‘What’s that young lad doing?’ Dorothy asked the shipyard’s head welder, Rosie Thornton, as she watched a boy who looked barely a day over fourteen clamber between a line of huge wooden blocks. They had been laid down in a long line and resembled the vertebrae of a steel spine running along the bottom of one of the yard’s dry docks.
‘It’s part of the shipbuilding tradition,’ Rosie started to explain as she shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare. In this light you could clearly see the small splashes of scars scattered across her otherwise very attractive face. Dorothy thought she would have personally tried to cover them up with a thin layer of foundation or powder, but her boss did not seem to care.
As Rosie talked she wiped a tear away, her overly sensitive eyes struggling to cope with the early morning show of sun. Today, like most days that had greeted the New Year, it was bitterly cold, and there were patches of ice on the yard’s greasy, concrete surface, but, as if in celebration of the day’s events, the sun had come out for a short spell. It seemed appropriate that the ceremonial laying of the ship’s keel should have a blast of sunshine. It was a good omen.
‘Haven’t you learnt anything since you’ve been working here?’ Gloria ribbed her workmate. By way of reply, Dorothy stuck her tongue out at the woman she loved to hate and who seemed to love to hate her back in equal measure.
Gloria rolled her eyes at Dorothy’s juvenile gesture and continued. ‘The yard’s youngest apprentice has to put a coin down on one of the wooden blocks that go under the keel to bring the ship luck … and for those of you who still don’t know,’ she added sarcastically, ‘the keel is the long wooden thing that runs from the bow to the stern – that’s the front to the—’
‘All right,’ Dorothy interrupted, ‘I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid!’
Rosie sighed. Ever since they’d started at the yard, Gloria and Dorothy had been incapable of saying anything nice to each other, even though, strangely enough, she knew they didn’t actually dislike each other. Far from it.
‘The day that woman utters a civil word to me is the day I start to worry,’ Dorothy muttered to her friend, Angie, who was standing close by, scrutinising the events of the ceremonial laying of the keel being played out in the depths of the dry dock just yards away from the edge of the River Wear.
As usual, whenever there was a break, Angie would climb out of the square metal cabin of the massive crane she spent her day operating, and go and find Dorothy. The pair of them had become inseparable these past few months after they had bonded over a two-timing philandering riveter called Eddie who had been dating them both behind their backs.
‘The laying of the keel,’ Rosie continued, eager to stop any more squabbling, ‘is a tradition that dates way back to when ships were built out of wood. It’s one of the four specially celebrated events in the life of a ship, the others being launching, commissioning, and decommissioning. And, like Gloria said, the coin is meant to bring luck to the ship while it’s being constructed, and then later on to the captain and crew.’
‘Rosie make a good teacher, no?’ Hannah said with only the slightest hint of a foreign accent as she nudged her fellow welder Martha, who had been renamed ‘Big Martha’ by the yard’s mainly male workforce. It was a nickname that was also a play on words, as the town’s massive anti-aircraft gun had been christened Big Bertha due to its formidable size.
Martha did not seem to mind the fact that her name had been given a prefix. She had told Hannah and the other women as much when they had asked her if her new moniker bothered her and she had simply told them, ‘but it’s true’. And, to be fair, it was a pretty appropriate description of Martha, as there was no denying she was certainly big; in fact, it wouldn’t have been too much of a push to call her a giant. She certainly fitted the description of a ‘gentle giant’, as she had an incredibly quiet and unthreatening nature in contrast to her huge bulk.
When Martha had first started at the shipyard as a novice welder, it had taken the women a while to get to know her as she had hardly spoken a word. What they hadn’t realised then was that Martha had hardly spoken many words at all in her entire life, never mind at her new place of work. Since she had settled in at the yard she had become far more verbose, although she was still a million miles away from being a chatterbox.
‘… And as you are all more than aware – being almost shipyard veterans,’ Rosie gently teased the women, knowing full well that, although they were no longer trainees, six months in the yard had also not made them old-timers, ‘… the keel is the backbone of the vessel, and the laying of the keel is the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle to be put down …’
‘So, all this hoo-ha is to celebrate the start of the ship’s life.’ As usual Dorothy had to stick her oar in, and true to form her words were followed by Gloria’s dry cynicism.
‘Well, let’s hope this ship’s life is a long one and that it doesn’t get bombed to smithereens by some Jerry U-boat as soon as it’s out the harbour.’
Gloria’s words were met by a communal grunt of agreement from the women as Hitler’s stealth-like submarines had already succeeded in blowing up a few ships just three miles up the coast.
As they watched a couple of the town’s suited dignitaries make their way down to the dock where the boy apprentice was standing awkwardly, coin in hand, Gloria ran her hand over her small bump that was still well hidden under her bulky overalls. Only the women who now stood around her knew about her pregnancy, and, more importantly, were the only ones to know why there was a need to keep her condition a secret for as long as possible.
‘… and when the ship is finished, the owners will be presented with the wooden block – complete with coin.’ Rosie finished off the women’s lesson of the day.
‘Blooming typical,’ Dorothy exclaimed, having now lost interest in learning anything more about keels or shipyard ceremonies as she spotted Helen Crawford and her mother Miriam hobnobbing with the other VIPs.
‘Might have guessed Helen would get her ugly mug in on the action,’ she said to the women as a photographer lined everyone up for an official picture.
Dorothy was being even more bitchy than normal, but she was only voicing what the others were thinking. None of them reprimanded their workmate for her catty remarks, because none of them had an iota of sympathy for the woman presently flaunting her hourglass figure to all and sundry just a few hundred yards from where they were now standing – for Helen Crawford had committed the cardinal sin of trying to steal Polly’s beau, Tommy Watts; and, worse still, she had tried to do so with deviousness and outright lies.
As Helen clapped her hands in delight when the keel was carefully lowered down on to the wooden blocks lining the floor of the basin, Polly scrutinised her former love rival. She still felt angry when she saw Helen, despite the fact she had not succeeded in coming between Polly and Tommy.
‘All right. The show’s over,’ Rosie said, picking up her welding mask. ‘Back to work.’
Her words were met by a general groan, but as the town’s luminaries were now making their way over to the administration offices for their sandwiches and sherry, there was nothing more to see. The women were also under pressure to get a number of metal panels welded on to the hull of a cargo vessel; it had had a hole blown in its side after hitting a floating mine that Jerry had dropped along a popular shipping route.
‘Hannah,’ Rosie said, nodding her head over to the group’s ‘little bird’. The name had initially been coined by Dorothy, but it had stuck, as Hannah, who had come over from Czechoslovakia shortly before Hitler rampaged through her homeland, really was like a tiny, fragile sparrow. She’d struggled with the gruelling workload since starting at the yard, but had kept going, much to everyone’s surprise.
‘There’s some touching-up work that needs to be done over with the riveters,’ Rosie told Hannah, who immediately looked relieved that she would not be spending the rest of the day with her arms held high doing overhead and vertical welds.
As they walked over to join the other shipwrights, Rosie glanced down at Hannah and looked at her slight frame and naturally pale skin and wondered just how much longer she could cover for her and keep finding her less labour-intensive welding jobs.
When the yard manager Jack Crawford had been there, he had been more than happy to make exceptions for Hannah, but since his daughter Helen had taken over the reins for the few months he was away in America helping with the production of a new ship, it had become much more difficult. Helen had already started to query Hannah’s work output and question her viability as a shipyard worker.
Today Rosie was thankful Helen’s attention had been taken up with the keel-laying ceremony and rubbing shoulders with the bigwigs, as it meant she had been able to get Hannah in with the riveters without too much fuss. But she knew it would only be a brief respite from Helen’s scrutiny and that the boss’s daughter had her claws out for all the women welders. Helen was clearly going to make not only Polly, but all of Polly’s friends, pay for getting Tommy.
And Hannah was an obvious and very easy target.
At least she’s in safe hands here, Rosie thought as she approached the half-dozen men Hannah would be working with over the next few days. Most of them were well into their forties and early fifties, too old for military service but, even if they hadn’t been, would have been exempt from conscription due to their shipbuilding skills being desperately needed if this war was to be won.
‘We got the bairn with us today?’ the head riveter said on seeing Hannah. Rosie smiled. Hannah was nearly nineteen but she still looked like a child, with her coarsely cut mop of thick black hair and short fringe.
‘Yes, Jimmy,’ Rosie said, ‘the bairn’s yours today.’
‘Well, dinnit worry about her, she’ll be fine with this lot,’ he said, as he showed Hannah to her first weld of the day.
As Rosie returned to the rest of the women, she thought about Jimmy and the men like him who could come across as hard, no-nonsense northerners, but who hid the softness of their hearts well. The men in the yards always seemed to champion the underdog, and Hannah was most certainly that, here in this metal jungle, where workers had to be strong and tough to survive the backbreaking and dangerous work it demanded.
As Rosie turned on her welding machine, she quickly checked on the remaining four women. She’d hoped Dorothy’s mate, Angie, might consider leaving her job as a crane operator and learn to weld, as she needed another pair of hands to make up her team, especially as Gloria was now in the family way and Hannah was being regularly lent out to the other fitters. When she had suggested the idea to Angie, though, she had not seemed keen. And why would she? Her wages weren’t quite as good as those of a welder, but the work was a damn sight easier and she wasn’t collapsing exhausted into her bed at night like the rest of the women.
When the klaxon sounded the end of the day shift, the women pushed their masks up and turned off their machines. They would all have a tea break and some sandwiches before doing another few hours’ overtime.
Rosie, however, had to go. She had told the yard’s timekeeper that the damage to her eyes caused by her ‘accident’ meant they could not deal with more than a day’s work; not with the constant flashes of light and the bright smouldering metal that welding entailed.
In reality, though, it was because her second job she went to on an evening had become more demanding. She was needed there now every night from seven until well after midnight, but it was worth it as it was paying dividends. She was now easily earning enough to cover her monthly outgoings – even managing to put some savings aside for the future.
As Rosie waved goodbye to her team of welders, she thought of the group of pretty young women she would be in charge of this evening and how very different they all were from the overall-clad, dirt-smeared women waving back at her now.