Ruby's War (31 page)

‘Come on, you two,' Jenny said, pushing her way to the front of the crowd. ‘I've got Michael to get me another cup of tea, before we walk round the stalls. Ruby, stop snivelling; he's not been hurt. I hope you'll come and see Henry the next time you get some time off, Con, love,' she said. ‘You'd be very welcome; we've not seen you there for a while.'

The war meant there was little time for Con and Ruby to meet up, and the increasing scarcity of late passes made it even harder. The issue of the passes had made him and the rest of the guys at the camp very bitter: everyone knew that the white GIs got plenty more passes than the black guys did. As often as he dared, Con made up for his lack of passes by delaying his return to camp from the neighbouring bases: it didn't make up for the wrong he felt, but it helped to soothe his resentment. When Ruby was at home, he would call at the cottage and sit for a while in the steamy kitchen, watching her cook or mend, and listen to the radio, but on warmer days he would drag her away from her chores to walk under the new hazy-green canopy in the nearby woods. When there was no one at home at the cottage, he would call in at the pub, and when that was closed, he called on Mrs Bland and raided her library. One day he found the old lady
unpacking books from a battered box and looking almost as spitting mad as her old cat.

‘They asked for books to make a library for our soldiers. I was happy to contribute, but they've returned my donations – “too anti-war and pacifist in nature”, apparently,' she said, kneeling by her unwelcome offerings.

‘They look real nice,' Con said, reaching down and ruffling the gilt-edged pages of one of the leather-bound tomes.

Appeased by his words, Mrs Bland looked up and smiled. ‘You're a young man whose mind needs to be fed, your stomach as well, no doubt. Join me for some food. I have a stew, if you would care to share it. It is only plain vegetable and lentils, I'm afraid.'

They ate the stew out of large blue-and-white striped bowls at the bare wooden table, along with slices of rough, grey English bread, which they tore in pieces and soaked in the gravy to make it palatable. His grandma served her stew with corn bread that she made herself; Con smiled, as he thought how shocked she would have been at the sight of a white lady scooping up food with a spoon, without a tablecloth or napkin in sight.

‘The anger you feel at your treatment,' Mrs Bland said, chasing the last piece of bread around her bowl. ‘Don't let it burn uselessly inside you. Use your reading and your experiences to change things. The young men who come to your meetings at the camp need people to show them the way. Your sergeant is a wise man; learn from him. He knows how powerful knowledge can be. That's why they've rejected my books; writers are needed in times like these, as keepers of our ideas and dreams. If you take
away access to ideas, you smother progress and freedom. Can I offer you a cup of tea, dear, and then we'll find something that might interest you?'

During that early spring, Ruby had learnt that the monotonous work – taking off and replacing the bobbins on the spinning frames – meant that she didn't need to use her brain. Instead of being shut inside in the spinning room's heat and noise, as her hands picked up and replaced each bobbin, Ruby was by the river, or she was walking in the woods with Con, their feet disturbing the scent of last year's decaying leaves. The other thing she'd learnt was that the days at the factory fused together in her mind: it was hard to separate any of them out, except for Fridays. On Fridays, there was always a feeling of expectation; everyone was in a good mood, looking forward to the feeling of contentment a wage packet brought, even if it was only for a few hours. Not that there was much to buy, but at least if there was something in the shops on Friday – and you'd the points on your ration card – you had some money in your pocket to spend.

As they waited outside the office window, watching the figures moving about behind the frosted glass, the tacklers – mostly older men because of the war – shouted to the office manager that they were losing valuable drinking time, and he called back, saying that there was plenty of time and to take their money home to their wives first. It was the same jokes every week, until the little window was unbolted and they lined up to collect their money.

This week, when the window rattled up, it wasn't the
manager standing there, dripping ash from his cigarette on to the wage packets, but Trevor, the boy who'd played Joseph in the Nativity play, dressed in the same grey sweater and wearing the same dark-blue tie he'd worn for school. The manager stood at his shoulder, joking with the men about his new assistant. When it was the weavers' turn to get their pay, some of them tried to flirt with him, telling him he was much better-looking than the manager, asking him his name and if he was courting, or telling him they hadn't a boyfriend, or that their husbands were away. The more they teased him, the more nervous he became. When it was Ruby's turn – her cheeks glowing – she gave her name, but Trevor didn't look up. Instead, he gulped and handed her the pay packet without a word.

She pushed the brown envelope in the pocket of her overall. Now that she was working – along with her granddad and Sadie – Ruby handed over her unopened pay packet to Jenny every Friday night. It was the same ritual every week. They had their meal, then Jenny got out the biscuit tin from the drawer in the sideboard and they handed over their pay. She opened her own packet first and then the others in their turn, handing each of them some of the money back. Ruby knew that both Sadie and Granddad spent most of their money every week, but she put part of hers with the ten-shilling note Uncle Walt had given her; with the rest, she would sometimes go along with Sadie and Lou to the little cinema near the camp, and other times to the church dance on Saturday.

‘Edna Pye, that Trevor's mother, is friendly with Nellie Lathom, next door,' Sadie said the next evening, as they were getting ready for the dance. ‘A couple of right old
gossips they are. That Elsie Rostron is another one. They're always gossiping, the three of them. Nellie still doesn't speak to me, unless she has to, even though Ma told her that I only said I'd write to her Jack to be friendly.'

‘She still doesn't like me taking Bess out. If I go round, she makes excuses. I wouldn't care, but she doesn't take her out either,' Ruby said. ‘She only lets her out on the field; Mrs Bland says it isn't enough exercise for a dog that size.'

‘That's just stupid, it was nothing to do with you, or the flippin' dog. Anyway, you couldn't have kept on doing it now you're working. It's not like she's going to catch anything, is it? Though, I've heard that folk have been saying the lads from the camp have … have a disease, and you shouldn't let them use your toilet. It's a story that's come from the doctor's wife, so they all think it must be true.'

Ruby, who'd been concentrating on the way Sadie was applying her make-up, glanced up and met her eyes in the mirror.

‘I don't think Mrs Grey would say—'

‘It was her that wanted to stop them coming to the dances,' Sadie said, getting up from her seat and struggling into her dress. ‘Oh, look at this,' she said, turning towards Ruby and exposing a jagged purple line on the inside of her pale forearm. ‘This is one of my summer frocks. I haven't had it on since my accident. Look how it shows.'

‘You could try rubbing some make-up on it to make it fade.'

‘I've hardly enough as it is. I haven't got enough to keep covering this up. Who's going to want to dance with me with this ugly thing on my arm?'

‘Bo is,' Ruby said, as Sadie's face crumpled. ‘Let's have a cup of tea. Then we'll have a look for something else you could wear.'

Before she followed Sadie downstairs, Ruby went to her own room and opened Pearl's trunk. She selected a blouse in the softest lemon, with silk swirls embroidered on its gossamer-thin sleeves. Now it didn't feel as if she was giving part of Pearl away; instead, she felt that she was helping a friend – an equal.

‘Here,' she said, draping the blouse over a chair in the kitchen. ‘This was Mum's. It would go with the skirt you altered.'

Compared to the dances in town, the dance at the church hall was a very simple affair. Instead of a band of elderly musicians, the music was provided by records, but probably a more serious deficit was the lack of strong drink: during the refreshment interval, only tea and soft drinks were served from the little hatch off the hall, and instead of the bars in the town's dance halls, the dancers had to sip their drinks in the infant classroom, amongst the pictures of nursery rhymes. As a result of this shortcoming, most of the young women had to be content to dance with each other, until more potential partners began to arrive, after calling at one or more of the local pubs.

‘Let's sit out for a bit,' Sadie said, leading Ruby over to a corner seat, where they could watch the other girls dancing in pairs. ‘Can you see the girl over there in the blue – the big one with the red hair? She works with Lou. She says to Lou that her dad's thinking of complaining about all the black truck drivers on the road. Reckons all the lorries going down their road have stopped his hens layin'. She says that
we should complain as well, because it must have been one of them that hit you.'

‘No it wasn't,' Ruby said. ‘It wasn't any of the black GIs.'

‘She asked Lou if you was badly hurt. When she said you was, she says that they must have been goin' over twenty, and we should complain and ask for compensation.'

‘It wasn't any of the black GIs.'

‘What sort of lorry was it, then?'

‘I don't know; it was dark.'

‘Well, how do you know? If it was a lorry in the dark … How do you know who …? All the Yank drivers are black … Oh look, here's Bo and the lads. You want to say, if it wasn't one of them. They're getting the blame for it.'

The room filled up with young British soldiers home on leave and the black GIs who'd been lucky enough to get one of the treasured late passes. One of the soldiers asked Ruby to dance, allowing her to escape Sadie and her questions. Between partners, Ruby found a seat by the hatch to the tiny kitchen, where a couple of ladies were getting out the teacups ready for the refreshment break. When the ancient tea urn began to snort, one of them put her head through the hatch and waved to Father O'Flynn, who, once the record had ended, got up from his customary seat near the door and announced that refreshments were about to be served.

Normally the dancers would line up at the serving hatch, before taking their drinks through to the infant classroom where they would squat on the tiny chairs and chat, but when the queue began to form, Wes sat down at the piano
and began to play. The music made the hall's floor quiver and the tea urn bounce. Bo and Sadie began to dance. He took hold of her hand and their feet moved together in perfect time to the piano. When they saw how well they could dance, spinning around with such skill, the rest of the dancers forgot about collecting drinks and crowded around cheering and clapping.

No one noticed the door to the infant classroom open, or saw the two women dressed in WRVS uniforms standing in the doorway, until Father O'Flynn – who'd been puffing happily at his pipe and tapping his feet to the music – motioned to Wes to stop playing. Ruby saw the priest usher Mrs Grey and Mrs Prendergast back into the classroom, followed by one of the women from the kitchen, carrying a silver tray containing three cups and a plate of biscuits. Then the dancers began collecting their cups of tea from the kitchen hatch, but instead of following the priest and his guests with their drinks, they stood around the piano, listening to Wes, who was now playing more softly.

Con brought Ruby a cup of tea and they wandered over to a quiet space near the infants' classroom. They were watching some of the GIs showing the others new dance moves, when they heard a voice through the open door: it was Father O'Flynn.

‘… I'm happy to invite all the GIs here. I've told you that before, but I will not …'

Then, as Wes began another dance tune, the priest's angry voice became jumbled in with the music and the excited chatter of the dancers, until the piece ended and Mrs Grey's shrill reply filled the silent hall.

‘The danger is, you're encouraging the type of behaviour
we've just witnessed. You can't encourage our young women to treat these … men as equals. If you tell them to be friendly … the danger is you're leading them into trouble …'

Con looked for Bo, but he couldn't see him or Sadie in the crowd. The music and the laughter had been forgotten and, alerted by the sudden quiet and lack of customers, the women manning the tea urn poked their heads out to see what was going on. Then Mrs Prendergast's voice sliced through the fuggy air.

‘I've seen them in the town whistling after girls. And, because of the way people like you encourage them to think, these young women feel they must be polite. An Englishman wouldn't do that in the street. And their drinking. I was in town the other evening and two of the louts almost pushed me over.'

‘They'd have had to be in a bloody truck to do that,' one of the squaddies sniggered.

Hoping to hear more, the dancers edged closer to the open door, where they were joined by the ladies from the kitchen. Then suddenly Father O'Flynn's bulky shadow fell over the picture of Jack and the Beanstalk hanging on the classroom door. At this signal, the two women bustled back into the kitchen and the dancers clustered into smaller shuffling groups, lighting cigarettes, feigning interest in each other's conversation, or in their cooling cups of tea.

‘I think we have had this discussion before,' the priest said. ‘And I have the young people to … If I can show you ladies out.'

As Mrs Grey followed the priest across the room, Con left Ruby's side and approached her.

‘Excuse me for addressing you directly, ma'am,' he said, ‘but I couldn't help overhearing your conversation …'

‘Ah, may I introduce you,' Father O'Flynn said. ‘This young man is Con, a member of the Quartermaster Truck Company. As you see, we have a number of friends here from the camp. Mrs Grey and Mrs Prendergast are here. The main reason for their visit, I understand, is to invite some of the young ladies here to a dance at the camp.'