two

It was the effect of the injections against smallpox and varieties of typhoid fever: I hadn’t recovered from the journey. I was disorientated from the numerous and confusing experiences since I’d arrived in the camp: punch drunk with the amount of slang and army jargon. Biscuits were three-piece mattresses: barracking was a way of sandwiching your sheets between two blankets then wrapping the lot in a third so that the bundle resembled a monster brown-and-white liquorice allsort. Rookies and jankers, fizzers and bulling, knickers called wrist stranglers. My mind was unhinged. It must be. I was hallucinating. For why else everywhere I looked did I see pairs of naked breasts. High round ones, slack pendulous ones, pert tip-tilted, minute to the point of non-existence. It wasn’t modest to look on another’s nakedness. According to my Catholic rearing it wasn’t modest to look on one’s own. And not having a full-length glass at home, I never had.

I looked away. I shook my head to clear it. I had a fever that was it. I was delirious. I looked back again and the breasts were still there and naked women splashing water at each other, laughing and singing, ‘In a strange caravan there’s a lady they call the gypsy.’ And then I saw the strangest sight of all. A pair of widely spaced breasts and growing in the space between a bunch of curly ginger hair. Banging her chest, the owner of the breasts began doing Tarzan imitations, then yelled, ‘What d’ye think of the running water, Pad?’ her voice rising above the singers. ‘Eh, cloth-ears it’s you I’m talking to.’

‘Me?’ I shouted back.

‘Yeah, you chuck. What d’ye think of the running water, great isn’t it?’

My head cleared. I wasn’t feverish nor having hallucinations. We were having a communal shower, something I’d never experienced before. And I was cloth-ears, Pad and chuck. The wide-spaced breasts and chest hair were Edith’s … also a new recruit, a rookie, but the daughter of an old soldier who showed us the ropes. Covering my nakedness with an army-issue towel (‘for the use of’, a phrase I didn’t, and never did, understand) I stepped onto a duckboard and called to Edith, ‘The water’s great.’ I had answered in the same vein to how I found wearing shoes, what I thought of electricity, flush lavatories, buses and trains. Recognizing from the good-humoured voices that asked the questions that neither malice nor antagonism was intended.

‘You’re alright Pad,’ Edith assured me while pulling on her khaki knickers with well-elasticated legs. ‘Pity the bugger who tries to get his hand up these,’ she laughed and braless went to a shelf where she had left her cigarettes. ‘Want a fag kid?’ she asked, proffering a packet of Park Drive.

‘Ta,’ I said using the word for the first time in my life.

* * *

For four days we had been confined to barracks. During this time our uniforms were issued and injections and vaccines given. We spent the days nursing sore arms and marking kits with our names and numbers: meeting Corporal Robinson our squad leader and getting to know each other.

Twenty-four girls occupied the barrack room. Half were from Cheshire and Lancashire, the other twelve those who had travelled up from Dublin with me.

On the way back from the communal shower Edith reminded us that tomorrow for the first time we would wear uniform. ‘We’ll get started on the bulling after tea.’

Already I had taken a great liking to Edith and to her friend Marjorie. They came from the same seaside town and had been friends all their lives. They were both low-sized, stocky; they resembled each other except that Edith’s hair was ginger and curly like the hair on her chest, and Marj’s blonde with dark roots and permed. They were good natured and funny. I found it difficult to understand their dialect but was learning. I would have liked to ditch Deirdre, my minder, but wherever I went she was close behind.

After dinner we could unbarrack our beds, lie or sit on them, get under the covers and sleep. Anything we liked provided no one else shared the bed. This had been stressed at a lecture on the day after we arrived at barracks. ‘It’s an offence for which you can be charged,’ the officer informed us.

Afterwards Edith answered our questions as to why you could be charged. ‘You know how some fellas’d do a frog if it stopped hopping, according to my Dad there’s girls like that too.’ We gasped in disbelief. Fellas maybe, but girls? Then one of the Irish girls said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing, no one will lie on mine. All my life I slept two or three to a bed. Sometimes four. Two at the top and two at the foot. It was nothing to wake up with my granny’s big toe nearly poking my eye out. Separate beds are gorgeous, so they are.’ The majority of us having been reared in the same circumstance agreed with her.

We lounged on our beds, we smoked, talked and I, eager to familiarize myself with army slang, quizzed Edith. ‘A charge’, she explained ‘is the same as a fizzer.’

‘Why d’ye get put on a fizzer?’

‘All sorts of things. Being late on parade, not barracking your bed properly, insubordination, talking back, coming in after roll call, belting an NCO or Officer, millions of things. She recited a long, long list of offences which carried sentences that varied from forty-eight hours confined to barracks, Jankers, which she explained might be cleaning rooms, bumpering floors or kitchen fatigues. ‘That’s peeling sacks and sacks of spuds.’

Edith now had a captive audience and continued. ‘For some things you could have your pay stopped or even finish up in the glasshouse.’

Marj contradicted her, ‘Hang on cock, you’re talking about soldiers. Women don’t get sent to the glasshouse.’

‘Maybe I’m wrong about that’, Edith conceded, ‘but not about nothing else.’

Bubbles, the only girl in the squad who owned a dressing-gown and spoke like the BBC newsreader, and Corporal Robinson, and whom Edith had nicknamed because her hair was like the picture advertising Pear’s soap of a boy blowing bubbles, asked Edith, ‘What is the Glasshouse?’

‘Military prison. Terrible place. No food, only bread and water. Get flogged if you look crooked, so my Dad says.’

‘Sounds like something out of Dickens,’ Bubbles said in a voice that cast disbelief on Edith’s statement.

‘Clever clogs. If you don’t believe me don’t ask questions in future.’

‘Sorry,’ said Bubbles who didn’t seem sorry at all. But adroitly changed the conversation and talked about the following day, how we’d fare during our first session of square bashing which Edith had informed us was slang for drilling on the square.

‘I’m petrified just thinking about it,’ Deirdre said. I hope there’ll be no fellas watching us.’ According to her she was so shy and retiring that almost everything terrified her. But not, I said to myself, strange fellas on boats. And while the girls discussed the pros and cons of drilling on the square my mind went back to the night we had crossed from Belfast.

A force nine gale was blowing. People started to vomit as soon as the boat left the harbour. The stench was overpowering. Deirdre said she couldn’t bear it. She needed a blow of fresh air. I catnapped and eventually fell asleep. I slept for more than an hour. There was no sign of Deirdre. I went to look for her. Passing a bar I thought I saw her white swagger coat. But when I pushed open the door the smell of stout hit me like a malodorous wave and I let the door close.

Here and there as I wandered about the ship, now and then steadying myself against the walls as it lurched, I saw girls we boarded with and asked if they’d seen Deirdre. No one had. Eventually I reached the deck. The wind screeched and spray washed over the boat’s side, fell onto the deck and drained into the scuppers. Maybe, I thought, Deirdre fell overboard. I’d have to find a seaman and report her missing. I found the wind exhilarating. The fresh, salt-laden air was gorgeous after the revolting smells in the lounge. Now and then I stopped my lurching along to lean over the vessel’s side and watched the wake of the ship spin out behind it like yards of silk, a frothing mass of white in the darkness of the night.

There were other people leaning over the rail. One, a man quite near me. I heard him retch but knowing nothing about the winds direction stayed where I was until a plaster of his vomit blew onto my cheek. My stomach turned and I almost threw up. took several deep breaths, moved far from him, then took my scarf, already wet with spume, and wiped my face. I let the wind take the stinking scarf, wet a handkerchief in the scuppers and scrubbed my cheek and then let the handkerchief follow the scarf. All thought of a drowned Deirdre had left my mind. I was cold and shivery. I’d have to go back inside or find a sheltered place. The walking warmed me and once again I began to enjoy the storm, feel courageous braving the elements, let myself go with the pitch and roll of the ship convincing myself I was a natural-born sailor. I was beginning a new life. A marvellous exciting life. For wasn’t it the middle of the night, dark, stormy, and I savouring every minute of it. I remembered heroines I’d read of who’d been connected with the sea … Grace Darling, Graine. Graine sailing with her father, an O’Malley , a slip of a girl. A pirate plundering the ships of her enemies and Grace risking her life to save the lives of others. I could be such a woman. There was nothing I couldn’t do. I stood gazing at the tumultuous sea lost in my fantasies, my hair clinging to my skull, water dripping into my eyes, the shoulders and front of my coat saturated. I began again to shiver. But knew that I didn’t want to go back to the crowded saloon, smoke filled and reeking of vomit. Not yet anyway. I walked again looking for shelter and came near the funnels. Behind one I’d be out of the wind and warm. I moved closer and then I saw them. A couple. A man and a woman. Her white coat and other clothes above her waist. The man holding her.

I could hear him grunting as he appeared to be trying to push her through the funnel’s side. I had a vague idea of what they were doing. Was certain it was Deirdre and instinctively knew neither would welcome a greeting or me expressing relief that I had found her.

I made my way back, pushed open the heavy doors telling myself I would have to endure the lounge. Exhausted by this time, I fell asleep squashed between a man and a woman reeking of porter and slept until the boat docked. There was great activity. People looking for children, cases, and trying to guess where the gang-plank would be attached to the ship. I met up with the girls who were travelling with me to join the ATS. Then Deirdre pushed her way through the throng and berated me. ‘I’ve been looking for you all night,’ she smelled of drink. ‘I was worried and after me promising your mother I’d mind you. Will I get you a cup of tea, they’re still open?’

‘That’d be grand,’ I said and watched her go, seeing at the same time in ray mind’s eye, the white coat hoisted above her waist. She brought the tea. We waited to disembark. She didn’t say anymore about her search for me. And I said nothing about my stroll on deck.

‘Right then, let’s be having you,’ Edith’s voice put an end to my thoughts about Deirdre’s escapade. ‘Let’s get a bit of shape on these bloody uniforms.

‘Let’s leave it till after tea,’ Marj suggested, and several voices agreed with her.

‘We could do a lot in a hour,’ Edith said, but she was outvoted. We lounged and smoked and talked. Mostly about food. The English girls longingly recalling meals before the war. The roast Sunday dinners, home-made steak and kidney pies with suet crusts, liver smothered in onions, real eggs, banana sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, oranges, and bacon butties with lashings of tomato sauce.

In Ireland only tea was strictly rationed, and I’d only left Dublin four days ago. So neither I nor the other Irish girls expressed longings. Though I did think how nice two lightly boiled eggs and a fresh Vienna roll would be at the moment.

The English girls were remembering when sweets weren’t rationed. How every time they had money they bought sweets and chocolate. Crunchie bars and Tiffin bars, Fry’s Cream chocolate, acid drops, Dolly mixtures, Liquorice All Sorts and sticks of Liquorice. They went on remembering and planning what’d they’d buy when rationing ended.

The teatime meal differed only slightly from breakfast. An inch cube of butter and a dessertspoonful of jam instead of margarine and marmalade. We went to the cookhouse carrying our knife, fork, spoon and enamel mug. There with the other squads in training we queued for the counter and the aluminium sunken wells where vegetables, stews, whatever of that nature on the menu was served from. One of the first things I noticed about some of the food was how it differed in colour to food at home. Greens, as they were called, hadn’t a trace of green about them but were a blend of yellow, white and grey. Brown gravy was a shade I would have described as buff, beige or fawn. Brown stews were brown but the first mouthful and your palate recognized the artificial flavour. And when on rare occasions roast beef, pork or lamb was served, it too was a colour I didn’t associate with such meats and was tough, fat, full of gristle and tasteless.

For tea we were served ‘toad in the hole’, two sausages buried in a mass of doughy batter. I had never before seen such a dish. It was something my mother would have described as a plocky dollop. But hunger is good sauce. And we were hungry. The plates were left as clean as Jack Spratt and his wife’s. We refilled our mugs with tea to take back to the barrack room while a khaki-overalled orderly whose curlers made lumpy bumps beneath her turban waited to remove the urn. Outside the cookhouse we washed our cutlery in the barrel of hot water provided. Its surface shiny with grease. Preparations for the bulling of the uniforms began as soon as we were back in our room. ‘Right then’, said Edith, ‘someone put the ironing board up. Get out your brasso, shoe polish, button sticks and two sanitary towels.’

‘Sanitary towels, what for?’ asked someone.

‘For putting on the brasso and polish. You’ll want your dusters and brushes, shoe and button ones, as well.’

Sanitary towels were Lord Nuffield’s gift to the Women’s Services. They were expensive to buy. At home many girls used rags kept for when they menstruated. Washed and rewashed for many months. Sanitary towels were a luxury item and I’d never known them to be used except for the purpose they were intended. But soon I became used to ripping them apart. Using the cotton wool for applying brasso, polish, cosmetics, cleaning windows. And once many years after joining up I visited a soldier in hospital who had had a throat operation: around the wound on his neck and draped by the loops over his ears was a sanitary towel. He hadn’t long come from the recovery room and so probably wasn’t aware of the incongruous dressing. I was mortified with embarrassment for both of us. And at the same time wanted to giggle.

* * *

Edith showed us how to spit and polish. A mouthful of spittle into the Kiwi Dark Tan, a ball of cotton wool to blend the two. Then the corner of a cloth wound round the index finger dipped into the tin and then the tedious circling and circling of the shoe’s surface. From time to time moistening the polish again or spitting directly onto the leather until the faintest of shines appeared.

‘You’re lucky you aren’t blokes,’ said Edith, pausing to inspect our achievements. ‘You should see the men’s boots the first time they’re issued. Rough as a badger’s arse they are. Have to be soaked in piss.’

Not sure if this wasn’t another Paddy joke, I gave her a quizzical look.

‘No kidding. I’ve seen new boots and me Dad told me. Keep a bucket in the barrack room and piss in it then dunk the boots. Softens and brings the leather up a treat.’

I spat, circled and rubbed until my arm ached and my finger felt paralysed. Everyone felt the same and it was decided to call a halt.

Corporal Robinson came into the barrack room and enquired if we were all right. Were there any problems. After she left I said how pleasant she seemed. Edith contradicted me. ‘Wait’ll she gets you on the square it’ll be a different story. She’s still treating you like a civvy. Wait’ll she gets you in uniform.’

The uniform. Momentarily I’d forgotten it. Forgotten my bitter disappointment on the day my kit was issued. A mountain of it. More clothes than I had ever possessed in my life. Three brassières, two corset belts, three pairs of khaki directoire knickers—the ones Edith called ‘wrist stranglers’—three pairs of short white woollen panties, two pairs of blue-and-white striped flannel pyjamas. Three pairs of thick stockings the colour of diarrhoea. Two pairs of shoes, one pair of Plimsolls, baggy brown shorts, a burnt-orange shapeless sports shirt with a brown trim. Needles, threads, buttons in a small cotton bag called a ‘husive’. Shirts with separate collars, a khaki woollen long sleeved v.-necked pullover, cap, jacket, tunic, skirt and greatcoat.

A uniform that looked as if it had been made from a rough woollen blanket. And bore no more resemblance to the girl’s uniform in the recruiting poster than I to her. But I fervently believed that wearing what she was wearing I would be transformed. I would go home to Ireland wearing it and dazzle my love. Now I imagined the sight I’d be. The rough thick cloth, no perky little cap. The one’s we’d been issued with had brims and yards of sticking up crown. And all the shade of the vile stockings.

A lump rose in my throat. One always did when I was about to cry. And in seconds I was crying out loud. I’d done it all for nothing. There would be no triumphant return to Dublin in a glamorous outfit. With my tail between my legs I’d go back in the green tweed coat for I wouldn’t be seen dead in that tunic, skirt and chef’s peaked cap. Soon I had a crowd round me. Everyone full of concern as I tried between hysterical sobs to tell Edith of the tragedy that had befallen me. ‘I thought I’d look lovely. And then he’d notice me. And fall for me. He would, I know he would.’

Out I blurted everything. About the poster and the one I loved for so long. My one and only reason for joining up.

‘Pad’, she said, ‘you’re daft as a bleeding brush. Haven’t you ever heard of de Valera?’

‘What’s he g to do with it?’ I asked, sobs still threatening to choke me.

‘He’s that long drink of water with the specs.’

‘I know what he looks like.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s the one who wouldn’t let us have your Ports. Kept you out of the war. Ireland’s neutral. So even if the uniform was a dead ringer for the one in the magazine you still couldn’t wear it.’

‘But why?’ I persisted.

‘You can’t wear the uniform of a country at war, in a neutral one. You could be shot. Slung in prison camp.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. And listen, kid, forget about the fella. You’ll meet hundreds over here in the army camps. Fighting them off you’ll be.’

‘So I joined up for nothing,’ I said, pity again welling up in me.

‘You joined up for the same reason we all did. Nothing to do with fellas. You were fed up at home. You were fed up being under your Mam’s thumb. You wanted change, adventure. And you’ve got us. We’re mates, all mates, OK. I’ll put a bit of shape on your uniform, you won’t know it.’

‘By tomorrow?’ I asked doubtfully.

‘That was a mistake. Someone read the Part Two Orders wrong. One of your lot. So we’ve all tomorrow for sorting out the uniforms.’ She yawned. ‘I’m whacked. Get ready for bed. Have a fag first and no more bawling. Right.’

With a degree of modesty the girls had begun undressing, putting on their striped pyjamas. I’d never had an abundant supply of nightwear at home. Even so I hated the army pyjamas. Too long, too loose, especially the jacket which was like an overcoat in length. Then Bubbles had an idea. And demonstrated it. She undid the pyjamas’ bottom buttons, brought up the two ends and tied them just above her navel. Then folded the surplus back material to fit tidily behind. ‘Smashing,’ we chorused. ‘Who showed you how to do that?’ someone asked.

‘At the pictures. An American girl’s college or beach. I can’t remember.’ In minutes we had all copied Bubbles and in the future always tied up our pyjamas.

* * *

Edith borrowed an enamel plate from an orderly in the cookhouse, from somewhere else had got hold of a cloth to use for pressing, a bucket of water and a sliver of soap. She demonstrated how a good pressing reduced the rough appearance of the uniform, how to run the sliver of soap along where the crease in the skirt should be. Then turned it on its right side and banged away with the iron. The crease was knife like. The plate was fitted into the crown of the cap, the surplus material that stood up pinched and pleated around the plate’s edge. It was an improvement I had to admit. But still I hated the uniform and always would.

We polished our leather cap bands, which were detachable, the cap badges and then careful not to crease the tunic, gathered the buttons into the button stick, an attractive thing made from solid brass, divided in its centre so that the buttons could be slipped into it, be polished without fear of metal polish spoiling the cloth.

The atmosphere that evening was a happy, expectant one. For the following day after tea we would be allowed to leave the camp for the first time. We pushed to the backs of our minds our first experience of drill in the morning. For days, as we’d nursed our sore arms, marked and prepared our kit through the open window, we had heard and seen other squads being put through their paces. The drill corporal marched up and down shouting commands. ‘Right turn, Left turn, About turn, forward march. Swing those arms shoulder high.’ Occasionally they called words of praise. ‘Well done C Squad or B Squad,’ or whatever Squad hadn’t made a balls-up of their drill movements.

We speculated as to how we would spend our first evening away from camp.

One of the English girls said, ‘Maybe we’ll see blokes. haven’t seen a man since I came here.’

‘It’s a women’s training camp that’s why. Once we’re posted you’ll be falling over them,’ someone else explained.

‘Let’s hope you’re right. That’s why I joined up. Not a decent-looking man where I live. Women, kids and old men. I wonder where we’ll be posted? ‘the first girl said.

And Edith answered her. ‘Not where you want to go, cock. They give you a choice. You ask for Scotland and you’ll finish up in Devon.’

I knew where I wanted to go when Basic Training was finished.

To Brighton where my father had come from. I’d look up his relations. His father was still alive. I’d meet him. The majority of the Irish girls hoped for posting to London, Birmingham and Coventry, being familiar with the names of these cities where their fathers, brothers, many male relations and some female had worked during the war. Deirdre expressed no preference. The girls from England talked of Aldershot, Colchester and other army camps, where the ratio of men to women made the getting of a fella ‘dead easy’.

Well, an English girl who hadn’t so far taken part in the discussion said, ‘I want to go where there’s Yanks. I think they’re smashing.’

Someone informed her that Americans were stationed at Burton Wood and they came into the local town every night. She’d be bound to see them the next evening. There were whoops of glee.

‘On the make, ‘ a cynical voice said.

The girl who first mentioned Yanks replied, ‘They can make me anytime.’

‘So long as it isn’t pregnant,’ the cynic said. ‘Get yourself in ‘the club’, the Yank vanishes.’

‘Our kid’s engaged to one,’ Marj said. ‘She’s going to be a GI bride. Smashing he is. You should see what he brings her from the PX store. Boxes of chewing gum, cartons of fags, chocolates, tins of food for me Mam, and nylons.’

‘Nylons!’ There were gasps of envious admiration.

‘Mean cow, our kid. She wouldn’t lend us a pair never mind give us one. She has to have all sorts of tests before they get married, ones for TB and VD. And you have to fill in that many forms, even who your granny was. He’s got a ranch, her fella has.’

‘I hope it’s not a gopher ranch,’ said Edith.

‘She never said anything about gophers. What are they when they’re at home, a kind of cow?’

‘I don’t know,’ Edith admitted. ‘Only sometimes I heard the Yanks in our local talk about gopher ranches and nearly kill themselves laughing.’

‘I’d love to live in California.’ said Bubbles. Tomorrow night I’ll keep my eyes out for a Yank.’

The cynic joined in again saying all Yanks were hot stuff.

Bubbles smiled an enigmatic smile and Deirdre spoke for the first time. ‘I’d like to see any Yank try to get fresh with me. He’d live to regret it.’ I listened and thought of her pressed against the ship’s funnel with the white swagger above her waist.

* * *

Later on we talked of the jobs we’d like to do when basic training finished. Bubbles wanted to drive a Staff Car. ‘Land a wealthy old Brigadier,’ she said flippantly. ‘I think that’s what I’ll apply for. Driving would be great,’ I said. Another recruit wanted to join ack-ack battery, only to be reminded by several of the English girls that ack-ack sites were dangerous. Forty ATSs had been killed at one in Biggin Hill.

‘Not much chance of that,’ Edith disabused the girl with an ambition to shoot down enemy planes. ‘The war’s nearly over. Ack-ack batteries are being run down.’

Mess orderlies was the most popular choice. Marj extolled the perks. More food, able to keep curlers in as khaki turban hid them. It was a bobby’s job.

After the choice of jobs the English girls talked about the coming election. I knew nothing about politics, Irish or English, having only ever looked at the Dublin Evening Herald to follow the Mutt and Jeff cartoon. But many of the English girls bought the Daily Mirror and read with great interest news of the coming election. Pinning their hopes on a Labour victory, as were their families and the working-class people all over the country. With a Labour Party in power great things would happen. No more unemployment. No more panel doctors. Free false teeth, glasses. A share out of everything. Churchill was alright during the war. But his day was over.