Put Out the Fires (6 page)

“Hallo, there,” said Miss Thomas. “I suppose there’s no need to ask what sort of weekend you had. I expect it was perfect.”

Miss Thomas was the Women’s Overseer, a diminutive, birdlike woman in her early forties. When Eileen had first started, she’d resented her obvious upper-class demeanour, the plummy accent and the way she referred to the women as “her girls”, but as she grew to know her better, she realised Miss Thomas genuinely cared for the women in her charge. Having left her solicitor husband, a man even more violent than Francis, and reverted to her maiden name, she’d been advising Eileen how to go about the divorce.

“I’m afraid the weekend didn’t turn out as expected,”

Eileen said wryly. “I thought I’d better tell you - me husband’s home.”

“Oh, dear!” Miss Thomas’s face fell. “What happened?”

Eileen described the events of the past two days in detail, finishing, “He’s gone to a military hospital in Runcorn today to have the bandage removed.” On Sunday the house had been more like a station as word got round Francis Costello was back, with neighbours and old friends popping in by the minute to see him.

Miss Thomas frowned. “I didn’t realise he was a fighting man. I thought he had a desk bound job.”

“He did,” Eileen nodded, “but as he explained yesterday, he volunteered to take some important papers to one of the officers at the front and the car ran over a mine - the driver was killed. I suppose it was a brave thing to do. After all, he didn’t have to do it.”

“What happens now? I take it moving to the cottage is out for the moment?”

“Only for the moment,” Eileen said firmly. “Nick’ll be waiting for me at dinner time. We’ll decide what’s best to do then.” It seemed incredible now to think she’d actually decided to give him up. She couldn’t wait to see his face when she told him everything had changed.

“I hope your husband doesn’t give you any problems in the meantime.”

Eileen gave a sarcastic laugh. “He’s doing his best to get back in me good books. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth since he came home. He said me cooking had never tasted so good and he actually had the nerve to call me ‘princess’.”

“What does it say in the Bible about the sinner that repenteth?” Miss Thomas mused.

“I don’t know and I don’t particularly care,” said Eileen, “Anyroad, I’d better get down to some work. God! I’m dreading facing the girls. I deliberately sat downstairs on the bus, so’s to avoid Pauline on top. I’ll get the third degree when they realise I’m still in Bootie, and I’ve no intention of telling them the reason why.”

“They know about Nick?”

“Of course. It was difficult to keep him a secret when I met him outside every day, but I never talked about Francis if I could avoid it.” She laughed again. “I feel as if I’ve been leading a double life. It was the other way round at home.”

“Just be quite firm with the girls,” Miss Thomas advised. “Fob them off-a little lie wouldn’t hurt.”

Eileen was about to leave when Miss Thomas called her back. “I nearly forgot! I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ivy Twyford has given in her notice. Her husband has got a job in Sheffield, which means the job of chargehand will be vacant shortly. It’s yours, if you want it, Eileen. It means an extra twopence an hour.”

“Chargehand!” Eileen gasped. “But why me? There’s others been here much longer.”

“We, the management that is, decided you had the most responsible attitude. The girls respect you and they’ll listen to you. They don’t take a blind bit of notice of the foreman.” Miss Thomas smiled. “Poor Alfie merely gets showered with abuse the minute he puts his nose inside the workshop.”

The and Alfie get on fine,” Eileen said. “I must be the only one who doesn’t pull his leg all the time.”

“?’hat’s another reason we chose you. You can act as a conduit between Alfie and the girls.”

Eileen left, wondering what a conduit was, and resolving to look it up in Nick’s dictionary some time. She felt pleased and flattered at the promotion, though knew it might cause some ill feeling, at least initially, with the women who’d started at Runnings before she had.

She entered the workshop, where the noise of nineteen lathes functioning at full pelt was almost deafening, to be greeted with a united yell of, “Morning, Eileen!” With a display of confident cheerfulness she didn’t feel, she yelled, “Morning,” back. If she gave the impression nothing untoward had happened, the girls would be less likely to probe.

The lathe she worked on had already been set up by the woman on the morning shift. She quickly checked what was being made, turned the starting lever, and the machine clanked into action. In no time at all, one-and-a-half-inch distance pieces were dropping into a container underneath, and Eileen felt the fine spray of the nauseous-smelling cooling liquid on her face. When she first started nearly a year ago, she’d thought she’d never get the hang of things, but now the lathe held no more terrors than operating the stove at home.

“How’s things, Eileen?” screamed Doris on the lathe next to her, as casually anyone could whilst shouting at the top of their voice.

“Fine!” Eileen smiled back. No doubt Pauline, who worked on her other side, had already reported seeing her on the bus, when, if things had gone according to the plan the girls all knew about, she should have merely walked along the High Street from the cottage. “I decided to put off the move for a while, that’s all.” She changed the subject. “What did you get up to over the weekend? Meet any nice fellers?”

“If you did, I hope you kept your keks on for a change,” yelled Carmel from behind her lathe opposite.

“I always keep me keks on, if you don’t mind,” Doris replied haughtily. “Eh, what d’you think of me hair? I dyed it a different colour.” She stepped back from the lathe and untied her headscarf to reveal a mop of mahogany coloured curls.

“Y’look like a bloody toffee apple,” shouted Lil.

“Well, last week she looked like a Belisha beacon with that bright orange.”

“You’d look better, Doris, if your eyebrows matched.

One half of your face looks as if it belongs to someone else altogether.” Doris’s eyebrows had been shaved off and redrawn with a pencil. She was never able to draw them the same shape and the left was usually higher than the other, ending in a wiggly upwards curve.

“You’re dead nasty, you’s lot.” Doris pretended to be hurt.

“It looks smashing, luv,” Eileen assured her. “I like that colour better than the orange.” Doris’s wide purple painted lips clashed less violently than they’d done before.

She was a coarse, jolly girl of nineteen, and along with Pauline, who was the same age, spent all her free evenings at dances, being taken home by an endless stream of young men, mainly servicemen passing through Liverpool.

“T’weren’t orange,” Doris shouted. “It were molted gold or something.”

“Molten gold,” corrected Theresa.

“Looked more like mouldy gold to me,” shrieked Carmel.

Eileen grinned. Sometimes, it was more entertaining than the wireless, better even than ITMA, the quips the girls came out with, though some were anything but girls.

Carmel was well into her fifties and completely toothless.

When she spoke the words came out in a sort of mushy blur, along with a shower of spit. Her false teeth were kept in the pocket of her overalls and only brought out in the canteen. According to Doris, Carmel didn’t need cooling liquid, she could provide her own.

Like Carmel, Theresa and Lil, although considerably younger, had been housewives until the war began.

Almost overnight, they’d become centre lathe turners and how they managed to run their homes and take care of their large families as well as work an eight-hour shift at Dunnings, was a source of a constant wonderment to Eileen. She had nothing but admiration for their gritty determination to put in a hard day’s work, as well as their constant equally gritty good humour—though their language left much to be desired! They turned their worst catastrophes into jokes against themselves. Lil kept them in stitches describing the antics of her drunken loutish husband, and Theresa, a pretty young widow with several children who were looked after by her mother-in-law whilst she was at work, had a fund of stories about her eldest lad who seemed set on a criminal career at thirteen.

Their favourite comment, “Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you, else you’d only cry,” was usually made when the group in fact had tears running down their faces, but tears of laughter, not of grief.

Most of the women in the workshop were the same: housewives who had depended on their husbands for support, now suddenly wage earners in their own right and immensely proud of the fact. These five, though, the only ones within earshot above the noise of the pounding machinery, had become Eileen’s special friends.

“How did your mate’s wedding go, Eileen?” Pauline asked. Pauline was a graceful dark-haired girl with a face like a Madonna. She was more serious than the others and also rather vain. Miss Thomas was constantly ticking her off for not covering her hair properly with the turban.

“But it makes me look like an ould washerwoman,”

Pauline complained.

“Best to look like an old washerwoman, dear,” Miss Thomas would reply, “and have a face. You might end up with no face at all if you leave your hair poking out and it catches in your machine!”

“The wedding went fine,” Eileen replied. “There was dancing in the street till it was dark.”

Someone across the workshop began to sing Roll out the Barrel and everyone, including Eileen, joined in. If the women weren’t joking, they were singing. Halfway through the foreman came in and they stopped abruptly, and to the tune of Gracie Fields’ Sally, they warbled, “Alfie Alfie, show us your thingy”, and the embarrassed Alfie turned tail and left, whatever important message he may have brought left undelivered.

The time seemed to crawl by that afternoon, and Eileen kept glancing at the clock impatiently. Work halted at six for the half-hour dinner break, when she would see Nick.

She felt sure the clock had stopped, or might possibly be going backwards. It was weeks since they’d met, mid August, when he’d come home on forty-eight-hours’ leave and was so exhausted he’d spent almost the entire time asleep.

Twenty-five to four, twenty to four. The trolley came round with tea and they drank it by their machines. Tea breaks had been abolished months ago in the national effort to build more planes in order to combat the apparently overwhelming might of the German Luftwaffe.

Ten past five.

“Doesn’t your mouth ache without your teeth in, Carmel?” Doris shouted. “I’m amazed your face stays together, like.”

“It aches with “em in. That’s why I don’t wear “em.”

“What does your ould man have to say? I mean, it must be like kissing a sponge or something.”

Carmel hooted with laughter. “My ould man’s only interested in you know what. He ain’t kissed me in a long time.”

“Perhaps he would if you had your teeth in,” said Theresa. “You must be one of the few women who gives their chap a soft on.”

“I can’t think of a better reason for keeping them out,” Carmel leered. “Fact, I wish I could think of a way of stopping the ‘you know what’. The ould git’ll have a heart attack one of these nights.”

“Why don’t you put your teeth there, instead,” Doris suggested. “That’d soon stop him.”

By the time Eileen had finished laughing, it was half past five. Only another half an hour to go. The minutes dragged by, but eventually the big hand on the clock jerked to twelve and the hooter went. Eileen switched the machine off and was out of workshop in a flash, dragging the scarf off her head as she ran towards the side door.

Nick wasn’t there!

She glanced wildly up and down the banks of the little gurgling stream, half expecting his tall, lean frame to appear miraculously from nowhere.

He must be at home. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep. Perhaps his leave had been curtailed. He might be ill. Eileen mentally listed all the reasons why Nick wasn’t waiting as she hurried along the High Street towards the cottage.

She’d left her key under a stone beside the door. He would surely have left a message telling her where he was.

She turned off the High Street and down the narrow lane where the cottage was situated, alone and relatively isolated in its large untended garden. It was over two hundred years old, the once wooden exterior now pebble-dashed, with a crumbling red-tiled roof and tiny windows.

The key was where she’d left it and her fingers shook as she unlocked the front door.

“Nick!” she called as soon as she was inside.

There was no answer. Where was he, she wondered desperately?

She went into the low-ceilinged living room and nearly jumped out of her skin. Nick was sitting on the sofa, dressed in his blue-grey RAF uniform, his long legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. There was an expression on his sunburnt mobile face she’d never seen before, a look of icy disdain.

“Nick!” she cried and took a step forward, expecting him to stand up and take her in his arms.

“Eileen!” The tone was half mocking, as if he were making fun of her own cry of relief. He didn’t move.

“Why didn’t you come and meet me?” she asked shakily, aware something was terribly wrong.

He raised his eyebrows. “Under the circumstances, did you honestly expect that I would?”

“Well, yes.” Her blood began to run as cold as the look on his face. This was a Nick she’d never known. He’d had black moods before, when he felt the world was a terrible place, but he’d never taken his bitterness out of her.

Indeed, sometimes they’d seemed closer when she tried to coax him back into a good humour.

He smiled and her blood ran even colder. It was a hard, cynical smile, unpleasant. “On Saturday I was told we could never see each other again. Apparently, your husband was back. Why should you expect to find me waiting two days later as if nothing had happened?”

“I didn’t mean it,” she stammered, realising these were inadequate words to use. “I made a mistake. I wasn’t thinking right at first.”

“A mistake? You ditch someone at a moment’s notice, but it was all a mistake? I’ve spent one hell of a weekend, and curiously enough, it doesn’t make me feel any better knowing it was all a mistake.”