Wives at War

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

November

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

March

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

April

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

Copyright

November

1

Babs had always suspected that industry and commerce were built around a wide margin of inefficiency but it wasn't until she went to work for the Ministry of Labour in the early autumn of 1940 that she learned just how wide that margin could be and how damaging to a nation at war.

‘War,' Mr Harding informed her on her first day at the office, ‘war is, by its very nature, the quintessence of insecurity. Our problem is how to strike a balance between security, which can easily bracket off into apathy or all-consuming self-interest, and insecurity, which leads to irritation, disunity and stress. Are you with me on that, Mrs Hallop?'

‘Yes, sir, I do believe I am.'

He gave her the eye, not the sort of eye Babs was used to receiving from men but a deep, dour sort of scrutiny so magnified by his inch-thick lenses that she felt as if he were peering right through her. Without his glasses, she thought, his eyes would probably vanish altogether, like those of a hedgehog or a vole. He was, at a guess, not a day over twenty-five.

‘Twenty-six per cent labour wastage in the third quarter of last year, according to government figures,' Archie Harding went on. ‘My God, how the Germans must be laughing up their sleeves. My job, my role in this mighty conflict is to ensure that production quotients are increased by the simple expedient of redistributing the work force into areas where it will do most good. Only by winning the production war can we hope to stop Adolf in his tracks. And we're just the lads to do it, are we not, Mrs Hallop?'

‘Absolutely,' Babs, laddishly, agreed.

‘You're a qualified typist, I take it?'

‘Secretary.'

‘Where were you previously employed?'

‘Manone's.'

‘Manone's!'

She couldn't tell if he was dismayed or impressed by mention of the name. If he'd known even half of what had gone on in her brother-in-law's warehouse before the war, however, the patriotic Mr Harding would surely have run her out of the office there and then. Dominic Manone was gone, of course. In the autumn of '39 he had gathered up his ill-gotten gains, and his children, and escaped to America before the forces of law and order could muster a case against him for his part in a counterfeiting operation.

The fact that Dominic had left Polly, her sister, high and dry in Glasgow did not endear him to Babs. As far as she was concerned every Johnny Foreigner should be locked up. She kept the opinion to herself, though, for her sisters were outraged by the Government's cavalier treatment of foreign nationals.

‘Yes,' said Babs, exaggerating somewhat, ‘I was Mr Manone's personal assistant before I got married.'

‘Ah, of course, you're one of the marrieds, aren't you?'

Babs held up her hand and displayed a tarnished wedding ring.

‘Sure am,' she said.

‘Do you have children?'

‘Four.'

Mr Harding's brows rose. ‘Four!'

‘Three girls,' said Babs, ‘and a boy.'

‘Who's looking after them?'

‘The wee one,' Babs answered, ‘lives at home with me. The others are boarded out.'

‘Evacuated, you mean?'

‘Yes,' said Babs. ‘Went off, came back, went off again.'

‘Are they far away?'

‘Not really. They're on a farm at Blackstone.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Across the river, near Breslin.'

‘Very posh,' said Mr Harding. ‘Staying with relatives, are they?'

‘With friends of my sister, actually,' said Babs.

‘Well, they're better out of the way, I suppose.'

Babs missed her children more than she cared to admit. She gave a haughty little toss of the head. ‘I take it
you
don't have children, Mr Harding?'

‘Not I.'

‘Well then…'

‘I do not wish to imply that there's no emotional distress involved in being parted from one's offspring,' said Archie Harding, hastily. ‘It's simply that women can adjust better and put their shoulders to the wheel with more – erm – enthusiasm if they know their little ones are being well cared for.'

‘Of course,' said Babs.

In fact May, June and Angus were thriving at Blackstone Farm, where they were cared for by Douglas Giffard and Miss Dawlish, Polly's housekeeper; an odd arrangement that seemed to be working well.

‘Husband on active service?' Mr Harding enquired.

‘He's in the army, somewhere in Devon.'

‘You won't see much of him then?'

‘Don't see him at all,' said Babs.

‘He's safe, though,' said Mr Harding, ‘in Devon.'

‘As safe as any of us these days,' Babs said.

Jackie was a corporal in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and repaired tanks and armoured cars on the manoeuvring grounds near Yelverton where he'd been stationed for the last ten months. Babs had a strong suspicion that he was having the time of his life but she couldn't be sure, for his letters were few and far between. She fretted more about her brother-in-law Dennis, who had transferred into the air branch of the Royal Navy and was presently pitching about on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the North Atlantic.

Back in 1939, when the older children had first been evacuated, Babs had experienced a sense of freedom the like of which she hadn't known since she'd been a girl growing up in the Gorbals.

Along with millions of others, she'd been lulled into a false sense of security by what they were now calling ‘the phoney war', those weeks and months when nothing much seemed to be happening and air raids and gas attacks had failed to materialise. Then things had turned nasty, very nasty; British ships were being sunk ten-a-penny by German U-boats, the army had only just escaped from Dunkirk, London had been bombed, Italy had entered the fray, France had fallen and the war had spread into parts of the world that Babs had barely heard of.

‘Know what worries me?' Archie Harding said.

‘No, what?'

‘The probability that when this war is over women will imagine they're entitled to all these perks and benefits.'

‘What perks and benefits?' Babs said.

‘Big pay envelopes, responsible posts, pensions. Parity, in a word,' said Mr Harding. ‘Equality.'

‘I wouldn't worry about it,' Babs said.

‘Why not?'

‘The trade union machine will grind us up and spit us out again just as soon as peace is declared.'

‘Ah, but will women stand for it?'

‘Women always do,' said Babs.

Archie Harding sniffed and gave her another dour, deep stare. He came round from behind the desk and perched on it, facing her. His office was hardly bigger than a closet and much smaller than the reception area at the front of the building where she, Babs, would work.

Cyprus Street Recruitment and Welfare Centre, a sub-branch of a branch of the Ministry of Labour, was situated in the middle of nowhere. Only one bus served the area and trams turned at the little depot behind St Jerome's church at the head of the disused ferry ramp that sloped steeply into the river. Bleak wasn't the word for Cyprus Street. All around were shipyards and graving docks; across the river, more of the same. A row of steel fencing, four long sandbagged warehouses and a brick wall separated the street from the oily brown waters of the Clyde along which ships of war and trade, identically daubed in Admiralty grey, slid past like the scenery in a puppet play.

The shops that hugged the corners at St Jerome's Cross had boarded windows and were already selling unrationed goods only to regular customers. Babs was registered with her local Co-op miles away on the Holloway Road, near where she lived. Shopping, she realised, would be a major problem, not one that the loquacious Mr Harding would be likely to take into account when he required her to work late into the evening.

‘What,' Babs said, ‘will I be expected to do here, Mr Harding?'

‘Bit of this, bit of that. Adaptability will be your watchword, as it is mine.'

‘Could you maybe be a wee tad more specific?' Babs suggested.

‘Our job, boiled down, is to fit square pegs into round holes,' Archie Harding told her. ‘Too many tool setters in one factory, not enough in another – we fix it. Twenty skilled artisans conscripted
en bloc
from a single plant – we replace them. You'll soon become proficient in the ignoble art of filling in forms, and will, I don't doubt, groan at the weight of paperwork required to satisfy government regulations. You'll encounter tinpot tyrants from the Department of National Service and squander vital man-hours in pointless arguments with middle managers and personnel officers. But under my tutelage you'll learn to weed out the slackers and shirkers who slouch through that door with the sole intention of sponging off the state.'

Babs hadn't taken off her hat or overcoat, hadn't yet revealed her figure in a tight black skirt and one of Jackie's white shirts that she'd modified, on the make-do-and-mend principle, with several extra buttons. Even so, Mr Archie Harding was already breathing hard, his eyes reduced and multiplied in the curve of the lenses. It wasn't the proximity of a buxom young woman that excited him, though, so much as the volume of his own rhetoric.

‘I tell you this, Mrs Hallop,' he went on, ‘I can spot a slacker at a thousand paces and smell a shirker as soon as he steps off the tram. They are our enemies, our foes in the production war. Together we must stamp them out.'

‘We will, Mr Harding,' said Babs staunchly. ‘I'm sure we will.'

‘Well, Mrs Hallop – Barbara – I reckon we're going to get along famously and I'm sure you'll find your work here rewarding.' He placed a hand lightly near her shoulder. ‘Now, tell me, do you know how to make tea?'

‘Pardon?'

‘Tea,' said Mr Harding. ‘Can you brew up a nice strong cuppa?'

‘Of course I can.'

‘Make me a fresh pot then, dear,' Mr Harding said. ‘There's a good girl.'

Then he slid behind his desk and flopped down in his chair while Babs, sighing, removed her hat and coat and went in search of the kettle upon which, she would soon learn, the efficiency of the department depended.

*   *   *

Babs was obliged to rise so early that it still seemed like the middle of the night on cold November mornings. Before the war a network of lights had illuminated the valley of the Clyde but now the city and its suburbs were submerged in darkness. She did her best to cheer the dawn patrol by focusing her attention on her three-year-old daughter, April, who was her dear, her darling and the light of her life.

The morning ritual of rising, washing, shivering, dressing, was followed by a hasty retreat into the kitchen with April in her arms. The kitchen door was shut tight, all four gas rings lit and purring away. April would sit quietly while Mum finished dressing, then she would perch on Mum's knee and they would eat thin milky porridge sweetened with golden syrup while Babs wove a little story about the lion – ‘Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness' – that was depicted on the syrup tin; no mean feat for an unimaginative young woman whose teachers had marked her down as a flighty wee trollop who would probably come to a bad end.