The Storms of War (27 page)

Michael gazed at Tom, part of his childhood, bright-eyed, indignant; and at Wheeler, his face calm, confronting him.

‘Come on, sir,’ said Bilks. ‘You must decide. I can’t. And higher up won’t want this.’

They were all watching him. He had, he knew, to protect himself, to not show favouritism. And yet he must keep Wheeler safe. If he punished him, word might get back to HQ about sleeping on duty.

Michael put his hand on his gun. ‘The wheel,’ he said. ‘Tied to the wheel, clothed, though no boots.’ The wheel was the latest punishment, newly fashionable because of how many French carts they had; a man was spread-eagled over it for a night and a day, and the wheel was turned every hour. Most men were ordered to strip naked, but that, Michael felt, was going too far.

‘Yes, the wheel,’ said Bilks, impatiently. ‘For Wheeler?’ There was a giggle behind him.

The giggle decided Michael. He looked into the faces of his lover and his friend.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We cannot tell who is telling the truth. Do it to both of them.’

He turned his face so he did not have to see Tom’s eyes, crushed, the light gone from them.
What did you expect me to do? Just punish
Wheeler? How could that be fair?
He looked back, and Tom was still gazing at him, his face uncomprehending.

‘Those are your orders, sir?’ said Bilks, uncertain.

Michael looked at Tom, wavered, then hardened his heart. ‘They are.’

Bilks nodded to Long and Ebbots to take them away. Michael knew that all the men were gazing at him reproachfully. ‘We will release them tomorrow,’ he said, turning back towards his dugout, blocking his ears to the sounds of coughing and breathlessness as Wheeler and Tom were pushed towards the carts behind the shacks, out on the open scrub.

Aldershot, March 1916

‘Ladies!’ the voice shouted. They were in a gym hall in a girls’ school in Aldershot, lined up in borrowed uniforms because theirs still had not arrived. ‘About turn!’

‘I didn’t think we’d be doing any walking,’ said the girl behind her. ‘I thought we were supposed to be driving.’ Celia ignored her. She was struggling to keep up with the commands. Turn right, turn left, backwards, forwards, stand and turn. They were one great snake of girls marching around the hall and she dreaded being the part to drop out and spoil the whole. Memories of gym class came flashing back, even though she tried to force them to stay away. She saw herself, twelve again and clumsy, the last to be picked to go into the teams, getting her feet mixed up in the lacrosse classes. ‘Forward!’ shouted the commandant at the front. Celia felt pricklings of the same shameful thought she had had at school: the hope that someone else would fall over so she would not be the one to fail. She tried to follow the feet of the girl in front exactly, the step of her brand-new boots.

‘Pause!’ cried the commandant. Her uniform was sharper than any of the rest of them. Celia felt hopeful that it might be time for tea. ‘About turn!’

‘That’s someone who enjoys her power,’ said the girl behind her. Her voice was almost as elevated as Miss Ebert’s, the headmistress of Winterbourne. Celia looked at her quickly: small, dark-haired, the kind of person her old art teacher Miss Quinn would have called ‘elfin’. Not pretty, exactly – although it was hard to be pretty in the uniform – for the girl’s nose and chin protruded too much,
but her eyes were bright like clean windows. She smiled at Celia before she could look away. ‘My name’s Shepherd. Yours?’

‘No talking over there!’ shouted the commandant. ‘March!’

Three hours later, they were ushered off to eat at the makeshift canteen. ‘No talking on the way!’ shouted the commandant. Celia marched with the other girls, trying to keep up again. They lined up in a room full of benches and tables that didn’t look like any school dining room Celia had ever seen. She received a plate of stew on a chipped plate and looked uncertainly around the room. Dozens of girls in uniforms, different groups she supposed. She presumed she should sit next to the girl who had been marching in front of her, but she had been so busy staring at her feet that she had no idea what she looked like. She gazed at the spaces on the tables, feeling like the new girl at Winterbourne again.

She felt a hand on her arm. ‘There’s a space over there,’ came the voice of the girl who had been behind her. She gestured at a table to the left. ‘Let’s take it before anyone else does.’ She hurried forward and Celia followed her. They perched on the end of a table of girls who seemed to know each other, talking intently.

The girl held out her hand over their plates. ‘Shepherd’s the name, as I said. Elizabeth. And you?’

‘Emmeline Witt.’ So easy to say, yet it felt so wrong in her mouth, just like those nights in front of the mirror in her room. But Miss Shepherd forged on.

‘And what brings you here, Miss Witt?’

‘I – er – wanted to help. I wanted to do writing things. They asked me at the recruitment station if I could drive. Something about my father being in business.’ Celia blushed again. It had been simple enough to fool two middle-aged ladies in pearls. But surely girls her own age would
guess.
The key, surely, was to be as quiet as possible. She had never managed ‘speaking until you were spoken to’ when she was a child. It was time to start.

‘Ah yes, that would be right.’ Shepherd spooned up some stew. ‘We posh ladies know how to drive, that’s what they think here. And of course we wouldn’t want such a dirty thing as money. You
know, there are more titled girls in here than a debutante ball. Someone needs to tell the War Office that earls’ daughters get driven around by chauffeurs.’

Celia leant close. ‘But I don’t know how to drive. I’ve only done it once, with my brother. My – er – younger brother.’

‘Hmm. Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine. I doubt half the girls in here have ever got behind a wheel. There are probably a million factory girls who can drive better than us.’

Celia looked around nervously. It seemed a rather daring thing to say. ‘I thought I might be writing things. Or maybe even chopping for cooking.’

‘A cook? You? An English rose with a boarding school accent?’ Shepherd smiled. ‘Anyway, whose daughter are you? The Marquis of Bath?’

Celia knew she should have said,
Actually my father is German.
She blushed, didn’t. ‘My father is just a businessman. He – er – imports things.’

‘Mine’s in business too. See, we have that in common. Number one, we are both over twenty-one and not married. Number two, our fathers work in
trade.
Most of the girls here have landed money, I’ll bet. Mine makes rivets for ships. He says he’s never been so busy since the war began.’

Celia blushed again, knowing she should talk about the meat factories. ‘We live in Hampshire.’

‘Quite so. I think half of this room probably lives there, or in Kensington in some huge pile.’

‘Why did you volunteer?’ asked Celia, wanting to take the lead off her.

Shepherd shrugged. ‘Anything is better than being at home. And I like driving. I wouldn’t have done anything else. My eldest brother taught the rest of us, mad keen on it he was. We used to drive all over the land of the neighbouring farms.’

‘How many brothers do you have?’

‘Four. Four brothers and me. I’m the youngest. Two married. They’re all in France. I tried to drive after they left, but I only cried. So I decided to come here.’ She swallowed some stew. ‘Ugh,
gristle. I wish we would get to the driving, you know. I’d hardly call this training.’

Celia’s heart lurched. Boarding the train at the station after Thompson had left her, she had been hot with excitement: she had done it. She had stolen her sister’s birth certificate and she had
done
it. Then, as the green fields turned to the brown of the factories and warehouses outside London, she felt tears splattering down her face. The look on Verena’s face when she said she was going, the crumbs of ginger cake on the plate, her mother fallen into the sofa, hair awry.

‘Why do things have to change?’ she said, out loud in the compartment, and then again because there was no one to hear. ‘I am going to help my father,’ she said, trying to be calm. Still the tears rolled, until they drew closer to London, when a woman with four noisy children got in next to her and she pretended to have a cold. ‘There’s no going back now!’ she said, and reddened as they stared at her, told them she was practising a play.

‘What did you say, Miss Witt?’

Celia blushed. She had spoken out loud. ‘Sorry. I meant to say … my brother is in France. And my … friend. Do you think we might go near them?’

‘Is that why you’re here? Not a chance. There are thousands out there. All underground like moles.’

Celia looked at her plate.

Shepherd squeezed her arm. ‘Don’t be down. Listen, Miss Witt, I believe in saying what I think. So I shall ask you now – shall we be friends? We could stick together. I could do with a friend and you are just my type.’

Celia blushed with pleasure. ‘Of course!’

‘I knew the minute I saw you we were going to be friends. I had a friend just like you in school called Claire. I know we are going to do well together. I am an excellent friend, you know. I am always very helpful, I tell good jokes and I’ll never laugh at you. Sometimes, though, I get a bit overexcited and can’t stop laughing. Claire said it was very annoying.’ She nodded. ‘What
about you? How are you good and bad as a friend? I think it’s useful to know, we have so little time.’

‘I am a thoughtful friend. But I sometimes think too much. I get stuck with thoughts in my mind.’

‘Oh good. You are just like Claire. I try not to think too hard, so I’ll help you.’

‘I don’t think we should call each other miss, if we are friends. What about … Emmy?’

‘I think it’s surnames only, that’s the form. Why don’t you call me Shep? That’s what they did at school. I’ll call you Witt if you do.’

Celia nodded. It would certainly be easier to be called Witt, she thought, remembering the nights by the mirror. ‘Come here, Emmeline!’ she’d said, and then looked around for her sister.

The bell rang and the girls started stumbling to their feet. ‘Lesson time,’ said a strong-looking girl next to them. ‘Try not to fall asleep after your nice big lunch, new girls.’

That afternoon, they sat in a classroom at desks that were far too small and watched the commandant talk about spanners and mechanics. Then it was another plate of stew, and sleep, before the whole process was repeated. The place confused her, too many feet and people, voices. When she felt tired and cowardly, eager just to lie in bed and never get up, she thought of Tom. He had said she could never make tea, back in those days. She would show him. She would march in the right direction and learn to drive – and be good at it.

In the daytime, she clung tight to Shep, sometimes so much so that she worried the other girl would find her tiresome. She knew, of course, that it was most likely they would be split up and sent to different stations, but she could not help feeling Shep was her talisman: if she followed her and did everything she did, she would not get anything wrong – or at least would be less likely to. Shep looked like a little dark-haired fairy, but it was deceptive: she was confident, knew her way around immediately. Two nights in, she told Celia that she had been secretly preparing for the exams
to study history at Oxford. ‘Although I don’t know how Papa would have let me. He thinks that all the world needs is rivets.’ Celia said she had been thinking of going to Cambridge, but her mother had asked her to wait for a few years. ‘It’s true! We have so much in common,’ said Shep, clutching her arm. ‘Funny, though, my best friends are usually youngest children, like me. Whereas you are the third of four.’

Celia blushed. ‘I often
felt
like the youngest.’

‘There it is, then!’

Shep loved telling jokes, awful jokes, Celia had to admit. ‘What do you do to help a lemon?’

‘I know this one!’

‘But I want to tell it. Lemonade!’

‘That’s the last time I’m listening to it.’

At night, in the dormitory, under the mass of sleep sounds, Celia listened out for Shep’s gentle sighs. Then, only then, could she sleep.

In the second week, they devoted themselves to engine fixing. To her surprise, Celia found it astonishingly easy.

‘No, you do it like this,’ she said to Shep as she stood over her, all of them on the school playing field with practice engines on canvases on the ground. ‘Put the screw in here. You know, just as she showed us in the diagram.’

‘The screw doesn’t go there. That isn’t right.’

‘Yes it does. See.’ Celia pushed it in. She gazed more closely at the engine. ‘Shep, what have you done? Look, this engine is
completely
out.’ She began pulling off the bolts. ‘Everything’s in the wrong place. Let me do it.’

‘I just don’t understand it. How is the picture on the wall the same as this? It doesn’t look similar in
any
way.’ Celia smiled and began screwing the bolts back the way they were supposed to be.

‘What’s going on over there?’ called the commandant. ‘Witt, are you helping Shepherd?’

‘No!’ Celia screwed on the last bolt and popped her head up. ‘Just admiring her work, Commandant.’

*

When it came to driving, Shep got her own back.

‘It’s just practice,’ she said, over and over. ‘After all, Witty, you’ve only driven once. I did it hundreds of times.’

‘It’s all right for you.’ Shep could do anything: reverse, turn the car around, even take corners just using the brakes. She went fast, well over fifteen miles an hour faster than they were told. ‘Stop that!’ roared the commandant across the training track. ‘Shepherd, stop that immediately!’

But she was blustering, for when it came to the track, Shep was her favourite. ‘Oh, I give up on you,’ she said to Celia. ‘Why don’t you go out with Miss Shepherd and let her show you the ropes?’

‘Shep, it just does what you want,’ said Celia as they twisted around another corner. ‘It’s not
fair
.’

‘Pretend it’s a horse.’ Almost the same words Michael had used when he’d taught her to drive that afternoon in Stoneythorpe. ‘Cars are like horses, you know. You have to show them that you’re in charge.’

‘But I’m not in charge.’ Celia pressed the pedal and the thing sprang forward with such force that Shep fell back against the seat.

‘Pretend!’

Celia tugged the gearstick, but it wouldn’t go into the right spot. ‘I can’t!’

‘Do you want to go home?’

Celia gave her a quick look, wondering whether she had guessed. As she did so, the car lurched out of line.

‘Witt!’ screamed the commandant.

Celia stopped the car and waited for the commandant to stalk over. ‘Blame the engine,’ said Shep.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I wish we could request to be sent to the same station.’

Shep patted her hand. ‘I’ll write to you. Come on, better jump out and face the music. It’s not as if you haven’t heard it before.’

*

Two weeks later, Celia scraped through the test; she had a good score on the theoretical but barely got through the practical part. ‘Only just a pass, Miss Witt.’ The commandant sat in the office tapping her pen. ‘You really are the slowest and most uncertain driver I have seen for months. Anyone would think you hadn’t done it before. And at times you seem very young for twenty-one.’

Celia nodded.

‘You are a good mechanic, Miss Witt, that is not in doubt. But there is more to the job than knowing which part goes where. If you were an easily flustered type, I wouldn’t send you. But you are calm and they need girls out there. Don’t let me down.’

Celia shook her head. ‘I won’t. I promise.’ After all she had done, to then be sent home, not good enough, would be terrible.

The commandant took off her glasses, drummed her fingers on the table. ‘Miss Witt,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t doubt you have the enthusiasm.’ She fiddled with her glasses. ‘You are dismissed.’