TWENTY-ONE

Aldershot, March 1916

‘Ladies!’ the voice shouted. They were in a gym hall in a girls’ school in Aldershot, lined up in borrowed uniforms because theirs still had not arrived. ‘About turn!’

‘I didn’t think we’d be doing any walking,’ said the girl behind her. ‘I thought we were supposed to be driving.’ Celia ignored her. She was struggling to keep up with the commands. Turn right, turn left, backwards, forwards, stand and turn. They were one great snake of girls marching around the hall and she dreaded being the part to drop out and spoil the whole. Memories of gym class came flashing back, even though she tried to force them to stay away. She saw herself, twelve again and clumsy, the last to be picked to go into the teams, getting her feet mixed up in the lacrosse classes. ‘Forward!’ shouted the commandant at the front. Celia felt pricklings of the same shameful thought she had had at school: the hope that someone else would fall over so she would not be the one to fail. She tried to follow the feet of the girl in front exactly, the step of her brand-new boots.

‘Pause!’ cried the commandant. Her uniform was sharper than any of the rest of them. Celia felt hopeful that it might be time for tea. ‘About turn!’

‘That’s someone who enjoys her power,’ said the girl behind her. Her voice was almost as elevated as Miss Ebert’s, the headmistress of Winterbourne. Celia looked at her quickly: small, dark-haired, the kind of person her old art teacher Miss Quinn would have called ‘elfin’. Not pretty, exactly – although it was hard to be pretty in the uniform – for the girl’s nose and chin protruded too much, but her eyes were bright like clean windows. She smiled at Celia before she could look away. ‘My names Shepherd. Yours?’

‘No talking over there!’ shouted the commandant. ‘March!’

Three hours later, they were ushered off to eat at the makeshift canteen. ‘No talking on the way!’ shouted the commandant. Celia marched with the other girls, trying to keep up again. They lined up in a room full of benches and tables that didn’t look like any school dining room Celia had ever seen. She received a plate of stew on a chipped plate and looked uncertainly around the room. Dozens of girls in uniforms, different groups she supposed. She presumed she should sit next to the girl who had been marching in front of her, but she had been so busy staring at her feet that she had no idea what she looked like. She gazed at the spaces on the tables, feeling like the new girl at Winterbourne again.

She felt a hand on her arm. ‘There’s a space over there,’ came the voice of the girl who had been behind her. She gestured at a table to the left. ‘Let’s take it before anyone else does.’ She hurried forward and Celia followed her. They perched on the end of a table of girls who seemed to know each other, talking intently.

The girl held out her hand over their plates. ‘Shepherd’s the name, as I said. Elizabeth. And you?’

‘Emmeline Witt.’ So easy to say, yet it felt so wrong in her mouth, just like those nights in front of the mirror in her room. But Miss Shepherd forged on.

‘And what brings you here, Miss Witt?’

‘I – er – wanted to help. I wanted to do writing things. They asked me at the recruitment station if I could drive. Something about my father being in business.’ Celia blushed again. It had been simple enough to fool two middle-aged ladies in pearls. But surely girls her own age would guess. The key, surely, was to be as quiet as possible. She had never managed ‘speaking until you were spoken to’ when she was a child. It was time to start.

‘Ah yes, that would be right.’ Shepherd spooned up some stew. ‘We posh ladies know how to drive, that’s what they think here. And of course we wouldn’t want such a dirty thing as money. You know, there are more titled girls in here than a debutante ball. Someone needs to tell the War Office that earls’ daughters get driven around by chauffeurs.’

Celia leant close. ‘But I don’t know how to drive. I’ve only done it once, with my brother. My – er – younger brother.’

‘Hmm. Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine. I doubt half the girls in here have ever got behind a wheel. There are probably a million factory girls who can drive better than us.’

Celia looked around nervously. It seemed a rather daring thing to say. ‘I thought I might be writing things. Or maybe even chopping for cooking.’

‘A cook? You? An English rose with a boarding school accent?’ Shepherd smiled. ‘Anyway, whose daughter are you? The Marquis of Bath?’

Celia knew she should have said, Actually my father is German. She blushed, didn’t. ‘My father is just a businessman. He – er – imports things.’

‘Mine’s in business too. See, we have that in common. Number one, we are both over twenty-one and not married. Number two, our fathers work in trade. Most of the girls here have landed money, I’ll bet. Mine makes rivets for ships. He says he’s never been so busy since the war began.’

Celia blushed again, knowing she should talk about the meat factories. ‘We live in Hampshire.’

‘Quite so. I think half of this room probably lives there, or in Kensington in some huge pile.’

‘Why did you volunteer?’ asked Celia, wanting to take the lead off her.

Shepherd shrugged. ‘Anything is better than being at home. And I like driving. I wouldn’t have done anything else. My eldest brother taught the rest of us, mad keen on it he was. We used to drive all over the land of the neighbouring farms.’

‘How many brothers do you have?’

‘Four. Four brothers and me. I’m the youngest. Two married. They’re all in France. I tried to drive after they left, but I only cried. So I decided to come here.’ She swallowed some stew. ‘Ugh, gristle. I wish we would get to the driving, you know. I’d hardly call this training.’

Celia’s heart lurched. Boarding the train at the station after Thompson had left her, she had been hot with excitement: she had done it. She had stolen her sister’s birth certificate and she had done it. Then, as the green fields turned to the brown of the factories and warehouses outside London, she felt tears splattering down her face. The look on Verena’s face when she said she was going, the crumbs of ginger cake on the plate, her mother fallen into the sofa, hair awry.

‘Why do things have to change?’ she said, out loud in the compartment, and then again because there was no one to hear. ‘I am going to help my father,’ she said, trying to be calm. Still the tears rolled, until they drew closer to London, when a woman with four noisy children got in next to her and she pretended to have a cold. ‘There’s no going back now!’ she said, and reddened as they stared at her, told them she was practising a play.

‘What did you say, Miss Witt?’

Celia blushed. She had spoken out loud. ‘Sorry. I meant to say … my brother is in France. And my … friend. Do you think we might go near them?’

‘Is that why you’re here? Not a chance. There are thousands out there. All underground like moles.’

Celia looked at her plate.

Shepherd squeezed her arm. ‘Don’t be down. Listen, Miss Witt, I believe in saying what I think. So I shall ask you now – shall we be friends? We could stick together. I could do with a friend and you are just my type.’

Celia blushed with pleasure. ‘Of course!’

‘I knew the minute I saw you we were going to be friends. I had a friend just like you in school called Claire. I know we are going to do well together. I am an excellent friend, you know. I am always very helpful, I tell good jokes and I’ll never laugh at you. Sometimes, though, I get a bit overexcited and can’t stop laughing. Claire said it was very annoying.’ She nodded. ‘What about you? How are you good and bad as a friend? I think it’s useful to know, we have so little time.’

‘I am a thoughtful friend. But I sometimes think too much. I get stuck with thoughts in my mind.’

‘Oh good. You are just like Claire. I try not to think too hard, so I’ll help you.’

‘I don’t think we should call each other miss, if we are friends. What about … Emmy?’

‘I think it’s surnames only, that’s the form. Why don’t you call me Shep? That’s what they did at school. I’ll call you Witt if you do.’

Celia nodded. It would certainly be easier to be called Witt, she thought, remembering the nights by the mirror. ‘Come here, Emmeline!’ she’d said, and then looked around for her sister.

The bell rang and the girls started stumbling to their feet. ‘Lesson time,’ said a strong-looking girl next to them. ‘Try not to fall asleep after your nice big lunch, new girls.’

That afternoon, they sat in a classroom at desks that were far too small and watched the commandant talk about spanners and mechanics. Then it was another plate of stew, and sleep, before the whole process was repeated. The place confused her, too many feet and people, voices. When she felt tired and cowardly, eager just to lie in bed and never get up, she thought of Tom. He had said she could never make tea, back in those days. She would show him. She would march in the right direction and learn to drive – and be good at it.

In the daytime, she clung tight to Shep, sometimes so much so that she worried the other girl would find her tiresome. She knew, of course, that it was most likely they would be split up and sent to different stations, but she could not help feeling Shep was her talisman: if she followed her and did everything she did, she would not get anything wrong – or at least would be less likely to. Shep looked like a little dark-haired fairy, but it was deceptive: she was confident, knew her way around immediately. Two nights in, she told Celia that she had been secretly preparing for the exams to study history at Oxford. ‘Although I don’t know how Papa would have let me. He thinks that all the world needs is rivets.’ Celia said she had been thinking of going to Cambridge, but her mother had asked her to wait for a few years. ‘It’s true! We have so much in common,’ said Shep, clutching her arm. ‘Funny, though, my best friends are usually youngest children, like me. Whereas you are the third of four.’

Celia blushed. ‘I often felt like the youngest.’

‘There it is, then!’

Shep loved telling jokes, awful jokes, Celia had to admit. ‘What do you do to help a lemon?’

‘I know this one!’

‘But I want to tell it. Lemonade!’

‘That’s the last time I’m listening to it.’

At night, in the dormitory, under the mass of sleep sounds, Celia listened out for Shep’s gentle sighs. Then, only then, could she sleep.

In the second week, they devoted themselves to engine fixing. To her surprise, Celia found it astonishingly easy.

‘No, you do it like this,’ she said to Shep as she stood over her, all of them on the school playing field with practice engines on canvases on the ground. ‘Put the screw in here. You know, just as she showed us in the diagram.’

‘The screw doesn’t go there. That isn’t right.’

‘Yes it does. See.’ Celia pushed it in. She gazed more closely at the engine. ‘Shep, what have you done? Look, this engine is completely out.’ She began pulling off the bolts. ‘Everything’s in the wrong place. Let me do it.’

‘I just don’t understand it. How is the picture on the wall the same as this? It doesn’t look similar in any way.’ Celia smiled and began screwing the bolts back the way they were supposed to be.

‘What’s going on over there?’ called the commandant. ‘Witt, are you helping Shepherd?’

‘No!’ Celia screwed on the last bolt and popped her head up. ‘Just admiring her work, Commandant.’

*

When it came to driving, Shep got her own back.

‘It’s just practice,’ she said, over and over. ‘After all, Witty, you’ve only driven once. I did it hundreds of times.’

‘It’s all right for you.’ Shep could do anything: reverse, turn the car around, even take corners just using the brakes. She went fast, well over fifteen miles an hour faster than they were told. ‘Stop that!’ roared the commandant across the training track. ‘Shepherd, stop that immediately!’

But she was blustering, for when it came to the track, Shep was her favourite. ‘Oh, I give up on you,’ she said to Celia. ‘Why don’t you go out with Miss Shepherd and let her show you the ropes?’

‘Shep, it just does what you want,’ said Celia as they twisted around another corner. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Pretend it’s a horse.’ Almost the same words Michael had used when he’d taught her to drive that afternoon in Stoneythorpe. ‘Cars are like horses, you know. You have to show them that you’re in charge.’

‘But I’m not in charge.’ Celia pressed the pedal and the thing sprang forward with such force that Shep fell back against the seat.

‘Pretend!’

Celia tugged the gearstick, but it wouldn’t go into the right spot. ‘I can’t!’

‘Do you want to go home?’

Celia gave her a quick look, wondering whether she had guessed. As she did so, the car lurched out of line.

‘Witt!’ screamed the commandant.

Celia stopped the car and waited for the commandant to stalk over. ‘Blame the engine,’ said Shep.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I wish we could request to be sent to the same station.’

Shep patted her hand. ‘I’ll write to you. Come on, better jump out and face the music. It’s not as if you haven’t heard it before.’

*

Two weeks later, Celia scraped through the test; she had a good score on the theoretical but barely got through the practical part. ‘Only just a pass, Miss Witt.’ The commandant sat in the office tapping her pen. ‘You really are the slowest and most uncertain driver I have seen for months. Anyone would think you hadn’t done it before. And at times you seem very young for twenty-one.’

Celia nodded.

‘You are a good mechanic, Miss Witt, that is not in doubt. But there is more to the job than knowing which part goes where. If you were an easily flustered type, I wouldn’t send you. But you are calm and they need girls out there. Don’t let me down.’

Celia shook her head. ‘I won’t. I promise.’ After all she had done, to then be sent home, not good enough, would be terrible.

The commandant took off her glasses, drummed her fingers on the table. ‘Miss Witt,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t doubt you have the enthusiasm.’ She fiddled with her glasses. ‘You are dismissed.’

Celia stood up, saluted and started towards the door. Then the commandant’s voice. ‘Miss Witt!’ She turned around. ‘I have an idea. I feel our best chance of success with you is if you go with girls you know from here. With some it is the opposite. I shall put in a request for you to be transferred with Shepherd if possible, even perhaps the others.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Rest assured, this is not favouritism, Witt. Far from it. Remember what I said. I am counting on you to do your job well.’

‘Yes, Commandant,’ said Celia, breathlessly, knowing it was wrong of her to feel so happy. She wanted to kiss the commandant on the cheek, hurried out of the room before the urge became too strong.

‘We’re together!’ she hissed to Shep that evening. ‘The commandant said we could go together! Mainly because I’m such a bad driver.’

Shep caught her hands and whirled her around the tiny space between the beds. ‘You clever thing, Witt. I knew that your hopeless gear changes would come in handy.’ They spun around again and then fell on to the bed, giggling. Someone from another bed told them to be quiet.

Shep lowered her voice. ‘We are friends for ever now that we are going to France together. Now I will tell you a secret, if you tell me one back.’ She hurtled on, putting her mouth close to Celia’s ear. ‘I won’t tell the other girls, but father is Jewish. I know, I don’t look it, do I? I put on a good show, eating the same as you lot. But I don’t always feel it as mother isn’t really Jewish. I could be Church of England, like you, just as easily. I’ll say the prayers – but you know. That’s the reason I am twenty-one and not married. The suitors don’t like it.’

Celia’s face was hot. Here was her chance to say I am German, my father is incarcerated, I am not yet eighteen.

‘Go on. What’s your secret?’

‘I think I’m in love with a boy who … worked for our family. I thought we were just friends, that we’d be friends for ever. But now I think I would never want to be parted from him if we met again.’ And just as she said it, the words were true. That was it. She had read about love – they were always in love in Jane Austen – but she could not grasp what it meant. The emotion they felt in books, so pure and overwhelming, was something she could not feel, because nothing was ever a total feeling to her; there was always something else peering in at the sides. And she still did not exactly feel that. But she wanted to be always with Tom, even if they never went to Paris, and that was surely a type of love, a bit like Captain Wentworth always thinking of Anne.

‘So that’s why you’re not married. I knew there was something! Where’s he now? In France too?’

Celia nodded. Her mind was flurrying with strange ideas. Did she have to marry him? Have babies with him? None of that seemed so terrible as having to tell him. Would she have to do that? Surely so. He couldn’t be on the front line with all the other soldiers and not know. She wished she could sit down and turn herself into a list – what she felt, what she desired, written in a notebook with ruled lines. But instead she was a jumble of thoughts, scribbled all over the page. If she saw him, maybe they would become clear, she thought.

Shep laughed. ‘He’d be proud of you. You never know, we might see him out there. Better keep up with washing your hair just in case, Miss Witt.’

Celia nodded. Maybe, after the war was over, they wouldn’t come back. They would live together in Paris and be best friends and there wouldn’t be any babies because she would keep her gown on.

‘Will you two stop whispering?’ shouted the girl from the other side. ‘We have to be up early to leave in the morning. Or have you forgotten?’

They caught the train to Dover with English and Dartington, two stolid girls who had been always together in Aldershot. ‘The female Tweedledum and Tweedledee,’ Shep called them. None of them really felt like talking, so Shep took out her cards and taught them twenty-one, winning every time. ‘I should do this for money,’ she said. Celia sat there, still feeling dizzy with her thoughts from the night before. The splash of clarity, the spark of it all shocked her. She loved Tom. And if she loved him, if she felt that way about him, he must surely love her back.

At Dover, a girl called Warterton approached them in the queue. ‘I hear I’m in a group with you chaps,’ she said to Shep. ‘I got the info ahead of time. This is Genevieve Fitzhugh.’ She waved her hand at a tall girl with reddish hair and a very wide, pale face. Warterton was big too, but blonde and round-faced, the sort of person, Celia thought sinkingly, always chosen to be head girl. They all shook hands.

On the boat, Warterton alternated between talking, sleeping and eating. ‘Don’t you ever just sit and stare out of the window?’ Shep asked, exasperated.

‘Mother says people shouldn’t waste their time.’

They were treated to quite a lot of what Mother thought. As they learned, Father had worked for a mining company in Africa and Mother knew a lot about life in dirty climates. There were lots of fleas in Nigeria, so Warterton was ready for that. Mother was a great recruiter of men, and so the minute Warterton had turned of age, she had gone to the recruitment bureau. ‘Women must do their bit!’ she said to them.

‘Well, we are! You’re preaching to the wrong lot,’ said Shep.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee both whispered, one after the other, that they had brothers in France and wanted to help. Warterton said she had delayed her coming-out year so long, and now she was hoping that by coming here she had avoided it altogether. ‘I look like a great dancing umbrella in those gowns,’ she said. ‘Much better in uniform.’

Fitzhugh spent most of the time asleep. ‘She’s the daughter of an earl,’ hissed Warterton. ‘She’s Genevieve, Lady Fitzhugh. Says she would much prefer to be here doing something useful than on the debutante circuit.’

‘But this is a debutante circuit,’ said Shep.

Warterton shook her head. ‘Nonsense. Oh look,’ she said as the train rattled along. ‘Chinamen.’ Celia opened her eyes and saw groups of Chinese labourers building huts, three men in khaki overseeing them. She had only ever seen a Chinaman in London; three of them, near a shop in Oxford Street when she had been with Emmeline. These ones were dressed in shirts and trousers, thin shoes, piling up stacks of wood. ‘We should be nearly there, then.’

Celia pressed her face close to the window, watching the men.