Keep the Home Fires Burning (16 page)

‘Oh, yes,’ Peggy said. ‘The man who came around recruiting people told us that, and he also said they needed more people there. There was
munitions work as well, but I’d given my word to my mother that I wouldn’t do that.’ And then, at Marion’s raised eyebrows, she went on, ‘My mother’s younger sister, Dolly, did it in the last war. Mom said that she was tempted herself but my elder brother, Sam, was a handful and I was only a baby, and we were too much for our grandmother to handle and so Mom had to stay behind and look after us. She told us that after only a little time, Dolly’s skin went all yellow and her hair went all coarse and turned a sort of red colour, and she had a permanent cough. After the war she married, but never had any children and died before she was thirty, poisoned, Mom always said, by the sulphur. I said it was probably different now, but she wouldn’t hear of me working somewhere like that.’

Marion thought of her niece Mary Ellen, who would be involved in that dangerous work very soon and she gave an involuntary shiver. ‘I do understand that, but neither of you will have done any work in a drop forge before, I’m sure.’

‘No, of course not,’ Peggy said. ‘But these days lots of people are doing things that they have no experience of.’

Marion couldn’t disagree with that.

‘I suppose we can learn as well as the next person,’ Peggy continued. ‘And neither of us is a stranger to hard work.’

Marion saw the determination in the two girls’ faces and acknowledged that they certainly looked
robust enough. Even Violet, despite her diminutive stature, didn’t cut a frail, delicate figure. But Marion did hope that they hadn’t bitten off more than they could chew, not least because she liked the girls and she also thought they would fit in well to her household.

‘So when do you intend moving in?’ Marion asked.

‘Well, the man we saw at Tube Investments was keen for us to start as soon as possible,’ Peggy said. ‘It all hinged really on whether we were able to find somewhere nearby to stay. We said that we would call back and tell him as soon as we found somewhere suitable. Then we have to give notice, of course. It should be a month, but for war work these things are waived, and it’s a particularly early Easter this year.’

‘Yes,’ Marion agreed, ‘a week today is Good Friday.’

‘Right, so what if we leave the Buckinghams at Easter, move in here Easter Monday and start at the drop forge on the Tuesday?’ Peggy said. ‘How does that suit?’

‘That suits just perfectly,’ Marion said.

Marion had loved her time in service and so she said, ‘Will you miss your old lives?’

‘Not likely we won’t,’ Peggy said fiercely. ‘I’ve had my fill of bobbing my knee and kowtowing to people who think they’re better than me because they have money.’

‘And me,’ Violet said. ‘One of my jobs was to
light the fires in the rooms, and I would always fill up the coal scuttles before I left. Yet when the fires burned low the family would ring the bell for me to go and see to it. Not one of them seemingly was capable of putting coal on the fire, and yet the tongs were there for them to use.’

‘Oh, aye,’ Peggy said. ‘That’s what they were like.’

‘Do they know that you’re after war work?’

Peggy nodded. ‘We told them, but they knew anyroad because a man came round trying to recruit people, and my brother, Sam, and most young men his age in the village are already in the army.’

‘My husband is in the thick of it as well,’ Marion said.

‘That why you’re taking lodgers in?’

‘Yes,’ Marion said. Though she seldom discussed her finances outside of the family she found herself saying, ‘Before the war my Bill worked in the brass industry. Birmingham is famous for its brass and he earned a good wage. It was a shock to me to manage on the little amount the army pays.’ She gave a smile. ‘I always find that there’s too much week at the end of the money.’

Peggy and Violet laughed. ‘My mother finds the same, I think,’ Peggy said. ‘My dad was crippled in the last war, see. He nearly lost his foot but though they saved it, he has to have his shoe built up and still walks with a pronounced limp, so we knew he wouldn’t be called up.’

‘Have you a farm?’

Peggy shook her head. ‘A farm is too grand a name for it,’ she said. ‘I’d call it a smallholding. We have a few hens, two big fat sows and a host of piglets, and a few cows. Dad missed Sam when he enlisted because his leg is often painful.’

‘Yes,’ said Marion. ‘I’m sure your brother was a great help to him.’

‘He was,’ Peggy said. ‘Though my younger brother, Peter, is no slouch, but he is only twelve yet and so has another two years at school. Sam will be virtually running the place, I should imagine, when the war is over.’ She paused and added softly, ‘That’s, of course, if he survives.’

‘Ooh, don’t say that,’ said Violet.

‘Got to be faced,’ Peggy said, and gave a rueful smile. ‘But I know it will break my heart if anything does happen to him.’

She gave a sudden shiver and Marion knew just how she felt. She tried to lighten the mood a little. ‘Violet’s right,’ she said. ‘Dwelling on things that may not happen does no good at all, so let’s not even think of it.’ Turning to Violet she said. ‘Do you have a similar setup to Peggy’s?’

‘Yes,’ Violet said. ‘But ours isn’t so big. My dad also fought in the last war, and he was gassed. His breathing sounds like a steam engine sometimes and a lot of the work falls to my mother or my brothers when Dad has a bad spell. That’s why it was so hard for them when Mom was ill with pleurisy last year. She does most of the digging, see.’

‘So you are able to grow your own vegetables as well?’

‘Yes, but there’s other free food about in the country,’ Violet said. ‘Like rabbits. Your dad traps them, don’t he, Peggy? He’s brought a few to us. Dad was sure it was the good food that pulled Mom round.’

‘But a lot of bartering goes on,’ Peggy said. ‘You swap anything for what you haven’t got and sell any surplus at the market, and the butchers are always glad of the rabbits. We have an orchard too, so we can also swap or sell apples, pears and plums. Of course, when a pig is slaughtered by any farmer, the meat is shared around our neighbours.’

‘Oh, Peggy, you’re making my mouth water,’ Marion cried. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a bacon sandwich right now.’

Both girls laughed and Marion said, ‘I’m really surprised, as you’re both country girls, you didn’t opt for the Land Army.’

‘Our mothers would have preferred us to do that,’ Violet admitted. ‘They thought it meant that we’d be nearer home, but there’s no guarantee of that. They could send you anywhere.’

‘And you didn’t fancy it anyway?’

The girls shook their heads emphatically. ‘We wouldn’t be any better off and might have been worse,’ Peggy said. ‘The village is surrounded by farmland and so we know many of the big farmers – those with farms big enough to need to hire
staff, at any rate. Some of the wealthier ones were sometimes asked to dinner at the Buckinghams’ and we would wait on them and hear them talking. Most of them seemed to have little time for the Land Girls they claimed were being forced on them, and no intention of having the girls sleep in the house, but thought a draughty barn quite adequate.’

‘We thought them in the same mould as the Buckinghams,’ Violet put in. ‘All posh and stuck up, and we knew they would treat us like dirt – and the wages were rubbish as well.’

‘Yeah, they were,’ Peggy agreed. ‘Anyroad, we wanted to see somewhere other than our village, and try a different kind of work.’

‘But won’t your parents worry about you living so far away from home?’ Marion said.

‘Not really,’ Peggy said. ‘In service we had to live away from home anyway. I mean, our houses were close and all that, but we still had only the same time off as anyone else.’

‘Yes, but that’s different somehow,’ Marion said. ‘You are looked after, in a way, by the housekeeper, or perhaps the cook if you worked in the kitchen.’

‘Watched over, more like,’ Peggy muttered resentfully, ‘to see if we were enjoying ourselves too much or, Heaven forbid, if any of us met a boy we liked because we weren’t allowed followers.’

‘Yeah, like they wanted to control all of our lives,’ Violet said. ‘How were we ever to make a lives of our own, living in a place like that? My
parents are used to me not being there now because I haven’t lived at home since I was fourteen.’

‘I don’t wish to be rude,’ Marion said tentatively, ‘but to me you don’t look much older than that now.’

Violet sighed. ‘I know. I can’t help how I look, and I know that I’m not very big, but I am turned seventeen.’

‘Even so …’

‘Her mom made me promise to look out for her,’ Peggy said. ‘And I am twenty, and sensible enough,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye, ‘when I need to be.’

Her comment brought a wry laugh from Violet and Marion, but still Marion wondered if the girls realised exactly what they were taking on. One of Polly’s neighbours, being declared unfit for the army, had taken a job at the forge and he told Polly when the ovens were opened it was like Dante’s inferno, whatever the hell that was, and the noise was indescribable. Marion could only imagine it, but she did know that when the huge hammers dropped anyone standing in Lichfield Road would feel the vibration under their feet.

The children were agog with questions about the new lodgers they would soon have living in the house. ‘If we’re having lodgers will I still have to go and get coal every morning?’ Tony asked.

‘No you won’t, Tony,’ Marion told him, and saw the relieved smile steal over his face. ‘And I
will no longer be beholden to the Christmas Tree Fund and will be able to buy you clothes myself. So it’s good news all round.’

Polly, who popped in later, also wanted to know all about Marion’s lodgers, what they looked like, where they came from. She couldn’t understand either why they had chosen to work in a drop forge.

‘These girls’ families have small farms out in the country and it seems a completely different world from ours,’ Marion told her.

‘Then God help them, that’s all I can say,’ Polly said. ‘They’ll likely not stick it.’

‘I hope they do, Poll,’ Marion said. ‘I badly need the money.’

‘I know you do. But don’t worry. If it don’t work out for them there, I’ll have Pat put in a word for them at the munitions.’

‘That won’t do no good,’ Marion said. ‘Peggy promised her mom she wouldn’t work in a munitions factory.’ She recounted the tale that Peggy had told her about her aunt. ‘Doesn’t that worry you, Poll?’ she asked as she finished.

‘No,’ Polly said, and then added more truthfully, ‘Well, I suppose a bit, but Pat said things are different now from the conditions in the Great War. He said then there were explosions, and people say that it sometimes stopped women conceiving, although facts like that weren’t made public, like. Imagine the outcry if they had been?’

‘Well, how do you know that things are much better now?’

‘Marion, it was over twenty years ago,’ Polly said. ‘Name me one thing that has stayed the same for twenty years?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘They will have learned summat from making them munitions in that first lot,’ Polly said. ‘And this time around they have factory inspectors and everything, to make sure all the rules are obeyed. It’s safe as houses now compared to what it was, and I know that our Mary Ellen would prefer it to work in a drop forge any day of the week.’

‘I can’t say I blame her one bit,’ Marion said. ‘Even the sound of those drop hammers sends chills running down my spine. Let’s hope that Peggy Wagstaffe and Violet Clooney are tougher than me.’

Peggy and Violet found the work in the forge harder than anything they had ever done in their lives, but they made a pact not to complain about it at the Whittakers’. They had made the choice to go into the forge of their own free will and therefore they thought they had no right to moan. But Marion guessed they were finding it hard because she had seen the exhaustion on their faces.

But it wasn’t just the work that was so unnerving, it was everything. In their sleepy little village they had never seen so many people, nor so much traffic nor such a vast array of shops, and that took a bit of getting used to.

‘Didn’t you notice the crowds that day you came to look at the room?’ Marion asked.

‘Yeah, we did,’ Peggy said, ‘but we just thought it looked exciting then. I mean, we chose somewhere that was as unlike home as possible, but it’s different when you live in a place.’

‘Yeah,’ Violet added. ‘It’s the smell of the place too, and that’s all mixed together with the things made in the factories, particularly around here, where so much is made.’

‘Beer, sauce and custard, to name just three,’ Peggy agreed. ‘That’s what makes it such a vibrant place, of course.’

‘The country is all well and good, but not much is happening,’ Violet explained. ‘We love it here now, but crikey, the first time I went on a tram I was sure that it was going to jump off the rails and we would all be killed.’

Marion laughed. ‘Yes, I can see exactly what you mean.’

‘Now we never give getting on a tram a second’s thought, and as for the work in the forge, well, I’m sure we will get into the swing of that too eventually.’

‘It’s happening already,’ Violet said. ‘We’re not half as tired as we used to be when we come home in the evening.’

Marion had to agree with that. She had immense respect for both girls, and it was just amazing how well they had settled into the family, considering they had been there not quite three weeks.

Just a couple of days later Sarah, meeting her grandmother outside the church one Sunday morning, let slip about the lodgers working at the drop forge. Marion hadn’t told any of them to keep what work the lodgers did a secret, though she had not told her mother for she knew that
Clara would think it a totally unsuitable place for two young girls to work.

Sarah quickly realised her mistake as she watched her grandmother go puce in the face and begin exclaiming so loudly about the couple of guttersnipes her daughter had taken to live in her house that many stopped and stared, including the priest, who was in the porch. Sarah, mortified with shame, left her grandfather remonstrating with his wife and slipped into the pew beside her mother. She told her what had happened.