ELSPETH BREATHED ON her fingers. They were stiff, so cold they ached – a constant dull throb. It was a bright clear November day, but bitter. She reckoned the temperature was below zero. Still, it wasn’t raining, or snowing – there was always something to be glad about.
Above her two buzzards, floating on wind thermals so high they were distant specks, claimed their patch of the sky. Elspeth stopped to watch them and felt a brief pang of envy. If she’d stuck at her flying lessons, as Izzy had, that’s where she might be – up there looking down on all of this, miles and miles of forest stretching all shades of green and brown up the hillside. It would be especially wonderful today for it was clear. Usually the hilltops and the mountains beyond were draped in mist.
Learning to fly had been one of her many grand ideas. Amy Johnson was her heroine. She’d taken lessons at Scone airfield and being in the air had thrilled her. ‘I could get my own plane and fly to America,’ she’d said. On the bus going home, after her first flight, Elspeth had expounded to Izzy on the joys of being in the air. ‘It’s definitely as good as sex.’ Izzy had looked at her dumbly. At the time, she’d known nothing about sex.
A year after the war started, Elspeth, having abandoned flying for another notion – she was prone to flitting from notion to notion – had joined the Women’s Timber Corps, become a lumber jill. The things she knew now amazed her. Me, she thought, doing all this. Well, goodness.
She’d learned about forests and how to cut them down. She knew how to operate a cross-cut saw and fell trees so that they did not fall back into the forest when they groaned and crashed to the ground. She could swing a six-pound axe and strip the trees of their branches. It was hard, hard work. No, not work, she thought, it’s graft and sweat and tears. But she was fitter than she’d ever been, not an ounce of fat on her. Her body was trim, muscled. She was proud of this.
At night, in her army cot under her two regulation scratchy grey blankets, she’d run her hands over her new perfect sinewy thighs and think that this experience had at least done some good.
At first, she’d ached all over. Everything hurt – muscles and bones. The cold and winter damp seeped into her. But mostly the pain she felt was the cruel complaining of long dormant muscles being stirred, suddenly and mercilessly, into everyday action. She groaned in the morning getting out of bed and would creakily, painfully, pull on her workman’s dungarees. She’d hobble over the duckboards outside to the lavatories, legs, feet, arms groaning with her as she moved. At breakfast, in the wooden dining hut, it hurt to lift her porridge spoon to her lips. It hurt to sit, hurt to stand. But then, she told herself, that’s what happens when you start to use your body and not your mind. The body screams in protest.
Till now, she thought, I taught music. I sat listening to reluctant children thumping out begrudging scales for hours each day. Now, I know what work, real work, is. I have learned about life. Real life. And I have endured.
But now she would go. She’d applied to join the Red Cross. She would leave this forest, north of Inverness, miles and miles from anywhere. A wilderness, she thought. Nothing like the polite woods back home where she and her good friend Izzy used to stroll, and sometimes sit drinking tea from a Thermos flask, listening to Mahler on the wind-up gramophone she’d lug along.
Soon, she would take the train south, back to her cottage. She would spend a week there, have hot baths and sleep between soft clean cotton sheets. Bliss.
As she worked, she thought about the letter from Izzy. In it, Izzy had told her about The Letter. Izzy was worried that now her father would know that she had slept with a man.
Elspeth would reply tonight telling Izzy she was a big girl now and could do as she liked with her own life. She would say it was time for Izzy to tell her father about her job, her boyfriends, her loss of faith – everything. ‘It’ll come out one day,’ she said to herself. ‘Can’t keep on lying.’ Sometimes she despaired of Izzy. She thought that at times Izzy seemed to be almost crazed with doubts and fears. ‘You’ve got to stop keeping your true self a secret,’ Elspeth planned to tell her.
Right now, Elspeth was breathing in the scents of peaty wind coming down from the hills, pine and freshly cut wood. She was watching buzzards and somewhere, not far away, an Italian POW was singing something from Rigoletto.
‘So,’ she suddenly said to Lorna who was standing nearby, ‘what are you doing for Christmas?’
‘Well,’ said Lorna. ‘I had thought I might spend a relaxing day, opening presents, sitting by the fire listening to the wireless, eating too much. Then, I thought, no I’ll go into the forest and chop down some trees. I’ll get bleedin’ cold, I’ll smell the shit from these horses trotting up and down pulling logs, I’ll get sore and cut by pine needles and shouted at by that Duncan Bowman. That will be a grand way to celebrate Jesus’ birthday.’
‘I think I may join you. I will forgo the meal at a posh hotel served by flunkies wearing white gloves, the long-stemmed glasses of chilled champagne, the glistening golden turkey stuffed with crumbling apricots and chestnuts, the gleaming nubby Brussels sprouts, roast potatoes – crisp on the outside, melting soft within – the hot, rich gravy, the creamy bread sauce, cheeky little chipolata sausages, all of that. I will come up here into the bitter winter chill and chop down trees.’
They had been told earlier that morning that, no, they would not be getting Christmas day off, they would be working as usual. There was a war on, and there was no time for Christmas.
‘Bleedin’ hell, is that how you used to spend Christmas before you came here?’ asked Lorna. ‘You’re too posh for me. We used to get a little present, something shiny, a sixpence and an apple. Then, if my dad was working, we’d have a chicken, but he usually wasn’t, so it was sausages.’
This shamed Elspeth. The hotel and the white-gloved flunkies were imagined, but champagne and glistening turkeys had always been part of her Christmases at home. Until this moment, it hadn’t crossed her mind that some people’s celebrations were not very lavish. Indeed, they were frugal. ‘I like sausages,’ she said. ‘Turkey can be dry, sausages are always good.’
Lorna said she knew that, ‘But, tell me again. Not about coming up here, about the meal, only missing out the Brussels sprouts.’
‘No,’ said Elspeth. ‘It’s wonderful up here.’
‘It’s bloody freezin’,’ said Lorna.
‘It’s fresh,’ said Elspeth. ‘Good healthy weather.’ She stopped breathing on her fingers and shoved her hands into her armpits, her warmest available part. ‘A moment like this is as near to perfection as a person could get. We are in the depth of a forest, far from anywhere, surrounded by nature and a tenor is singing. Marvellous.’ Well, she thought, I would think it marvellous. I always love a place or a person with all my heart just before I leave them.
Lorna said something like ‘harrumph’ and the boss shouted, ‘Moon!’
She looked across at him. Duncan Bowman was standing, arms on hips, scowling. He waved at her to stop her prattling and get on with her work. Elspeth gave him a swift salute.
Duncan never did speak much. Well, not to the women, anyway. He didn’t like them. Not here, working in his forest, felling his trees. It was their voices, the way they sang as they worked, their jokes, the high-pitched laughter, that irritated him. Like an itch he could do nothing about.
He’d worked for the Forestry for nigh on forty years now. ‘Man and boy,’ he said, ‘started when I was fourteen.’ He used to think he’d seen everything. Then the war started, his co-workers had joined up and been replaced by women, and he knew he hadn’t.
He’d grown used to working with men. He respected men, you couldn’t respect a woman, well, not at work, you couldn’t. He could see they could do the job as well as any man. Except that they looked strange swinging an axe, or working the saw. Their problem was, he concluded, that they just weren’t manly. He felt he couldn’t be the man he really was when women were around. He couldn’t spit, or swear. He just didn’t want them here, talking about their boyfriends, lipstick and how they fancied Gregory Peck, and, sometimes, bursting into tears because they were cold or their blisters burst.
‘We don’t cry!’ he shouted. ‘Foresters don’t cry. Stop it.’
Once, that Elspeth one had said it was a shame to see lovely trees chopped down in their prime.
God, the stupidity of the woman. ‘These aren’t trees any more. They are telegraph poles, pit props, ships’ masts, road blocks.’ He’d shoved his face close to hers. ‘They are crosses for dead soldiers.’ That had shut her up. She’d even blushed. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Better get used to them. All the good men gone. There’s a war on. What can you do?’
Now, Elspeth, head down and working her way up the tree trunk, removing branches, pine needles thick against her fingers, breathing in the strong scent of resin, said, ‘The way he yells your last name does have an unsettling effect on the digestive system. I get butterflies. I think I might fart.’
Then, hoping he didn’t think her salute impudent, she took up her axe and continued snedding. ‘There was a time when I didn’t even know what bloody snedding was. I was happy then.’
‘Thought you was happy now. You just said this was marvellous.’
‘It was a happy moment: the buzzards, the smells, the tenor singing. I wasn’t including the snedding.’
Lorna, bending over the tree, hacking at branches, said, ‘If you’d kept yer bloody mouth shut when we were training, you’d be doin’ something else.’
Elspeth knew this to be true. Her big ambition had been to work with the horses that dragged the felled logs to the clearing by the road to be loaded onto trucks. But her lip had led to this dreadful job.
When she joined the Land Army, she’d asked to be sent to work for the Timber Corps as a lumberjill. She had a notion of herself in a plaid shirt. But, on arrival at the training camp, she’d been issued with a uniform – riding breeches, green pullover, beige shirt, green tie, melton coat, green beret with a badge with a tree on it, long woollen socks and stout leather boots – that didn’t include anything plaid at all. Still, she thought it wonderful. She imagined herself striding through the village back home wearing this outfit, and being admired by one and all. ‘I’m a lumberjill,’ she’d say. And people would think her splendid.
She was also given dungarees and wellington boots. This is what she wore, day in day out.
On her first day of training, after a dire and sleepless night on an army cot in a row of army cots, in an unheated hut along with twenty other trainees, she was handed a six-pound axe that she could hardly lift.
‘Are these the only axes you have?’ she’d asked. ‘These are surely for men. Don’t you have ladies’ axes?’
Her instructor hadn’t bothered to answer, and had set off up the forest track. The girls, welly boots scraping and squelching in the mud, bent under the weight of the axes that they had struggled to sling over their shoulders, had followed. They exchanged horrified glances. They all knew now that this had been a Big Mistake.
He only led them a few yards to a truck that would take them to the part of the forest where their training was to begin. It lasted four gruelling weeks. At the end of every day they’d had to walk back to their base, six or seven miles. Elspeth not only had stiff and groaning muscles, she had blisters on her feet and hands.
She’d learned how to chop down trees, how to use a cross-cut saw, how to measure timber for pit props, how to load logs onto a truck and snedding.
Snedding was her downfall. It was the word. She’d never heard it before. So when instructor had said, ‘Today, yer going to learn the snedding,’ she’d sniggered. ‘Sounds like something naughty. Oooh, we went into the woods and did a little snedding.’ She’d wiggled her hips as she said it. And the other girls had joined in the sniggering.
‘You.’ The instructor pointed at her – a rigid derogatory finger. ‘You can help me demonstrate.’ He was standing beside a felled tree and was about to show the girls how to cut off its branches, where to stand, how to stand, how to work from the base up and how to stop the emerging log from rolling on top of you. He wasn’t happy about working with women. Didn’t think they had the strength for man’s work.
Elspeth’s remark enraged him. He handed her an axe and a billhook, told her to work her way through the branches, stand on the opposite side of the trunk from where she was cutting.
‘Perhaps,’ Elspeth had said, ‘this is not for me. I’m thinking about my hands. I’m a musician, you see.’ She held them out for him to admire their softness.
He hadn’t answered verbally. He’d just looked at her. A look that said he thought her as disgusting as something he might find on the sole of his boot.
Her training behind her, and now working here in the forest beyond Inverness, she was still snedding. In rain, wind, snow, sleet and hail, she snedded. It was a punishment.
Now when she looked down at her hands, she hardly recognised them. They were rough, chapped, blistered with a ring of grime embedded under the nails. These are not my hands, she thought. These are not a musician’s hands.
She had brought her accordion with her. In the evenings the girls would gather round the wood-burning stove that heated their hut, and was kept stoked red-hot. They’d come from all over the country. They were shop girls, factory workers, typists, a couple of librarians. Bonded by their suffering – cold, aching bones and homesickness – they’d laugh, tell jokes and silly stories and sing. Most evenings, Elspeth would play. The tunes that filled the room were mostly songs of the day – ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’, ‘Bless ’Em All’ – but sometimes she’d drift into traditional melodies – ‘The Skye Boat Song’, ‘Marie’s Wedding’ – and the girls would hum along, swaying, drifting into their memories.
Years ago, a lifetime ago, Elspeth had worked in Selfridges. She’d loved that job. It had opened up whole new lifestyles to her. At home, her mother and father mostly talked about how busy the Tube had been on her father’s journey home, what the man in the grocer’s had said about the price of ham and what was in the news today. But at work break times the girls would chatter about lipstick, boyfriends, embarrassing things they’d done or said, their brothers and sisters. Their conversations overlapped, they interrupted one another. They giggled a lot. It had taken Elspeth a while to relax and join in. But when she did, there was no stopping her. She felt she belonged with these women.
She felt the same here with her fellow lumberjills. She was one of them. However, her background was far more privileged than any of the others. Lorna, her new best friend, was from Glasgow. She’d lived in a two-roomed flat with her mother and father and four sisters. Elspeth knew that times had been harsh for the family. But when Lorna spoke about life back home, she made it seem fun, rowdy, crowded fun. And, despite herself, Elspeth envied her that.
When Lorna had seen the hut she was to share with the other girls, she’d smiled. ‘Cosy,’ she’d said. She’d spread her arms enjoying the space between the beds. ‘So much room. And a locker of my own. And a whole bed to myself for the first time in my life. Always had to share with my sister.’ Elspeth had grinned at her. Oh, but the pang she felt at the comfortable life she’d led.
When night fell thick, black, there would be scuttlings. Not the swift fervid movements of forest animals – deer, rabbits, mice, foxes – but lovers – girls from the hut, and Newfoundlanders over to help in the war effort, working with the girls, living in log cabins nearby – slipping from their huts to meet and sneak into the trees.
They called their kissing and cuddling ‘canoodling’. Elspeth abstained from this. The consequences of canoodling where dire, she thought. She didn’t want to get sent in disgrace from the camp, pregnant. This had already happened. And would, she was sure, happen time and time again. She would play her accordion, she would work through pain and exhaustion, but love would never touch her.
Now, leaning towards Lorna, she said, ‘What I’d really like to do is work with the horses.’ She looked enviously at Avril, who was running behind Harry, a brown Clydesdale, through the clearing to the road where the logs were stacked onto a truck. Avril jumped stumps, crashed through fern and bracken. And, whenever she heard the shout, ‘TIMBER!’ she scarpered.
‘Up at five,’ said Elspeth, ‘grooming and feeding the horses.’
‘Shovelling shit,’ said Lorna.
Elspeth ignored this. It ruined the dream. ‘Caring for them, chatting. I think they’d like me to sing to them. I’d be good with the horses.’
‘Well,’ said Lorna. ‘The only way you’d get to work with them is to make the boss think you’d hate it more than you hate the snedding. That’s what he’s like – spiteful.’
‘I know,’ said Elspeth. ‘I should learn to keep my mouth shut. I just open it and out come the most inappropriate things. No matter now. I’ll be gone from here soon enough.’
Behind them, two girls were at either end of a cross-cut saw, heaving it to and fro, kneeling on the ground as they worked their way through a tree trunk singing, ‘Daisy, Daisy’.
The whistle blew, a blackened billycan was boiling over a small fire, time for tea. Newfies and the Italian POWs appeared from where they’d been working further in the forest. Calls and wolf whistles.
Tyler Bute, a brawny Newfoundlander who had his eye on Elspeth, called her name. ‘Hey, Ellie, looking beautiful today.’ He waved.
Elspeth trilled her fingers back. Then she slipped her hand into the pocket of her dungarees and fingered a bar of chocolate – a present from Izzy.
Elspeth had written to Izzy:
Darling Izzy,
You will never believe where I am now. I am in the depth of a forest a few miles north of Inverness. I have joined the Women’s Timber Corps. I’m a lumberjill. Fancy that.
Living conditions are rudimentary to say the least. Actually, they’re hellish. There is no electricity here. No plumbing, and the food is quite awful. Though I have to say, after a day working outdoors, I’d eat anything.
Lunch for Elspeth and the rest of the workers was tea and a sandwich. These sandwiches were not the delicate things Elspeth was used to – cucumber, peeled and finely cut and placed between two thin slices of bread – they were thick and contained cheese or grated carrot and, occasionally, beetroot. Still, she ate them with relish.
I have never known hunger like the hunger I feel these days. It gnaws at me. I think this is what life should be like. We should be aching for food when we sit down to eat. I rather fancy I used to nibble too much.
Anyway, darling Izzy, could you please do me a favour? It is October and winter is coming on. It is going to get cold, very, very cold. At the moment I am wearing my silk lingerie under my work dungarees. It reminds me that I’m a woman. But I rather fear this will not do in the months to come. Could you please send me a pair of long johns?
I have no money to send you. I get thirteen shillings a week. And they take money off for our food. Not only am I eating carrot sandwiches, I’m paying to eat them. I will pay you back when all this is over.
But right now, I work five and a half days a week out here in the middle of nowhere – a real wilderness – and rarely get near any shops. What little cash I have I use for the cinema in the village and some fish and chips on a Saturday night. Oh, I do like my Saturday nights.
If you could send me the long johns, I’d be warm, or warmer, in the ice and snow.
Thank you.
All my love, your old friend,
Elspeth
Izzy had sent three pairs of long johns. She’d used her clothes coupons to buy them. She spent most of her time in uniform and rarely bought anything new to wear. She’d also sent several bars of soap, two jars of Ponds cold cream, three pairs of woolly, socks and chocolate.
She wrote:
Don’t worry about the chocolate, we often have to work all day with no time for lunch, so Cadbury’s donate these bars to us. I often forget to eat mine. Will send more, seems like you need it more than me.
Lots of love,
Izzy
Sitting with Lorna on a log to drink their tea, Elspeth broke four squares of chocolate from her bar and gave Lorna two.
‘Chocolate,’ said Lorna putting one square into her mouth, letting the melting sweetness trickle down her throat.
‘I know,’ said Elspeth. ‘Chocolate.’
Tyler shouted, ‘Hey, Ellie, you don’t need chocolate, you’re sweet enough!’
Elspeth shrugged and said, ‘How original.’
Lorna told her not to mock him. ‘He’s lovely. Full of fun.’
Two of the Italian POW sat across from them. One was the tenor – tall, olive-skinned with a mop of dark hair that he would occasionally sweep back from his brow.
‘There’s a man I wouldn’t mind getting to know,’ said Elspeth. ‘Much more my type than that Newfie.’
‘You’re too thin. He says we’re all too thin. He likes his women plump. I’d rather have the Newfie. He’s a laugh.’
Elspeth said it would be a meeting of minds. ‘Me and that tenor. We could talk about music and art.’
‘Minds,’ scoffed Lorna. ‘Who needs minds? If I had a man like that, it wouldn’t be his mind I’d like to meet. I mean, you don’t need a man to think. You can think when you’re alone.’
Elspeth remembered well that at nineteen she, too, had been wise in the ways of men. Confident, too. She wondered what had happened to her. The older she got, the less she knew. The more experience she gained, the more she realised how ignorant she was. At this rate, by the time she reached sixty, she’d be a complete fool. Even more of a fool than she was now – and she considered herself to be an impetuous idiot who’d rushed into a stupid job because she liked the notion of striding through a forest in a plaid shirt, listening to birds singing, the air around her filled with the sweet smell of pine. No-nonsense Lorna was right. Elspeth decided she didn’t need a man. She needed to get out of there.
As she sipped her tea, cupping her hands round her mug, she saw Duncan approach.
‘Too late to bother with any man,’ she said. ‘I’ll be gone from here. Think of me when you’re out in the wind and snow. I’ll be at home in a hot bath. I’ll leave the bathroom door open so I can listen to the wireless as I soak. There’s often good concerts on in the evening on the Home Service.’
Duncan overheard her last few words. ‘And where are you going for your hot bath and your Home Service?’
‘Home,’ said Elspeth. ‘I’ve applied to join the Red Cross in Glasgow. But I’ll spend a few days at my cottage before I go there.’
Duncan snorted. ‘You can get all that baths and Home Service nonsense out of your head. You’re not going anywhere.’