Birmingham Rose (19 page)

In between the gripes about blisters and arms throbbing from the inoculations they’d had, Gloria was regaling them with tales of her men. She apparently had several in tow at once. To prove the point she’d pinned four photos on the wall behind her bed, and went through a half-joking ritual of kissing them all at length before she settled down to sleep.

‘That one’s Bob,’ she told them, pointing out a dark, moustachioed figure. ‘He’s my favourite really. It was him who give me this.’ She flounced round in front of them in the shimmering, peach-coloured folds of cloth.

‘Under the counter stuff,’ Tilly said knowingly. ‘Has to be. How’d he get it otherwise with rationing on?’

Gloria stood magnificently above her, curling a lock of her pale hair round a finger. ‘I’ll have you know,’ she said disdainfully, ‘that my Bob actually owns the factory where they used to make these here gowns.’

Gloria turned to Rose, who was sitting with her army jacket in her lap, lighting matches to burn off the pinkish film which covered the buttons. It was something they all did to make the jackets look more presentable.

‘You’re a looker,’ Gloria said. ‘Why ain’t we seen any pictures of your bloke? Or ain’t you interested in fellers?’

‘I’m – sort of engaged to someone,’ Rose told them hesitantly, still not feeling sure it was really true.

Muriel and Gwen both said, ‘Ah, how lovely.’

‘Where is he then?’ Tilly asked. ‘He in the army too?’

‘Yes, but he’s in Germany.’

There were noises of horror from the others.

‘Picked him up, did they?’ Gloria asked, more gently. ‘Is he in a Kraut prison camp?’

Rose nodded. ‘I just had one of them cards, a couple of months ago. You know, name, in good health and all that. The camp’s called Felsig. I think they picked him up in France.’

The others sat silent for a moment.

‘That must be terrible,’ Muriel said.

‘Yeah,’ Gloria joined in, trying to cheer things up. ‘But at least you know where he is and that he’s alive. Eh,’ she nudged Rose playfully with her elbow, ‘he won’t be getting up to much mischief in one of them camps!’ She gave her loud laugh. ‘So in the meantime you can have some fun, can’t you? I mean being engaged ain’t the same as being married, is it?’ She laughed again. ‘I’ll tell you one thing. I’ll give this army lark a chance, and if I don’t like it I’ll be over the men’s quarters right quick, getting meself a Paragraph 11!’

Paragraph 11, in army regulations, provided a let-out clause for women who were having babies. The others laughed, rather uneasily, at the thought of Gloria going brazenly over to the men’s side of the camp to help herself to a pregnancy.

‘That’s awful,’ Gwen said, blushing.

‘Oh, ta very much.’ Gloria was unruffled. ‘I can’t see any point in not having a good time when you can – specially with a war on. And I don’t know why you’re looking so bug-eyed about it. You only joined up to get away from that bleedin’ mother of yours, didn’t you?’

Gwen leapt to her feet, her face instantly a hot red. ‘That’s not true!’ she cried. ‘How could you say something so awful?’ And she ran sobbing over to her bed and lay down on it, curled up tight.

Rose put her jacket down. ‘I thought I had a gob on me till I met you,’ she said matter-of-factly to Gloria, and went to sit on Gwen’s bed. The other girl wouldn’t say anything, but gripped Rose’s hand.

‘Time for bed, methinks,’ Muriel said, with all the authority of a boarding school prefect, which until a few months before was what she had been.

Gloria grinned, making a thumbs up sign at Muriel and winking at the others. ‘Definitely officer material there!’ she said.

Every morning they were up at six-thirty and ready for PT by seven. This was made even more of an agony for the first few days by pain in their arms from the injections. Rose felt as if the scab was lifting up and down every time she swung her arm in the freezing air.

Compulsory inoculations had only been one part of the medical when they’d first arrived. They had also had to go through the dreaded ‘free from infection’ inspection.

‘Oh my Gawd,’ Gloria had said as they queued up. She seemed genuinely rattled by it. ‘It’s the bugs, babies and scabies job isn’t it? Do we really have to take our bits off in front of that lot?’

They all stood in line outside the chilly medical hut. Weak sunshine lit the grey camp buildings and a damp wind swept across the downs. Their grumpy corporal kept shouting ‘NO TALKING!’ and refused to answer any questions.

All of them were anxious. Most had never taken off their clothes even in front of their closest family before. When they had filed inside and Rose was stripped down to her vest and pants, she found herself trembling, and not just with cold. The stale, sweaty smell of some of the girls reminded her sickeningly of Mr Lazenby. She saw with enormous relief that the medical officer was a woman.

She listened to Rose’s heart, poked about in her hair and felt along her spine. She pulled out the elastic of her knickers to have a quick, impassive glance down them, and then it was over and Rose was pronounced nit-free and fit for duty.

‘It’s nothing much,’ Rose whispered to Gwen, who was standing outside looking pale with fright.

Every day there came another trial: kit inspection. Beds had to be ‘barracked’ – arranged with the sheets and blankets folded in a very particular way – and then all of the kit had to be laid out in precise order and immaculately folded. Woe betide you if any of it was missing and could not be excused as being in the laundry.

And then drill. They stood in lines, an extraordinarily unformed-looking bunch in the first few days, as one of the male NCOs bawled relentlessly at them.

‘Right, you lousy shower. Let’s see some discipline around here! You’ve got to learn in three weeks what we normally take three months of army life to pick up, and I’m damned if any of you are going to let me down! Right. Chests foward, shoulders back, bottoms in. Atten-
shun
!’

Gradually, as the days of marching and saluting and manoeuvring back and forth went by, their bodies creaked and cranked into familiarity with it. They began to look as if they might belong in the army.

After lunch, for which they lined up in the canteen, men and women bantering together, they sat down for a bewildering assortment of lectures and films. One talk on army regiments or history might be closely followed by a luridly educational film about VD or how a baby is born. This was a mixed camp in a mixed army and they were expected to take all this in their stride, but there was many a green, shocked face after they’d seen the festering genitals in the VD film.

And then came the fatigues or camp chores; scrubbing floors, washing dishes or spud bashing.

One afternoon Rose was standing in the canteen hut with Gloria. They both had their khaki sleeves rolled up so they could dip their hands into the freezing, muddy water.

‘You know, gypsy Rose,’ Gloria teased. ‘I can never make you out. What d’you really make of the army?’

Rose was silent for a moment, working on the cold, earthy skin of a potato. She turned her strong gaze on Gloria.

‘I don’t like being pushed around, except when I can really see the point of it. I mean I’ll do what they say if it’s right – for the war effort like. And I’ve always wanted to get away, see a bit more of life than just Brum. I miss home of course, but my mom’s died anyhow and I can’t stick living with my dad.’

Gloria seemed in an unusually solemn mood. ‘Seems like everyone’s running away from something when you come down to it, doesn’t it?’ She grinned. ‘Quiet here though, isn’t it? We hardly had a wink of sleep back in Deptford. They was bombing the balls off of us.’

Rose pulled back a wavy strand of hair with cold, wet fingers. ‘Is that why you joined up then?’

‘Not just,’ Gloria said briskly. ‘They got me brother. He was a rear gunner in the RAF. Went through all the Battle of Britain, right till the end. Then he went out one day and they lost him over the Channel. We was close, me and Jo. It was only me he told how scared he was – brown trousers, the lot – you know. When he went I thought, I’m not going to just sit here with them dropping this bloody lot on us night after night. I’m going to get the buggers.’

Rose still found Gloria an unlikely addition to the army with her peroxide hair, her curl papers and slinky nighties. ‘D’you think you’ll stick it?’

‘Oh, I’ll stick it,’ Gloria said grimly. ‘I’ll stick it if it kills me.’

‘So all that you said about Paragraph 11 – you was joking?’

Gloria gaped at her in astonishment. ‘Course I was bleeding joking! What d’you take me for?’ With a broad grin on her pink face she picked up a wet potato and lobbed it over in Rose’s direction. ‘The very idea, you cheeky bugger!

It was two weeks before Rose found an opportunity to write to Diana. She sat under the stark light in the hut with her pillow propped against the black iron bedhead. She wanted the letter to be warm and friendly. It was easier to write than she’d feared. Away in this place that was so different from home and Birmingham life, she felt almost as if those terrible years had happened to someone else. She wrote about Lazenby’s and, as clearly but briefly as she could, about what Mr Lazenby had done to her.

Yet when she described Joseph’s short, fragile life, tears began to pour down her face and on to the paper. It brought back vividly what she tried to keep from her mind: the feel of his soft, downy head, and the tiny frozen hands she’d found that terrible morning. She knew with renewed clarity that that day would be the worst of her life – far worse than the day Mr Lazenby assaulted her and worse than anything she might face in the future.

‘I wish now I’d told you, Diana,’ she wrote.

Now I think back I know you’d have understood – and your mom and dad. But at the time I wasn’t thinking straight. I just felt dirty and ashamed all the time and I couldn’t see how you’d want to be friends with me again. I hope you can forgive me. I know you’d never get yourself in a mess like that – much too clever, you are! And I want you to know I never stopped thinking about you and wondering how you was getting on. And your family too. They were all so kind to me. Please remember me to them.

I’d like to see you again some time. Maybe in more cheerful days after this war’s over?

She signed the letter,

With kind thoughts from your friend,

Rose.

After that, when she’d wiped her face, she dashed off a quick note home. She usually found herself talking in her mind to Grace as she wrote.

‘I miss you ever such a lot,’ she finished off. ‘When I come home next I want to see you in your nurse’s uniform!

‘Love to all – Rose. xxxx’

She heard the door open, and glanced up to see Gwen come in looking wet, dishevelled and flustered. She sat down miserably on the edge of her bed without even taking her coat off. After a moment Rose realized she was crying. She put her writing things down and went rather timidly to sit beside her.

‘What’s up with you?’ she asked.

Gwen looked up, startled and rather uneasy. She hadn’t even noticed Rose when she came into the hut, and she wished that if anyone had to be there, it had been Muriel.

‘You’ll think I’m so stupid.’

‘Why should I?’ Rose asked, genuinely surprised.

‘You give the impression of being, well, not exactly worldly, but of knowing a lot about life.’

‘Me?’ Rose couldn’t help bursting into laughter. ‘Gwen, you do know this is the first time I’ve ever set foot out of Birmingham, don’t you? Come on – out with it.’ She patted Gwen’s shoulder.

Gwen mopped her eyes with a delicate lacy handkerchief. ‘I went to the Naafi tonight. And one of the chaps – it doesn’t matter who – kept making up to me all evening. He seemed quite nice, but then he asked me to go outside with him. It’s raining, so it wasn’t very pleasant, but he didn’t seem to care. He pushed me up against the ablutions hut and started . . .’ She paused, her head down, ashamed. ‘He kept pawing at me. And then he grabbed hold of me and started sticking his horrible tobaccoey tongue in my mouth. It was disgusting. So I just pushed him off.’ Her voice had gone high and plaintive with emotion again. ‘I mean it was all wrong! D’you think there’s something the matter with him, Rose? Or with me?’

Having so recently revived the memory in her letter to Diana of how she’d had to find out about sex herself, Rose felt her heart go out to Gwen. ‘Look,’ she said gently. ‘I know it seems a bit funny if you’ve not done it before, but that’s just a way of kissing.’

‘
Kissing!
’ Gwen squeaked. ‘That’s not kissing. It’s . . . it’s – insanitary!’

Rose looked at Gwen’s distraught face in silence for a moment, trying to work out how to phrase what she knew she had to say next.

‘You know that film we saw last week, about the babby being born?’ she said. Gwen nodded, eyes wide. ‘You don’t know how it got in there in the first place, do you?’

‘Well, Mummy said they just get sort of planted there . . .’ Gwen trailed off. ‘No, I don’t. She told me I didn’t need to know anything about “that” until I’m married. And she said even then I’d be luckier not to find out. She’s very protective.’

Rose sighed, and then, as carefully and clearly as she could, so that Gwen could be left in no doubt what she was talking about, she explained. She watched Gwen’s expression change from astonishment to disbelief and horror, and then to a stunned gratitude.

‘So when they call us ATS “officers’ groundsheets”, that’s what they . . . ?’

Rose nodded.

‘And that’s what Gloria meant about Paragraph 11,’ she said slowly, her horrified expression returning. ‘That she’d actually . . . ?’

‘It’s all right,’ Rose reassured her with a wry smile. ‘From what I hear in this place she wouldn’t be the first to try that way out. But I’m sure she was only joking – honest.’

By the end of the final week of basic training, they had been drilled and barracked and bumpered into something that not only resembled army discipline, but was also becoming second nature. Now it was time to be assigned a trade. They all sat through aptitude tests and interviews designed to help the army allot each of them a suitable job. Rose found most of the tests less formidable than she’d feared.