Edna the taxi driver returned to pick up the hitchhiker. She did so out of simple kindness, and in no expectation of reward. The night was dark, the girl was young.
‘Silly old fart,’ she said of her last customer.
The girl unwound her yellow and brown knitted scarf in the warmth of the car. She had a lean, young face, stern rather than pretty, quick blue eyes and frizzed out hair of no particular colour. She said her name was Medusa, but people called her Mew.
‘That’s a funny name,’ said Edna.
The girl explained that her mother had been a Greek scholar who took the view that Medusa was Jason’s victim, and that serving him his own children in a pie was no less than he deserved. The mother had called her daughter after her favourite person.
‘I see,’ said Edna. But Mew thought she probably didn’t. Mew’s mother was a feminist. That too runs in the blood, not the brain.
‘My poor mother,’ said Mew. ‘They put her in a nut house, in the end. And it wasn’t even as if she got Medusa right. Jason’s girlfriend was Medea. Is it far to the Academy? I ran out of petrol.’
‘A couple of miles,’ said Edna. ‘But I’ll take you for free. No skin off my nose. What’s your business at Shrapnel?’ It was a puzzle. The girl was white, and so was hardly likely to be on the domestic staff of the Shrapnel Academy. And not having the gloss that money and power gives, she could hardly be a guest: nor could she be one of the students, for they were always male: nor one of the teaching staff, for they spoke with the soft authority of the privileged classes. This girl’s voice had a workaday, anxious twang.
‘I’m a journalist,’ said the girl. ‘Someone’s making a speech there tomorrow. Some general.’
Edna did not believe her. This was not, in her experience, how journalists looked and behaved. They did not wind themselves in woolly scarves, ride motorbikes and run out of petrol.
‘You don’t believe me,’ said the girl, ‘but it’s true. I’m on the staff of the Woman’s Times. It’s a new daily newspaper. Feminist. Have you heard of it?’
Edna hadn’t. How fast the world changed. One moment women stayed at home and baked steak and kidney pie; the next they drove taxis, published newspapers, and beef was bad for you and pastry worse.
‘If you give me your address,’ said Mew, ‘I’ll send you a copy of the Times. You really ought to read it. Every woman should. It will explain so much to you!’
Edna said she knew more than enough already. She sneezed and eased out a damp tissue from beneath the cuff of her sleeve and dabbed at her nose, which was bright pink and painful around the nostrils. She changed her mind and tucked back the tissue and sniffed up instead; it hurt less and was more efficacious, if noisier, and the girl was getting a free ride.
‘Is that it?’ asked the girl in alarm, when she saw the spotlit splendour of the Academy, and its flag flying proudly through the blizzard. She had assumed, on accepting the assignment, that she would be visiting some local College of Further Education, tucked somewhere at the back of a High Street in a country town. Mew had not envisaged anything so grand, nor anywhere so remote as this. She knew nothing about the army. How could she? Why should she?
‘That’s it,’ said Edna. ‘That’s the Shrapnel Academy, and thank God for it. It keeps the taxi-rank in business. We’d all be bankrupt otherwise.’
The taxi’s wheels stuck and spun in soft snow as Edna reversed and set off home. The sky was clearing; she could even see a star sparkling above the trees. If the snow stopped falling and then froze on the ground, and then started again, as the weather forecast suggested, there would be a hard weekend ahead on the roads.