headphones on. The beeps began almost immediately, so she had to memorise them till she could grab a pencil. At least they hadn’t lost any information in the handover.
Listen, scribble, listen and write again, hand the message over and reach for another piece of paper, another pencil when the one she’d been using went blunt. Jean vaguely wondered who sharpened the pencils . . .
Listen, scribble, listen, hand over what looked like gibberish, and hope she’d got it right . . .
Of course she’d got it right! She was Jean McLain and she’d never made a mistake in the post office, and wouldn’t make one now, though this was harder than she had ever imagined: constant focus, listen, write, listen.
She was so intent it wasn’t till another woman tapped her on the shoulder that she realised her back ached, her fingers felt like throbbing sausages, and she felt weak from lack of food and drink, for there had been no chance to eat dinner or supper. Next time I’ll treat myself to a square of chocolate to keep me going, she thought as she followed Hattie outside. The guns didn’t sound as loud in the daylight, possibly because of the voices and clangs and other sounds of the camp and the city beyond.
‘Breakfast time,’ said Hattie. ‘The work is arranged around meals. Eat what you can when you can, as our shifts are so long we usually miss a meal or even two. I’m so parched I could drink a horse trough of tea.’
The mess was a substantial building, with few people — most of the camp had already eaten. Women lined up with trays, a tin mug and plate, took their food and filled their mugs. Jean was served three slices of some cold, greasy meat that might be ham, bacon or the scrapings of a kitchen drain, and two slices of toast. She tiredly covered the slices with white margarine and what might have been apricot jam, and filled her mug with something brown. A big box of army biscuit sat next to the jam and margarine. Hattie ignored it, so Jean did too.
She and Hattie found a seat at an empty table and began to eat. She was so hungry she didn’t taste anything for a few mouthfuls, then made a face. ‘The jam tastes like bacon.’
‘Always does,’ said Hattie cheerfully. ‘They boil the ham and bacon in the same dixie they use to make the tea and coffee.’
Jean sipped the brown liquid. It tasted just like the jam. ‘Is this tea or coffee?’
‘No idea. If there’s brown sludge at the bottom of your mug, it’s probably meant to be coffee, though rumour says it’s made from roast acorns. No second helpings of toast or meat, but you can have more tea or coffee, and if you’re starving you can have as much army biscuit and margarine and jam as you want. Just don’t break a tooth — we don’t have any dentists.’
The bread tasted as if sawdust had been added to the flour — or a bit of flour added to the sawdust — but the greasy meat was filling enough. Jean forked up another mouthful and thought longingly of the wondrous luxury of sleep.
She got used to it. Or rather, no one got used to it. You endured, because there was no choice.
They worked the morning shift from eight am, ten am, or eleven. The afternoon shift began at either five or seven pm. Night duties that ran till eight or nine in the morning, so there were always fresh minds and hands to press the keys and listen for the dot dot dot dash dash and write it down.
Her world shrank to Rouen headquarters: men, men and more men, with one ladies’ ‘parlour’ containing hard-backed chairs and bench-like tables where you could read or write letters, and which she rarely saw, for while the women cooks, clerks and drivers worked eight-hour days the signallers’ long shifts left time for food and sleep and not much else.
Dinner was at midday, the main meal of the day, bully beef stew served with potatoes boiled in their jackets, or rice, and turnips, though the women often brought in salad vegetables from the gardens to brighten the monotony, and for afters rice pudding with jam, or rice pudding with milk, or rice pudding with milk and jam and sometimes a few prunes.
‘Tea’ meant a slab of the sawdust bread, always hairy from the sacks it came in, with cold bully beef or a curious pudding of cheese and rice, or canned pork and beans from America. Supper was army biscuit and cheese or jam, and tea or cocoa, which actually did taste of cocoa.
Jean finally tried the army biscuit. It was too hard to bite through unless you soaked it in your tea, and then it suddenly went splodge, and turned your tea to sludge. Army biscuit was also said to stop the bowels for days, allegedly a deliberate ploy to solve the problem of how to have latrines in trenches, which everyone believed implicitly, and at the same time didn’t believe at all.
The bowel-stopping quality of army biscuit plus the greasiness of the meat and white margarine meant that going to the loo regularly was like the ‘end of the war’: something you had to believe would happen one day, longed to see, but never quite believed it could.
War was the whole world now, and her part of the world was Rouen.
Days off were irregular, given as a gift to pale-faced women whose hands had begun to tremble halfway through a shift. Jean suspected they were given only when the women looked as if they were so overworked they might become inaccurate, and inaccuracy might lead an unknown number of men to death. Sometimes she spent her day off sleeping, or writing a letter home that could not say much except I am well; I hope you are too. Some days she walked into town with Hattie or one of the other signallers, and they turned their precious shillings into francs to buy fried egg and chips or even omelettes, and sometimes a vastly expensive apple or orange instead.
The station platform would be empty except for the women waiting to give out cups of chicory coffee and corned beef sandwiches to the next train load of men bound for the front, or the shattered bodies sent back from it. Pigeons pecked the crumbs, while sparrows waited, hoping for whatever the pigeons had left. Suddenly a train would come in with new drafts for the front, the sergeants yelling orders, the young men, barely two years older than her mostly, fresh faced and eager, standing to attention, singing ‘God Save the King’. The girls would wait to wave them off as the train took them nearer to the front, resolutely refusing to cry when the carriages had been pulled away and the station was silent once more.
When the trains came back they were just as crowded, but with wounded now. Jean longed to help, to give a crying man a drink of water or to simply hold a hand, but was inevitably due back on duty in an hour and that duty mattered, because if she didn’t send the signal or translate the signals coming in, then more men would be wounded and more would die and the war would be over soon and Britain would have lost.
Camp at night, a million stars gleaming overhead, the distant call of bugles, the pounding that might be giants playing bowls but she knew was guns. The girls from one of the earlier shifts would wake her and she would dress by the light of a single candle, wash in the cold water, tread through the camp to the Signals hut.
Most women hated the night shift. Jean liked it. The camp was theirs at night, the sprawling army base usually quiet, apart from the footsteps of the guard, and a few men of secret business who slipped in by dark and left by dark again. There were no bright lights except on nights when there was a concert, but the Signals women weren’t allowed to go to those or join the hockey matches played by the female clerks and cooks and drivers. It was thought to be too easy to pass on confidential messages if they mixed with the other women, though Jean doubted any of them would. Nor, mostly, did they have the time to join a hockey match, even if they’d wanted to.
She had expected to work with men, but most of her co-workers were female, and almost as new to this life as she was. When she’d been recruited she had been told women had been sought because so many of the men who knew Morse code were already dead, but she hadn’t realised that she’d be working almost entirely with women. But of course, army incompetence and short sightedness was exactly why she was here. Nearly all the male telegraph officers had been encouraged to join the Postal Rifles at the beginning of the war. Those men had died, their skills unused, to try to capture a few yards of mud. Now the field marshals and generals had to accept women to sit in dead men’s seats and wear the dead men’s headphones. But they would not let it be publicly known.
They lived and breathed secrecy, not allowed even a bottle of perfume, as any bottle might contain invisible ink with which they might write an indiscretion home. It hadn’t seemed to occur to army intelligence that women skilled at Morse might find their own way to send a coded message home: the loop in a letter G or Y made with the tiniest of dots and dashes, an O that looked as if the nib of the pen was almost out of ink, so had not completed the letter. Instead, the writer had most carefully told family they trusted where they were or added endearments to fiancés or lovers that they didn’t want the censor to read. Jean discovered that censors were mostly women, too — something else the public had not been told — and they were ruthless at cutting out any detail about the work, the place or the war. It was rumoured that one family merely got a note in an unfamiliar hand that said Your son is well but talks too much.
The overlapping shifts meant it was difficult to form close friendships. Except on their scarce days off, life shrank to messages, to sleep, and longing for sleep, with food a mere necessity to keep on going. But each of them shared a rare camaraderie in their small periods of free time. No matter what their backgrounds or ages, they were bound by this: they volunteered, they worked until they literally dropped to the floor, their work was vital. They helped each other with the gift of a spare home-made sanitary napkin, or a chance to laugh or remember to watch the moon rise through a smoky sky.
The work was far harder than in the post office — not just the hours, and the work without breaks, but the physical effort. The army used the old-fashioned Wheatstone system, where three keys had to be bashed down hard with a length of wood to make either a dot or dash, a meaningless hardship it seemed at first till Jean realised that the sheer physical pressure to press the keys meant you wouldn’t press one by accident.
Back in the post office a letter or two missed didn’t matter — you could work out what was meant. But here, in code, each letter was vital. The wrong one might make a battle order meaningless, or even incorrect.
And men would die.
The hardest part, for Jean, was keeping her transmissions slow enough so the person receiving them at whatever camp or base or trench, would have time to take them down correctly.
Mostly Jean was put to receiving, as that meant the quickest transmitter at the other end could work with her. Messages received by Miss Jean McLain were always impeccable, no matter how fast the transmission. Slowly she earned a reputation for easily keeping up with transmissions thirty, even thirty-five words a minute instead of the usual twenty-five. It would have been faster, had anyone had the speed to transmit as fast as Jean could receive.
Their room was always stuffy, with the door opened only for a shift to leave or enter and only one small window high up, so no one could see in. Each day was the same, even Sunday, apart from a change in shift time, except for those rare days off.
It was amazing what a day off could bring: the chance to sleep, to wander by the quay across the cobbles, gazing at the oily water, watching a sunset with the tall ships black against its glory.
A day off even meant almost an hour with her brother.