The platoon of khaki-clad girls trudged laboriously up the steep, hillside road that led to their quarters, wearied not just by the climb, but by their day’s work at a Royal Army Ordnance Depot.
“This is all I need every evening, after the way the Colonel keeps me pounding the typewriter,” Marianne puffed to one of her room-mates who was marching beside her. “They ought to provide us with transport, instead of making us walk, Birdie.”
“An’ I wonder wot them bleedin’ cooks ’as ruined fer our tea ternight?” Private Bird replied through the side of her lipstick-caked mouth.
Talking during a march was forbidden, but the girls, and Birdie especially, thought most of the ATS regulations were made to be broken.
Marianne shrugged, then straightened her shoulders as Corporal Davies, who was escorting them, cast a beady eye in her direction. “We’ll never know, will we?” she whispered to Birdie. Their meals were largely unrecognizable but telling the orderly officer so when she made the statutory visit to the cookhouse to receive complaints, had no effect.
“It won’t be lokshen soup, that’s fer sure!” Birdie, who had once been a waitress in an East End Jewish restaurant, said nostalgically. “More likely bubble’n squeak, made wiv the leftover bacon rind, ’n bleedin’ caterpillars fried up wiv the flamin’ cabbage like the larst time!”
Another glance from Corporal Davies put an end to the exchange and Birdie raised her voice in song with their comrades who were rendering one of the bawdy ballads included in their nightly repertoire.
Marianne usually sang with them, enjoying the camaraderie of Service life that compensated for its less pleasurable aspects, but this evening she was dispirited. Who could be cheerful when their brother might be lying dead, his body not yet accounted for? She was trying to look on the bright side, but it wasn’t easy. Meanwhile, she had applied for compassionate leave, so she could go home and comfort her parents.
“You’re out of step, Klein!” the corporal barked.
Marianne executed the necessary staccato shuffle and almost tripped over a stone on the unpaved road. What was she doing here, in the middle of nowhere? Wearing a uniform and being ordered about by an ex-schoolmistress from Cardiff? Sharing a room with two cockney girls who were man-mad?
“You’re out of step again, Klein!”
And getting called by her surname by women and girls to whom a stripe or two on their sleeves, or pips on their epaulets, had lent unquestionable authority? She’d joined up, that’s what she was doing here! But sometimes she had to pinch herself to believe it. That she’d gone against her parents’ wishes and was miles away from home. The family would faint from shock if they could hear what her comrades were singing.
“Roll me over,
In the clover,
Roll me over, lay me down
And do it again!”
Marianne had blushed the first few times she had heard it, but you couldn’t blush every time you heard something like that in the Services, or you’d walk around with a permanently red face. What a sheltered upbringing she’d had. Some of the other girls had, too, and now took everything in their stride, as Marianne had learned to do. But there were still some things that shocked her.
“Gerrartofit yer fuckin’ bleeder!” Birdie yelled after a passing jeep that had raised the dust in their faces.
And the language was one of them.
“Arseface!” Marianne’s other room-mate hollered when an army truck repeated the offence.
“That’s enough of that,” Corporal Davies rasped as she did regularly in the same circumstances. Her uniform and hair were as dust-laden as everyone else’s, but, unlike her lessers, she marched along stoically, every inch the living image of a woman who has found her true niche in the army.
When it was not dusty underfoot, it was muddy, and the girls invariably arrived at their quarters coated with one or bespattered with the other. Marianne had to change and make herself look presentable before going to Platoon Office to find out if she had been granted leave. There was an evening train to London which would get her there in time to catch the midnight one to Manchester. Barring delays, she thought restively when she was left cooling her heels until the CO found time to see her.
The distress that had lowered her spirits since her mother’s letter arrived that morning increased whilst she waited. And the news about Harry only accounted for half of it. Was the recrimination she had read between the lines just her imagination? The praise for Shirley, who kept dropping in to cheer up Marianne’s parents in her absence. The reference to Eva Frankl’s always being there when her mother and father needed her, because she was stationed in Manchester. Even the mention of people they hadn’t seen for years caring enough to ring up and console them seemed an oblique rebuke. The tin of homemade strudel with which the letter had been enclosed did, too. A reminder that Esther Klein did not neglect her maternal duty to her daughter, despite her anxiety about her son. Duty! Marianne thought and was shocked by the sudden surge of resentment aroused in her. Possibly these thoughts were just the product of her guilty conscience because she had left home, but her feelings about duty were not. It was the first time she had seen family ties in that light.
She glanced around at the ugly, green filing cabinets and the grey-blanketed camp bed on which an NCO would sleep that night. Acrid fumes from a paraffin heater in the corner caught at her throat and a huge poster beside a notice board, displaying a plate of half-eaten sausage and egg, asked “If you didn’t want it, why did you take it?”
Marianne averted her eyes from the poster. She had wanted what she’d taken. A taste of freedom. This was why she had not done what the family called “the right thing” and joined the Pay Corps; maintained her allegiance to them and served her country at one and the same time. She had taken the opportunity to spread her wings because it might never come again, and she had no regrets about having done so. But her troubled conscience was another matter.
The day-sergeant emerged from the officer’s sanctum with a sheaf of papers in her hand and a bored look on her baby-face, “Miss Platt will see you now, Klein,” she said sitting down behind her typewriter and tucking a stray strand of flaxen hair into the fat roll servicewomen who preferred not to cut their locks to the regulation length were obliged to choose as their coiffeur. “But you don’t stand a dog’s chance of getting leave,” she added.
This was immediately endorsed by the commanding officer. “It isn’t an adequate reason, Klein.”
Marianne steeled herself to argue, which was not easy when confronted by Junior Commander Platt’s impersonal gaze. “It is family, ma’am.”
Miss Platt raised her carefully plucked eyebrows and allowed an uncomfortable silence to develop.
Behind her desk, another poster blazoned a warning about careless talk, which seemed particularly apt to Marianne at that moment, but she did not allow it to deter her. “What I mean, ma’am, is that Jewish people always cling together when there’s trouble in the family. All my relations are rallying round my parents, and even if it were only for a day or two it’d comfort them to know I wanted to be with them, too.”
“The last time you requested special leave, Klein, you wanted to be at your cousin’s engagement party.”
And next time it’ll be for her wedding, Marianne thought.
“I would hardly call that trouble in the family,” Miss Platt said crisply.
Marianne did not reply. Her request to go home for the celebration when Shirley became engaged to Peter had not been granted and she had been unable to explain to the CO why it mattered for her to be there. What would Miss Platt have thought if she’d known Marianne didn’t even like Shirley, but had wanted to be present, nevertheless? God, how complicated this family thing was! She couldn’t even explain to herself the hold it had on her.
Miss Platt toyed with the contents of her in-tray. Did the girl think there was a special set of King’s Regulations for Jews? “I’m sorry about your brother, Klein. But the same rules apply for you as for the rest of us.” She left her in-tray alone and twirled the bright gold band on her wedding finger. “It might interest you to know I didn’t ask for leave when my husband was shot down in the Battle of Britain. I would probably not have been given it because his remains were not recovered and there was no funeral.”
How could you discuss family feeling with a woman whose upper lip was as stiff as that? Marianne thought, studying her CO’s pale and perfect features across which no tremor of emotion had so much as flickered whilst she spoke of her personal loss. But Miss Platt had “boarding school” written all over her and probably they’d trained her to be like this. Not like Temple School in Cheetham Hill where the teachers made a fuss of you if you fell in the playground and grazed your knee.
“Your hair is too long, Klein.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’d better get along now, or you’ll miss tea.”
Marianne saluted smartly and left the office feeling like a robot with a muzzle clamped over its mouth. But there was no provision in King’s Regulations for debate. Everything was either black or white.
Most of the time, she revelled in her away-from-home freedom, but every so often something like this would happen to remind her she wasn’t her own boss, any more than she’d been under her parents’ roof. And in some ways she was less so.
Cut your hair, Klein! Polish your buttons, Klein! Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am! Yesterday, there’d been the regular medical inspection and her dignity was still smarting from having her hair scanned for lice, her hands for scabies and her nether regions for worse.
When she’d signed on at the recruiting centre on Market Street, Manchester, unable to control a sudden, wild impulse to do so, the smiling khaki-clad girl who’d greeted her hadn’t warned her it would be like this, she thought, treading the long winding path to the cookhouse in the March wind. But she would still have joined up if she’d known. What were niggardly restrictions compared with the danger Martin and her brother had to face?
She looked up at the starry sky and shuddered. Would Martin be setting off on another air raid on Germany tonight? It was still hard to believe he was a bomb-aimer, that the gentle cousin she’d grown up with was no more. In his place had arisen a tight-lipped RAF sergeant who wanted to wipe the Nazis off the face of the earth.
She recalled how timid he had been as a child, but now he was afraid of nothing. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me” had been his schoolboy philosophy. He wouldn’t hit anyone unless they hit him first, she remembered him saying and this still held good. Only it wasn’t himself he was avenging now, it was the whole Jewish people.
She thought of her brothers, too. Arnold, sailing the treacherous seas in a minesweeper, as if he, too, like Martin, had deliberately sought the highest degree of danger. It made her feel she had not really known him. But how well did he know her? Perhaps it was always that way with brothers and sisters? The familiarity of family life deadened your perceptions. Maybe she hadn’t valued her brothers, either, she reflected with a lump in her throat. And now she might never see Harry again.
The cookhouse loomed blackly ahead as she turned a bend in the tree-lined path. Inside, the girls would be eating their tea, laughing and joking in the brightly lit, steamy warmth. Spreading hunks of bread with the margarine deposited like yellow bricks in soup plates on the long tables and diving greedily for the jam before it was all gone. In summer, the jam was left uneaten, as warm with captive bluebottles and wasps tempted to a sticky end in the sweet morass, and some girls, Marianne included, were too sickened by the sight to eat the main course and fled to the NAAFI canteen to fill themselves with stodge.
Why bother going in? she asked herself when she reached the cookhouse door. The empty feeling inside her was not hunger. She retraced her footsteps and went to her billet to take a bath before the other girls returned and used all the hot water. At her last unit, she’d lived in a big nissen hut and had had to cross a field to the ablutions. Here, she was one of a single platoon of ATS attached to the Ordnance Depot for special duties and enjoyed the comparative luxury of peacetime married-quarters.
These little redbrick houses were set back from the road behind a broad, grassy verge and flanked by “Off Limits” notices to keep out the soldiers quartered in the huge barracks complex at the foot of the hill. In peacetime the barracks was occupied by the British, but now housed vast numbers of GIs; with only a sprinkling of Tommies left to scowl at their better-paid, gum-chewing allies whose illusory, Hollywood-inspired glamour worked like a charm with the English girls.
Most evenings, a line of army trucks was parked beside the “Off Limits” signs, waiting to carry off the “Ats” to USO concerts, and dances, and it was not uncommon for a skirmish to break out between the drivers as they vied for the girls’ patronage.
Tonight was no different and Marianne had to run a gauntlet of devouring male eyes in order to reach her quarters. Many girls found this persistent attention flattering, but she found it irritating. And sometimes insulting.
“Hi there, Shorty!”
“Come on over for a pack of Camels, hon.”
“I don’t smoke, thank you,” she replied haughtily.
“Have a Hershey bar instead.”
“No thanks.”
“Say, you eat candy don’t you?”
“No, as a matter of fact. English people eat sweets.”
Her retort brought a chorus of laughter from the GIs and one of them shone a flashlight on to her.
“Did you ever see such a cute little number?”
“Get your eyes off of her, bud! I saw her first.”
Marianne ran into her billet and slammed the door, wolf whistles ringing in her ears. Why was she always rude to them, when all they wanted was to be friendly? She took off her cap and borrowed Birdie’s scissors to snip an inch off her hair before she forgot the CO’s warning, though it was practically an Eton crop already! It was the way the GIs went about it, approaching girls as if they could be bought, that made her hackles rise. English soldiers didn’t treat the “Ats” that way and she was sure the Americans didn’t employ those tactics with girls in the States. You couldn’t go into a Service canteen without them wanting to pay for your food or take you to their PX store to buy you cosmetics that weren’t available in wartime in English shops. Why did they think they had to buy your friendship?
After she had cut her hair, she switched off the light and drew back the blackout-curtains to gaze moodily out of the window at the rows and rows of tanks and jeeps that stretched like a metallic sea in the moonlight. Beyond them, a clump of woods hid the US firing range, but in daytime the rat-a-tat of rifle shots was a constant reminder of its presence.
How lovely the trees looked, lit with silver. Viewed from afar they appeared frothy with blossom, but it was just the chalky dust that had settled on the leaves. Everyone knew this was the marshalling area, that the Americans were here preparing for the Second Front, but nobody talked about it. Was it waiting to be thrown into battle, the desperate will to live while they could, that made the GIs behave as they did? Perhaps if she took the trouble to find out, she’d discover that beneath their brash and sometimes crude veneers they were nice boys, like her brothers and cousins? And maybe, once they found out she couldn’t be bought, they would stop trying to buy her?
She blacked out the window and switched on the light before Birdie and Joyce returned from tea; if they found her standing in the dark they’d think she was pottier than they probably thought her already. They couldn’t understand why she had stopped going to the dances with them, why the nightly excitement had palled for her when it hadn’t for them. How could she tell them that their promiscuity dismayed her? That she was saving herself for the man she would one day marry, like Jewish girls always did? And did not want to tussle with determined Yanks in order to do so. She had had several such encounters already and enough was enough.
When the other girls entered clutching their enamel mugs and army-issue cutlery, Marianne had bathed and was sitting on her bed doing The Times crossword puzzle; the colonel passed on his newspaper to her every day.
“If you ask me, Joycie, she haint normal,” Birdie observed. “The way she don’t make dates nor nuffin’, I’m beginnin’ ter fink she’s one o’ those.”
“One of what?” Marianne inquired naïvely.
“It’s not just blokes what can be ’omos, cock,” Birdie informed her.
“I bet she don’t even know what an ’omo is,” Joyce giggled.
“I don’t.”
“Oh Gawd, who’s goin’ ter tell ’er, Birdie? You or me?”
“She can look it up in that flamin’ dictionary of ’ers wot’s taking up all that space on the chest of drawers.” Birdie picked up Marianne’s Oxford Concise and dropped it in her lap.
“’omosexual’s the word yer wants, cock. Yer’ll find it wiv the haitches.”
Birdie exchanged a wink with Joyce and watched Marianne’s face turn crimson when she finally found the word in the Addenda.
“’avin’ a sexual propensity fer persons of one’s hown sex,” Joyce read aloud over her shoulder.
Marianne closed the dictionary with a thud. “How could such a thing be possible?”
Birdie chortled. “Keep well away from Lance-corporal ’attersley, cock, or yer liable ter find out!”
“Yer know that black eye she ’ad larst week, what she said she got from walkin’ inter a lamp-post in the dark? Well she didn’t,” Joyce confided. “Private Lockett’s ’er girl an’ she told us it was ’er who kyboshed ’attersley fer bein’ hunfaithful wiv a Yankee Red Cross girl.”
“Sorry ter spoil yer innocence, Marianne,” Birdie smiled. “But it ’ad ter ’appen sometime. Why d’you fink Service girls never gets billeted two in a room?”
“’cause three’s a crowd,” Joyce supplied sagely.
Hattersley and Lockett were part of the threesome in the room next door and Marianne recalled having seen them go into the shower together but had thought nothing of it because they were both female. Now this, and other incidents which had not registered with her at the time, assumed a new significance. She would find it difficult to look them in the eye next time she saw them. But she liked them both and what she’d just learned didn’t make them into different people, any more than finding out Birdie and Joyce were promiscuous with men had made her stop liking them.
She glanced at the snapshot of her grandmother she had pinned on the wall beside her bed and wondered if Sarah, whom she’d always thought knew everything, knew people could be homosexual. How could she know, with her cloistered existence? Marianne would probably never have made the discovery if she hadn’t joined up. In some ways being in the Services was better than going to university. It taught you about life.
“Oh well, off wiv me passion-killers!” Birdie said, divesting herself of her pink cotton brassière and khaki knickers.
Marianne watched her rummage in her kitbag for the saucy black lingerie she kept hidden there.
Joyce was getting her spare skirt from beneath her mattress, where she had laid it to be pressed into four sharp pleats, the way all the girls did. “I dunno why yer bovvers,” she said to Birdie. “Nobody sees yer undies in the dark.”
“I bought ’em on the black market fer me ’oneymoon an’ they could rot wiv age before my Bert gets annuver leave, bless ’is lickle bell-bottom trousers. I might as well wear ’em art.” Birdie lit a Chesterfield and showered herself and the room with the Chanel Number Five talc she had recently received from a US sergeant. “Private Dent in the ’ouse next door fell darn the stairs last night, did you ’ear abart it, Marianne?”
Marianne shook her head.
“Fell my arse!” Joyce snorted. “If yer ask me, she jumped. But she still ’ad a face like a fiddle terday, so it couldn’t’ve brought on a miscarriage.”
“Serve ’er right if she ends up discharged under Para Eleven,” Birdie declared, citing the dreaded King’s Regulation that provided for pregnant girls to be released from the Service. “Like Lance-Corporal Donnelly was. She never took my advice, neither. I even hoffered both of ’em a dollop o’ me own gin ter boil up wiv vinegar an’ swaller, but they said it’d make ’em spew up.”
“Why didn’t they make the men take precautions?” Marianne pondered.
“’cause they’re simple country girls what knows nothing,” Birdie said loftily.
Like I was a simple city girl before I met you, Marianne mused wryly. She had thought the GI she’d heard ask his friend to lend him a rubber had meant an eraser until Birdie put her wise.
“But Dent’s even greener than Donnelly,” Joyce giggled, smoothing on a pair of forbidden, sheer silk stockings and kicking her hideous, thick khaki ones into a corner. “Whoever it was what knocked er up, told ’er fuckin’ was safe so long as she peed right arterwards, an’ she believed ’im!”
Marianne, who had once thought knocked-up meant being roused from sleep in the morning, averted her eyes. Had Joyce used language like that in civvy street? Probably not. She had told Marianne she was a virgin when she joined up and had sung in the church choir. And Birdie would probably not have been unfaithful to her husband if she’d married him in peacetime. Everyone said war brought out the best in people, made them unselfish and united them in a common cause, but it brought out the bad in them, too. It had transformed Martin into a killer and girls like Birdie and Joyce into the next-best-thing to whores. But she wouldn’t let it change her.
The other two exchanged a glance. Marianne’s thoughtful silences were apt to make them feel uncomfortable.
“What’s up, cock?” Birdie asked. “Finkin’ up anuvver story, are yer?”
She had told them she wanted to be a writer and they sometimes found her scribbling when they returned after a night out, which had inspired them with a grudging respect.
“She’s finkin’ of ’er bruvver what’s missin’ in haction, yer clot!” Joyce exclaimed.
Marianne felt ashamed because she hadn’t thought of Harry for at least half-an-hour.
“Mopin’ won’t do ’er nor ’im an ’apporth o’good,” Birdie declared and went to put a kindly hand on Marianne’s shoulder. “Come art wiv us ternight, cock. We’re on the loose as it ’appens, them blokes we was datin’ moved art today. We’ll go ter one o’ the dances darn the barracks ’n if you don’t meet a GI yer fancies, Joycie’n me won’t let anyone take us ’ome. We’ll stick wiv yer ’n all walk back together.”
For an “At” to return up the hill alone at night was asking for trouble. Drunken soldiers could be waiting to waylay her and one girl who had braved it had had to hit one on the head with the bottle of Coke she was carrying, to escape being raped.
“We won’t leave yer on yer hown, Marianne,” Joyce echoed. “’We’re yer mates.”
“An’ we can manage wivout our slap’n tickle fer one night,” Birdie smiled. “If we ’ave ter.”
They were both painstakingly arrayed for their outing and had no doubt intended to find a couple of replacements for the boy-friends who had been shipped out. Marianne knew their offer was a real sacrifice, but she didn’t want to go with them. She surveyed Birdie’s bloodshot, blue eyes, the lashes caked with mascara, and the tiny, gin-swiller’s broken veins on her small, florid face above which a towering bird’s-nest of peroxide-blonde hair was crowned by an ATS forage cap.
Joyce was tapping her foot impatiently, her hour-glass figure encased in a uniform she had altered to fit her like a second skin.
“’Ow abart it, Marianne?” she demanded, licking off some of the purple lipstick that was too strident for her mousey colouring and made her look as if she suffered from heart disease. “Standin’ abart like this is a waste of good Joycie’n Birdie if yer haint comin’.”
“’Course she’s comin’,” Birdie insisted. “But she’d better do ’erself up, or we’re not takin’ ’er.”
Marianne rose from her bed reluctantly and gave them each a slice of strudel to eat whilst they waited for her to dress. What would Esther Klein say if she knew her precious daughter was about to go out on the tiles with these girls? Her experiences of nights-out with Joyce and Birdie could not be described any other way. But there was no point in her having left home if she was going to let the family control her by proxy; it was time she got them out of her system. And maybe she would meet a nice American Jewish boy at the dance, whose morals had remained as intact as hers had, war or no war.