A Summer Promise (24 page)

The girl called Pasfield sighed. ‘You’re right,’ she said resignedly. ‘Mave’s major treated her well, but the other drivers – the men, not the Ats – made nasty remarks which were totally unfounded. It was jealousy, I suppose, but I think we all agree that the men should have to prove themselves too, and not simply assume superiority.’

‘Oh, well, we’re halfway through our training now and beginning to get the picture,’ the dark-haired girl commented, pushing back her chair and scooping up her irons, ready to dip them in a bucket of extremely dirty water and dry them on the rag of a dishcloth. ‘Tomorrow is another day, as my dear old gran used to say, so comfort yourself, girls, with the fact that it can only get better.’

It had been warm, almost muggy, in the cookhouse, but the moment Maddy and Marigold followed their companions out through the open doorway they walked into a snowstorm. Maddy clutched Marigold’s arm and bawled directly in her ear, tilting her friend’s cap in order to do so. ‘Want to go to the NAAFI and write letters?’

Marigold shook her head and they dived into their hut and slammed the door behind them.

‘Tomorrow there’s kit inspection immediately after drill, then a hair inspection and then a hearing test,’ Maddy said. ‘The corporal said that at this stage in our training we’d usually have to go into the gas hut, but not in the snow – too dangerous – so that’s one thing we can discount. But I ought to write to Alice, because she really does try to keep in touch.’ She sighed. ‘There’s Alice and Tom complaining about the heat and you and I complaining about the cold! So what’s it to be? Letters or bed?’

‘Bed, I think,’ Marigold said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘If I’m to get up at reveille I need all the sleep I can get. I keep waiting for someone to ask me what trade I mean to apply for, because I fancy being a driver, the same as Pasfield’s sister. If I could just find a major important enough to have his own chauffeur, I’d find some way of wangling myself into his good graces. Oh, I know it’s wicked of me to want to jump the queue so to speak, but I’m sick of being ground down and mocked by every man in uniform just because I’m female and a lot prettier than they are.’

Maddy heaved a sigh. She had always enjoyed letter writing, but the thought of fighting her way across the parade ground to the NAAFI, penning a letter to Alice and then fighting her way back to her hut had very little appeal at the moment. And bed wasn’t all that attractive either, she told herself, eyeing the three straw ‘biscuits’ which made up the mattress of her bunk bed with loathing. Life would have been so much pleasanter if at the end of a hard day you could have relaxed on a decent bed, but that wasn’t the army way. Presumably the men, too, had to make and remake their beds morning and night.

She began to remove her clothing, spreading skirt and battledress out on the end of her bed in the hope – usually vain – that they would add to the warmth for which her frozen feet longed. She put on her issue pyjamas, added the thickest pullover she possessed and made up the bed, something she could now do with incredible speed. Then she wriggled underneath the blanket, beating Marigold to it by the skin of her teeth.

She fell asleep almost at once, only to be awoken in the early hours by some sound or movement which she could not at once interpret. She lay listening for a bit and then realised that the relentless drips as the snow filled every gutter on the hut had stopped. It was not the thaw for which they had longed, she realised, sitting up and peering out through the thickly frosted window above her bed, but the storm did appear to have blown itself out. Maddy gave a loud yawn and the voice in a bunk nearby said: ‘It’s stopped snowing! Wouldn’t you bloody well know it! Just when I was hoping to get out of being gassed, the bloody snow stops.’

Maddy giggled. ‘That’s life!’ she said. ‘And all this time we’ve been praying for the snow to stop. Isn’t that what they always tell you? Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.’ And with these words she slid down beneath the blanket again, adjusted the woolly cap she always wore at nights now, and fell instantly asleep.

Next morning the girls drilled for the customary thirty to forty minutes, finding it difficult to obey the sergeant’s commands since they could scarcely hear his voice above the howl of the wind. Then they formed two lines and returned to their hut for kit and hair inspection.

‘I’d like to see the nit which dared to try and establish a colony in
my
squeaky clean locks,’ Marigold said as the corporal moved along the line, cursorily examining the girls’ heads. ‘Mind you, having seen Morton scratching like a maniac I suppose anyone can be targeted by the little beasts.’

‘Oh, Morton’s all right,’ Maddy said hastily. Morton was a large and aggressive girl, who would be a bad enemy. ‘Come on, let’s get into the queue for this wretched hearing test, though anyone who’s a trifle deaf is to be envied when the sarge starts shrieking commands into the wind.’

Cleared of deafness, the two girls went straight to the cookhouse. ‘I’m bloody starving,’ Marigold moaned as they entered the warm and fuggy atmosphere. ‘If the porridge is burnt I swear I’ll empty my plateful over the chief cook’s miserable bald head.’

Maddy laughed. Marigold was always threatening to pay the cookhouse back for its many mistakes, but though she often voiced her disapproval she was still popular with the staff, who often saved her odds and ends of food, warning her that if she got fat she would only have herself to blame.

‘I will; I’ll empty it over his head, so help me God,’ she repeated dramatically. ‘What’s next on the agenda? After brekker, I mean.’

Someone ahead of them in the queue turned round and grinned. It was the tall dark girl, Plethin. ‘You could have toast,’ she remarked. ‘Oh, I know there’s no marmalade or Marmite, but there’s margarine and marrow jam, if that’s your fancy. Oh, and did you know? They’ve decided to test us in the gas hut today after all, provided it doesn’t start snowing again.’ She grinned at them. ‘What a wonderful treat,’ she said sarcastically. ‘If I die, girls, I shall leave my body to medical science, and I trust you will see that Sergeant Wetherspoon gets his come-uppance.’

Later that morning Maddy and Marigold joined the queue of girls, respirators in hand, who were awaiting their turn in the gas hut. This was an empty hut, similar to their own and with entrance and exit doors, but of stronger construction, with a corridor marked out down the middle. Sergeant Wetherspoon waited at the entrance and an ATS corporal barred the way to the far door. The sergeant collected them in groups of ten and gave them their instructions. ‘First go off, you wear your respirators and proceed in an orderly fashion halfway down the length of the hut until you reach the corporal – she’ll be wearing her respirator the whole time – whereupon you will remove your respirators and proceed
h’again
in a orderly fashion towards the exit. Do not run or gallop or do anything but march, holding your breath so as not to take on board no noxious fumes. Do not breathe in or out until you emerge from the hut. Remember, I shall be observing your progress . . .’

‘Do not stop. Do not collect two hundred pounds, but go straight to jail,’ Maddy murmured wickedly. ‘Trust the army to turn gas drill into a board game!’

‘Do you think they really fill the hut with poisonous gas?’ Marigold said nervously as they neared the front of the queue. ‘Surely it would escape whenever the door was opened?’

‘I expect it’s just a trick,’ Plethin said knowingly. ‘Be comforted by the fact that if they kill us they’ll have to face a court martial . . . oh, crumbs, what if your respirator has a leak? I mean, we’ve not tried them out, have we? I wish I’d thought of testing mine earlier.’

But it was too late now; the sergeant was checking each girl, ensuring they were all wearing their respirators, and when he was satisfied he stepped back, giving them a peculiarly saturnine grin as he did so. ‘Forward march!’ he bellowed. ‘And take them respirators off as soon as you get level with the corp. And remember, no runnin’ allowed, else you’ll have to go through again.’

The first part of the test was easy because they were wearing the respirators – gas masks to civilians – which they had been carrying around unused ever since they were first issued. But getting the mask on was a lot easier than getting it off; Marigold, eyes watering, managed to tug quite a lot of her hair out by the roots in the process, which caused her to gasp and thus inhale some of the noxious fumes against which they had been warned. Maddy saw what had happened and grabbed her friend’s arm, forgetting that, in order to communicate, they had been told to use sign language only. Needless to say, they held up the line and confused the other girls, so that when they emerged through the exit, taking huge breaths of the clean, cold air, they were ordered, brusquely, in the sergeant’s stentorian tones, to return to the dreaded hut and this time to do it properly.

After the second ordeal the girls were permitted to go to the cookhouse and get their midday meal – sandwiches, a very small piece of cake and a very large mug of strong, unsweetened cookhouse tea – and in the afternoon Sergeant Wetherspoon decided it was time they all learned to march. Maddy, having wrongly assumed that drill was marching and marching was drill, soon discovered her mistake. A platoon of soldiers who were being marched from one place to another would not deviate from their forward motion unless whoever was in charge of them ordered them to turn right or left, or to halt.

Once they had got the idea, and in some cases had learned to tell their left foot from their right, marching was not too bad, and in the following weeks the girls took turns to act as corporal and give the orders as they marched through the streets of Durham, causing a good deal of amusement as they shepherded their obedient troops up and down narrow alleys and across main roads. The only disadvantage was the fact that the ATS shoes were heavier than those most of them usually wore, so that blisters burst and chilblains burned and itched, sending the girls to sit shivering on their beds in their huts whilst trying to repair the damage.

‘I wonder if Tom has to march in the desert?’ Maddy asked Marigold, one dark afternoon when they had been practising aircraft recognition with the rest of their set. ‘I could ask him next time I write, but I don’t suppose I shall. It’s a silly question really. We are only doing so much marching because we’re in a training camp.’ She smiled reminiscently. ‘Can you remember how green we were, Marigold? I know we’ve grumbled and moaned, particularly over all the medical stuff and the gas hut, but it has had a purpose. When we came in we were starry-eyed kids, imagining ourselves in romantic uniforms, doing romantic things. Why, I even thought I might get to the front line, having been taught how to use a Bren gun. I imagined soldiers queuing up to take us to the flicks. I even imagined marrying one of them, or being dropped in France as a spy to discover what Hitler’s latest plans were. Gosh, I was green!’

‘Yes, you were,’ Marigold said rather too quickly. ‘And if you go even further back you believed in Tom the chimney sweep and the water babies . . .’

‘Hey, unfair!’ Maddy said indignantly. ‘I did
not
believe in either Tom or the water babies. I did believe in Vendale, and thought we might find where the Reverend Mr Kingsley pretended he’d seen water babies, but I’m not sure, now, that I even believe in Vendale any more. You are mean, Marigold, to rake up all that old business . . . but at least the ATS has brought us both down to earth with a bump. It’s disappointing to have to admit that the army seems to have decided that we’re an inferior sex, which considering that they make us work twice as hard as the men seems very unfair. But I intend to go through with the examinations when we’ve completed our four weeks’ basic training, and if I pass I shall put in for an ack-ack or searchlight battery. I know that passing examinations and doing work that men don’t want us to do won’t prove anything, but it will make me feel better.’

‘Oh, but you can’t – take those examinations, I mean,’ Marigold said, her voice rising. ‘I don’t intend to spend my army career stuck out on some miserable gun site in the middle of nowhere. For one thing, they say you have to be really good at maths to work with the guns, and for another, I’ve always wanted to learn to drive, and they won’t teach you if you’re on an ack-ack site.’

‘Oh, Marigold, don’t be such an ape,’ Maddy protested. ‘The War Office wanted girls to go on the gun sites months ago but the men didn’t like it, said women wouldn’t be able to cope. I’d like to pass the exams and become a girl gunner just to prove that they were wrong. If you take the exams too – and I’m sure you’re as physically strong as I am – we could go on being together, and wouldn’t it be a feather in our caps to wear the white lanyard and work alongside men on the ack-ack sites!’

Marigold hesitated, and Maddy thought, with an inward grin, that she could see various options struggling within her friend’s curly blonde head. Finally the other girl nodded reluctant agreement. ‘All right, I’ll have a go,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose for one moment that I’ll pass, but as you say, if we do, there will be a lot of crestfallen faces on our male colleagues. It’s awful how keen they are to make fools of us and how they constantly shoot themselves in the foot when we’re seen to do well. One or two of the officers are quite nice, and the one with the little blond moustache told me that women consistently come out streets ahead of men in written tests. Of course he told me in confidence, but I know you won’t repeat it, and anyway, once the results are known, they’ll simply have to accept the findings.’

‘True; but can you imagine the chagrin?’ Maddy said with a small smirk. ‘Well, they’ll find a way to get even, you may be sure, only once we’ve proved ourselves it will be a lot more difficult to keep putting us down.’

They had been having this discussion in the classroom, finally empty save for themselves, and now Maddy got up from the desk upon which she had been perched. ‘I’m as bad as the fellows, boasting about how we mean to come out on top,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as my old gran used to say. Onward and upward, Private Stein!’