‘I’M NOT GOING, AND I’m not doing poxy brush clearing, and that’s THAT!’ The noise exploded out through the gap in the door of the hut into the woods and Seppe grabbed his hand back.
‘I don’t care if the others are all off. What’s that got to do with it? It’s only me I’m talking about, not the whole lot of us. You have to let me stay and help with the felling.’
Seppe pivoted so that he was beside the hinge of the door, peered through the gap at the commotion. The words weren’t being spoken so much as fired and he understood them about as little as he had the bullets he’d faced in the desert, but their intent was equally clear. How many people were in there? He squinted. Only the two of them, by the looks of things. The way the girl was ranting, he’d expected to see a squadron’s worth of men lined up. She was getting ready to go again, her arms bent like a boxer’s. She was quite stocky, at least in that great big overcoat, and her face was suffused by a frown.
He had happened upon the hut almost by accident after leaving the camp this morning, just needing to get out. As he made his way into the forest, leaves whispered above Seppe’s head, crackled beneath his boots, the ground crunching despite this constant light rain. The world was alive out here, the scent of bud and blossom in every breath a stark contrast to the thud of bombs into sandbanks, or worse, the iron tang of blood and the screams when a shell hit a target. This was a place where you could hide, where you could start again. Hypothetically, this would be a place where he could also run, but for what purpose? No English town would harbour a foreign soldier in their midst, and he’d end up back in the Regio Esercito facing who knew what.
A thought germinated. Could he find work out here? The camp trucks discharged dozens of Italians every day to do the work of those British men away fighting. What a stupid, stupid world they all lived in, that sent men away from this tranquil place to die, only to replace them with their apparent enemies. Not for the first time, Seppe frowned at the senselessness of it all.
He stepped gently onto and over a fallen branch, unsure if it would take his weight. If his father could see him now, on his way to work for the enemy, there would be blows, and rows.
But his father seemed increasingly far away the further into the forest he walked. The trees whispered agreement, branches shifting. His shoulders relaxed, the music bubbled up inside him; he started to hum.
He clambered onto a moss-covered tree stump and stared downhill. Below him in a clearing was what looked like a worksite. An enormous pile of tree trunks was chained together. Two women wearing berets with headscarves underneath them squatted beside a trunk on the ground, beside the pile. They might know who was in charge of allocating the jobs. He scrambled down the bank into the clearing.
‘Where did you spring from?’ The woman at the near side of the trunk dropped her chain and strode forward, smiling. She was young, barely eighteen or nineteen. He pulled off his cap, welcoming the warmth through his fingers.
‘I am looking for …’ Come on. What was the English for what he was looking for? He pointed at the trunk on the ground, then spotted the badge on her beret. A fir tree at its centre glinted in low rays.
‘I work with wood.’
‘Fair enough.’ The girl turned back to her partner, uninterested and seemingly too distracted to pick up on his foreignness. ‘Let’s try this again, shall we?’
Seppe skirted the edge of the clearing. A tin cup lay haphazardly on the floor beside a sawn-off oak stump. He righted it and placed it on the stump where its owner would more likely see it.
Across the clearing was a wooden shack. It would be interesting to see how it was put together. Was it someone’s home? He moved cautiously towards it. It looked like it might fall over in a strong breeze.
The door was slightly ajar. It had been so long since he’d been inside a dwelling that wasn’t an army barracks or a prison camp that the urge to look inside surprised him with its intensity. He glanced around but the girls were busy trying to move their errant tree trunk onto the pile.
Seppe put his hand to the door. It was damp, the grain saturated and bulging. Some kind of pine, not one he’d ever worked with in Livorno. It was splintery in this damp, but it didn’t look like it had warped.
‘I’m telling you, I don’t want to go to Scotland. I’m staying put here, and I want proper work!’ What was happening in Scotland? He couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, only a muttering that rose and fell like tragedy. The girl was in the same uniform as the ones dancing the trunk between the chains, but he couldn’t tell if she’d got a fir tree on her hat, too, because it lay upside down beside her feet. Her long fair hair flew as she gesticulated. You didn’t need much English to tell she wasn’t winning the battle, but she wasn’t giving up.
‘Tell me why I can’t get the hardwoods down. Go on. I know I’m a girl – do you think I don’t? And how has that ever stopped me doing twice the job of your men? You need me for as long as this war’s on, not that any of you yokels have noticed the war. You don’t care about clothing, so the coupons don’t bother you, and the only time the stupid paper mentions it is if a pig’s gone missing and someone’s agitating about what the War Ag will make of it. People are dying, you know. Real people.’
The girl raised her fists again and Seppe recoiled.
There was a shuffling from within. Were they coming out? The last thing Seppe wanted was to be caught spying. But he didn’t dare move; they’d hear him.
He shuddered at the shrieking hinges, but the pair inside seemed too deep in their row to notice. The hut seemed even smaller from within, though maybe that had to do with the girl, who filled it with her wayward hair and stabbing arms. She appeared to be a little older than the others out in the yard. The man – what had the girl called him? Frank? – looked a good decade or two older than Seppe, his brown hair darker than the girl’s but not as black as Seppe’s own. He was leaning on the desk, looked worn out from the intensity of the girl’s argument.
The air was thick with tobacco, a denser scent than that at the camp, though. It tickled down into his throat and he coughed.
‘What the hell?’
If only he could retract the cough. But he couldn’t, of course he couldn’t; and now they were both staring at him. Frank put both palms flat on the table and pushed up, limping over to Seppe at the door.
‘Who do you be and what do you be after, now?’ His voice was guttural, seemed to fit the forest more than it fitted this slight, wiry man. What had he said, exactly?
‘I am Giuseppe – Seppe. I am Italian.’
The girl laughed, a short bark. ‘Here’s the enemy, wandering around free as a bird and nobody down here seems to care. We’ll all end up murdered in our beds at this rate.’
Frank glared across at the girl. ‘That’s enough from you, Constance Granger. Might seem odd to you with your city ways, but we have a need of them POWs down here, what with the planting and the felling and the rest of it. It wouldn’t be enough to just have you twittering girls.’ His words lilted and undulated like the leaves swaying in the breeze. Just when Seppe thought he had the shape of a sentence, it tipped away from him again.
‘What do you want, boy?’
Seppe swallowed, lifted his head and forced himself to look Frank in the eye. ‘I want to work with trees.’ He sounded stupid, so stupid. His fingers went again to the whittling knife, stroked its blade. It was hot in here – was that embarrassment? No, over there, behind the girl, something was glowing. Must be a stove.
The girl snorted. ‘Join the queue. Frank’s not letting nobody except the inbreds do the interesting work on his damn trees.’ She glared at the foreman, stuffed her hands in her pockets. Seppe watched Frank closely. What was he going to do? If his father had been cheeked like that, the belt or pan would come out, the one with the lead bottom to it. But Frank had sat back down, was shaking his head. He didn’t look like he was about to attack.
‘You do know as well as I do, girl. You were sent down here for lumberjill training, not to stay for good; that’s how it works. Be grateful I’ve kept you on at all.’
‘But it’s cockeyed, Frank, you know that! You don’t have to start all over again every time; you should let me out there properly. I can get the oaks down, I bet I can. I’m flying through those softwoods and it can’t be much harder.’ The words danced past Seppe without meaning anything much. They had the rhythm of poetry but could have been another manifesto.
Frank sighed. ‘Beats me why you didn’t want to leave with the others, to be honest.’
It was as if he’d snuffed her out. The girl’s arms dropped and she slumped. Seppe’s own heart was beating faster, the anxiety rising for reasons he didn’t understand.
When she spoke again, it was somebody else’s voice, closed and quiet.
‘I just didn’t want to, all right? I came here, and I’m staying put here, and that’s that. And you know I can do the job, Frank, you had me showing those rookies from Hull how to place the wedge earlier this week. Let me stay.’
‘All my men work in pairs, you know that, and there’s not a one of them as would step down to let a wench take their place. Aye, you’re not bad for a girl, but that’s not the same as doing the job day in, day out, like them who were born here. I’ll give you that the blokes we’ve got left might be a bit old and creaky, but the forest’s in ’em, ent nothing they need to be taught. Even if you know how to fell the stands, you couldn’t tell your oak from your spruce without pointers, I saw you.’
‘But I can – I know trees.’ Need propelled the words from Seppe. ‘I work with wood. Look.’ He offered up the whittling knife and the half-carved owl like a prayer. The girl and Frank stared at him as if he might be insane, or dangerous, or both.
Frank turned away first, dismissive. ‘Making trinkets is nothing like getting trees down, lad.’ No, no, Seppe understood that, but how to explain it? He ran a finger around his collar, shifted his feet.
‘I not sure … yet … how is best way to cut the tree. But I know which is oak, which is spruce. On my way to you, I see beech and yew and oak and ash. I can show you, now, if you like?’ What was he doing? There would be no point entering into a tree-spotting competition with this man who was created from the bark itself.
‘Aye, well it’s easy enough to tell ’em apart, don’t need a Johnny Foreigner like you showing off.’
‘But knowing the trees, it will help with the, the –’ Seppe looked down again at the paperwork on the table, all stamped with the British crest. The word he needed was there in big letters underneath the coat of arms, and it was the same as the Italian for once ‘– the quotas. If I am knowing which tree to come down, then I can help to get quotas on time?’
‘Them quotas are my business and mine alone, and I’ll thank you not to go snooping at every blessed thing you see in here.’ But Frank’s voice slowed as the thought came in to land. ‘What are you doing here in the first place, eh?’
‘We are captured and kept in Africa, then –’
‘No, not that. Why haven’t you already been assigned a job?’ The foreman’s face darkened. ‘Not one of them blackshirt fascists, are you? Thought they weren’t allowed to leave the camp.’
Seppe felt sick at the idea and his answer came out more vehemently than he’d intended. ‘No. I am not them. I have job that keeps me in and I want to be out. I am carpenter for camp. Make things.’
Seppe waited. Even the girl had realised it was best to be quiet now.
Frank shook his head again and the room became smaller, hotter. ‘Sorry, lad, I can’t risk it. Too many of you Italians we’ve had out here, friendly enough, but more shirkers than workers. This ent just a place of work; you lads don’t seem to be able to understand that. This is my home, and with so many of our kind gone to fight this faraway war –’ Connie shot him a look and he held her off with a raised hand ‘– it’s up to me to make sure our forest stays as intact as it can be despite them Home Timber Production demands. You lot treating it like a holiday camp don’t help me one little bit.’
‘But I …’ Seppe’s stomach dropped.
Frank shuffled the papers on his desk. The little finger on his left hand was missing, a scar barely visible. One of his feet stuck out at an angle from the desk; his boot was mosaicked with wood chippings.
‘I am not them.’ It was all there, pent up behind the words. Frank and the girl stared.
‘Aren’t you now?’ The foreman looked like he might almost smile. ‘And none so fond of them, neither, by the sounds of things.’
‘No. I will work.’ That was safe enough to say, surely.
‘You ever driven a tractor, ridden a horse? Handled an axe?’
He knew the lie to choose, didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. I can cut the trees.’ He swallowed down the guilt that followed. How difficult could it be, if this man with the limp could do it?
‘Look at that for a turn up, Frank! You’ve got yourself a new tree-felling team.’ The girl was bouncing again, but she wasn’t thumping any more. ‘And if he knows his way around an axe you don’t even need to train him; couldn’t be simpler.’ She flung out an arm to make her point and a sheaf of papers scattered around the hut like seed.
‘Christ! Sorry, Frank.’ She bent to pick them up, squatting wide, primitive, like Seppe had never seen a woman crouch before. He fought the urge to close his eyes against the confusion of emotion and instead bent down beside the table to help. It had been patched together from old cords of wood, and listed where someone hadn’t planed off the left-hand leg. Wonky furniture made him all lopsided inside; next time he was here, he’d fix that.
‘If I tell you to pair up with this sorry ha’porth here, Connie, will you leave me alone for a bit? Lord knows we needs all the help we can get.’
‘Frank! Honest to God, I might hug you!’
Frank frowned at her, then turned it on Seppe.
‘I’ll sort it with the camp guard, but it’ll likely take time to release you because he’ll need to fill out endless paperwork.’ Frank’s face made it clear what he thought of this, if the stack of scrumpled papers on his desk hadn’t already done the job.
‘If you fail, if you two can’t get them trees down on schedule, then you’re back up at Wynols Hill and you won’t be out again until this war’s over, you mark my words. And you –’ he picked up a piece of oak and pointed it at Connie ‘– you’re on the next train to Scotland if you cock up, mind.’
She was already gathering up her things. ‘You’re a gem, Frank.’ She winked at Seppe, waved on her way out. ‘I’m off. I’ll see you at the stand as soon as you’re cleared for work, timber partner.’
Seppe thought he might collapse with relief. No more taunting. No more repairing endless bits of furniture after they’d been destroyed in a fit of ‘we’ll show them who’s still boss’ pique. Hidden out here, doing honest work. All he needed to do was get down the oaks. He stood up, his hands full of papers, ignoring their trembling.
‘I will see you.’