In 1915, Bill was seventeen. You couldn’t join the army until you were eighteen, and you couldn’t serve overseas until you were nineteen. Unless the war somehow managed to drag on for another year and a half, he would never be part of it.
But the recruiting officers didn’t ask for identification. If you said you were nineteen, they took your word for it. Why – Tommy Parkin had joined up last month, and he was younger than Bill was. Everyone on Coney Lane knew he was only sixteen, but no one had said anything. He was in a training camp right now, while Bill was still here, pedalling round the East End on his uncle’s bicycle. Though he would never have admitted it to her, Nell’s words still rankled. Would she really have joined up, if they’d let girls in the army?
He didn’t know. But sometimes he thought she might have done. She wasn’t afraid of anything, Nell. There were times when he wondered if what she had said was true. She would have been more than a man than he ever would.
The situation at home had eased a little. Their father had finally been allowed to send some of his wages home, which helped. And before that, Miss Pankhurst and the East End Suffragettes had opened a cost-price restaurant in the Women’s Hall. You paid for your meals, so the Suffragettes said it wasn’t quite charity, but they gave Nell’s mother a whole sheet of meal tickets for free and told her to come back for more if she didn’t find work.
The restaurant made stews of the sort May’s mother liked. Beans and lentils and split peas and root vegetables with the skin left on. Nell thought it sloppy stuff, but it amused her to be eating the same sort of vegetably things May did. Several of the East End women thought it was an outrage, though.
‘Who do they think we are? Animals?’ Mrs David said furiously. ‘You wouldn’t eat this muck, would you, miss?’
‘I certainly would!’ said the woman the Suffragettes had hired to cook the food. Nell recognised the fervour in her voice, and grinned to herself. ‘Don’t you know, half the good of a vegetable is the skin? Why! In the Irish Potato Famine …’
But Nell didn’t wait to hear about the Irish Potato Famine. She took her bean stew and her bread, and went to find the rest of her family. Her mother gave her a tired smile.
‘Why couldn’t the government have done something like this?’ she said. ‘Instead of leaving it to the women?’
‘Too busy making guns,’ said Nell briefly. She didn’t often agree with May’s mother, but on this, she had to admit, she had a point.
To Bill, though, it was degrading, taking charity from women. And it was charity, whatever the women said about it. A man was supposed to support his family. Not that anyone expected a seventeen-year-old to support a family of seven, of course. But still. Bill had been down the docks, asking if they’d take him on in his father’s place, but they hadn’t even considered it, not seriously. So many men were out of work now, naturally they wouldn’t give a man’s job to a boy like him. So he was stuck working for his uncle. As a grocer’s boy.
Bill’s father had rather liked the East End Suffragettes; he thought they had pluck. But Bill knew they were against the war, or Sylvia Pankhurst was, anyway. You only had to read those papers they had lying around the Women’s Hall. It drove him to distraction to think he was taking food from traitors and anti-British creatures like that.
There were recruitment posters up all over Poplar and Bow. Men pointing at you and shouting at you and shaming you. Bill had seen women giving out white feathers to men who weren’t in uniform; they did it on the high street, right in public in front of everyone. If you were given one, it meant you were a coward. Bill was bicycling down Poplar high street when he saw them, so they hadn’t actually given one to him. But they might have done.
There was a poster on the wall outside Uncle Jack’s grocery:
HOW TO JOIN THE ARMY.
The nearest Recruiting Depot is listed below. Present yourself personally before the Recruiting Officer, who will give you all particulars of Terms of Service, Pay and Allowances. You can be medically examined and attested at this depot without loss of time.
Every time he walked past it, it felt like an accusation. He’d always said he was going to join the army like his dad, as soon as ever he turned eighteen. What sort of heel would wait until after a war was over to join up? And what sort of a time would he have, serving under men who’d actually been there?
Each time he walked past the poster, his resolve grew. It took such an age to train people, anyway. Even if he joined up tomorrow, he’d probably never actually make it out to France. But it wouldn’t matter. It would be something, to say he’d been in the army. Nobody would be able to sneer at him then.
It was a wet day in March when he came home late from work. The kitchen was the usual suppertime chaos: Dot and Bernie fighting over the right way to lay the table, Siddy crying because he wasn’t allowed to play with the bread knife, Nell complaining to anyone who would listen about the crowds outside the factories waiting for day-work, and why didn’t the government set them planting vegetables, or something, if we were all so blimming short of food?
Bill took off his cap, threw it onto the table and said, ‘You can have my job if you wants it. I quit.’
‘You what?’ Nell stared at him. ‘Why?’
Bill didn’t look at her.
‘Cos I joined up, that’s why.’
She stared at him. He kept her gaze, a challenge in his eyes. Who’s the man now?
‘You never!’ Their mother looked up from the dinner pot and the moment was gone. ‘William Swancott, you go straight back to that recruiting officer right now and tell him you’re seventeen. I mean it! War may be going badly, but we ain’t desperate enough to start sending kids to the Front Line, and we ain’t about to start with you.’
‘No,’ said Bill. He took off his jacket and hung it on the coat hook on the back of the door. He turned to face his mother. ‘And I told them I were nineteen, so I expect they’ll send me to France. You ain’t stopping me, Mum. It’s my war too. And I’ll send home money and all, once I’m settled.’
Nell, over by the fireside, could see her mother trying to decide whether it was worth marching down to the Recruiting Office herself, and deciding against it.
‘And anyway,’ Bill went on. ‘I’ve done it now. I can’t leave, it’d be desertion. Imagine what Dad would say if I deserted!’
Their mother started to argue, but Nell could see that it would be no good. Bill had won.
She watched him, torn between envy and dread, guilt and pride and fear.
How much of this was her fault?
The Sniper and the Hun
NELL LAY ON May’s bed and stared at the soot stains on the ceiling. May was talking about conscription, which she and her mother were sure was going to happen soon, and what a disaster it would be if it did. Nell found she couldn’t summon much energy to care. If there weren’t enough soldiers, you’d have to get some from somewhere, wouldn’t you? The Germans had conscription, didn’t they? So if we wanted to beat them, we’d probably have to have it too. This was so self-evidently obvious to Nell, she was baffled that it seemed such an evil to May. But arguing with May was never a good idea. It wasn’t as though you stood any chance of getting her to listen to you.
The longer the war went on, the harder Nell was finding it to sympathise with May’s pacifism. Right now, her father was in the middle of his first battle, in a godawful-sounding place in Belgium called Ypres, which nobody knew how to pronounce. Nell had always imagined battles lasted a day or two; you lined up your men, they lined up theirs, you both charged, and when the smoke had cleared, you counted up the casualties and declared one side or the other the winner. But these battles just seemed to go on and on and on, and the whole time Ypres did, you couldn’t forget that Dad was in it. You flinched every time there was a knock on the door, in case it was a telegram. You couldn’t bear to read the casualty lists in the newspapers, but not reading them was worse. Imagine if something happened to Dad, and someone like Mrs O’F
arrell found it out first! It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Mama thinks they might make an exception for people with a conviction against fighting. But I don’t expect they will. It’s not like anyone in this idiotic country even believes in pacifism. Even you don’t, not really.’
Nell had hoped her uncle might give her Bill’s job, but this hadn’t happened.
‘You’re having a laugh, ain’t you?’ he’d said, when she’d asked. ‘Get your mum to teach you sewing, love, you’re too old to mess about like this.’
He’d given the job to her cousin Lionel, who was not-quite fourteen and awful. He stole, and pinched, and needed everything explained to him three times over before he understood it. Nell wasn’t sure whether to laugh or weep.
‘Hmm?’ She realised May expected her to respond. ‘I believe in pacifism! I want peace just as much as you. I just … well, war’s here, ain’t it? I don’t see what good not fighting’s going to do, except make the Germans win.’
‘But it’s not about what good it does,’ said May, sitting upright on her knees. Nell recognised the zeal in her little face, and groaned inwardly. Quakers were called Quakers because early Friends were supposed to quake with the power of the Holy Spirit. May, Nell thought grimly, would have fit right in. ‘If you’ve got a religious conviction against fighting – which we do, because it says in the Bible Thou shalt not kill, and you can’t argue with that, can you? – then it doesn’t matter what happens after you kill someone. The point is, killing is wrong, full stop, so whatever happens after it is wrong, no matter how good you think it’s going to be.’
‘That’s cracked,’ said Nell, goaded at last. ‘Like – what if some Hun were going to blow up a school, and you could stop him by shooting him, but you didn’t, cos you was a Quaker, and then he blew up the school. All them kids would be dead, and it would be your fault. You’d have killed them just as much as the Hun did.’
‘I would not!’ said May, delighted. ‘That’s such rot. You might as well say their parents killed them by sending them to school. Real life doesn’t work like that. And you can’t know he’s is going to blow up the school. Maybe he’d change his mind. And you can’t know what’s going to happen if you kill him either. Maybe all his friends will come and blow up the Kensington Olympia in revenge. By that argument,’ said May, with relish, ‘you could do anything if you thought the ends justified the means. You could kill Mama and give all her money to the poor. Or the king – he’s got heaps of cash. I bet you’d save loads of lives if you killed the king and sold the Crown Jewels and gave the money to poor kids. But you don’t. Cos it’s wrong. So.’
This was why Nell hated arguing with May. She was wrong. Nell was sure she was wrong. But she just twisted up all your arguments and left you in a tangled mess, trying to follow the threads.
‘But this ain’t a real Hun,’ she said, deciding to ignore May’s unexpected plot to bring down the monarchy. ‘He’s a pretend one. Say you knew you could save them kids. There’s a Hun with an actual gun, actually shooting people right now. And you’s a sniper and you can stop him. You would, wouldn’t you?’
‘No, I jolly well would not,’ said May. ‘And don’t say Hun, that’s an awful word. Germans don’t go around shooting kids any more than we do; it’s just propaganda, Mama says. But I still wouldn’t. I’d try and stop him without hurting him. I’d go and tell the police—’
‘Who’d shoot him. How’s it different if they does it and not you?’
‘Because they’re the police! You can be against the army and for the police! The police try not to kill people if they can avoid it. The army kill as many as they possibly can! If we were sending an army of policemen to arrest the Germans, I wouldn’t have a problem!’
‘I would!’ said Nell. ‘They’d get blown to bits.’
‘Well, that would be unfortunate,’ said May, with dignity.
Nell began to giggle. After a pause, May joined in.
‘Goodness,’ said Nell. ‘You is a card, you know that, don’t you?’
‘But you love me anyway?’ said May. She had been asking this a lot lately, teasingly, like it was a joke, like it didn’t mean anything. She did it so as to get Nell used to the idea. To try and fool her into thinking it didn’t matter whether they loved each other or not. But it did matter. Of course it did. And the longer Nell brushed it aside, the worse it was, she knew. May had never said she loved her again. But those words, once said, couldn’t be unsaid.
And after all, didn’t Nell love her? So why was she so afraid to say so?
Keeping her tone very carefully light, she kissed the top of May’s head, so as not to have to look into her eyes.
‘Course I does,’ she said. ‘You’re me girl, ain’t you? Even if you is a loon.’
Bloody Men
THE TELEGRAM CAME on Saturday while the family were eating dinner.
‘Telegram for Miss Evelyn,’ said Iris, and Evelyn started. No one ever cabled her, except relations on her eighteenth birthday, as a sort of treat. It must be from Teddy.
It was. It read: SHOVING OFF MONDAY MOTHER AND FATHER MOTORING DOWN TOMORROW CAN YOU? BEST LOVE T
‘Shoving off?’ said Hetty, who was reading over her shoulder. (Wasn’t anyone ever going to teach these kids manners?) ‘Does that mean going to France? He’s going to France!’
‘Oh, darling,’ said her mother. She held out a hand to Evelyn, who ignored it.
‘Mr and Mrs Moran are going down to Brighton to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘Teddy wants me to come too – I may, mayn’t I?’
‘Tomorrow?’ Her mother expression changed. ‘Oh dear, I don’t think so.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Well –’ Her mother’s face twisted. ‘An army camp, darling, really?’
‘Teddy’s parents are going to be there,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m hardly going to wander about on my own and wait to be ravished!’
This was exactly the wrong thing to say. Her father said, ‘Evelyn!’
And Hetty said, ‘What does ravished mean? Daddy?’
And Kezia, with maddening superiority, ‘It’s frightfully rude, Het, you wouldn’t like it a bit.’
‘Please don’t be tiresome, Evelyn,’ her mother said. You would think she was a child, the way they treated her! ‘And anyway –’ as though this closed the discussion – ‘you know Aunt Mary is coming tomorrow, so you couldn’t possibly. Could you pass the mustard, Kezia?’
Kezia passed the mustard with a rather mulish expression. Evelyn sat, astonished. Had that just happened? Had her mother really just told her she couldn’t go? She wasn’t a schoolgirl any more. She was eighteen. She was engaged to be married. If something awful happened to Teddy, this could be the last time she ever saw him. She experienced once again the bewildering sense that here she was, dealing with life-shatteringly adult experiences, while living with people who insisted on treating her like a sulky child.
‘You can’t forbid it,’ she said. ‘You simply can’t.’
‘And yet it seems I have,’ her mother said stiffly. She had been far too relaxed with Evelyn, and look what had happened as a result. She liked Teddy’s parents very much, but she had still not forgiven Teddy’s mother for that awful Suffragette meeting where Evelyn had apparently got into this whole mess in the first place. And as for letting them chaperone her daughter – well!
Evelyn’s mother had already had to suffer a daughter in a prison cell, and had accepted that she would probably have to suffer a daughter at a university. She was not about to suffer a daughter who was an unmarried mother, particularly since Teddy could hardly be made to marry her if he were blown to bits.
She had no intention of explaining this at the dinner table, however, and since Evelyn had only the vaguest notion of how babies were conceived, this part of her mother’s reasoning passed her by entirely. She was horrified.
‘But he could die,’ she said. ‘This might be the last chance I have to see him, ever. Imagine if it were Kit or Father!
Imagine how you’d feel! Imagine how you’ll feel if he gets killed!’
‘I expect I’ll be able to live with myself,’ said her mother, who knew full well that were anything to happen to Teddy, she would probably remember today for the rest of her life.
‘I hope Kit gets shot to pieces, and then you’ll know how I feel!’ Evelyn said furiously, and was sent to her room in disgrace.
The next morning, when she came downstairs all prepared to sulk and rage, there was a letter waiting on the breakfast table for her. It informed her that she had been awarded a place to study Classics at Somerville College, starting in October. She was so blindsided by this that she could only stare.
The breakfast table was as noisy as usual. Hetty and Kezia were squabbling about lipstick.
‘Scarlet lipstick,’ Kezia was saying, ‘and long red nails, like talons. That’s what I’m going to have. And those eyebrows that look like they’ve been painted on. And—’
‘Lipstick is vulgar,’ said Hetty, and Kezia said, snubbingly, ‘People of twelve don’t know the first thing about it.’
‘I do!’ Hetty cried, indignant. ‘I do know! Captain said—’
Evelyn dropped the letter onto the table.
‘You might be interested to know,’ she said. ‘That they’ve offered me a place. At Oxford.’
There was a pause while the family absorbed this information. Then her father said, ‘My dear! Congratulations.’
And Kezia said, ‘Great Scott!’ and made everybody laugh. Evelyn scowled. She still wanted to be angry, and it didn’t suit her at all to be happy and congratulated. Mostly what she felt was frustration, that what should have been a grand and important moment had been spoilt by the awfulness of Teddy going to the Front.
Later, upstairs in her room, she wrote him a long and furious letter about it. Everything I ever do gets overshadowed by Bloody Men, she wrote, and then tore the whole thing up. It was impossible to be angry or self-absorbed in letters to someone who was busy packing their bags to go to war. Your letter might so easily be the last thing they ever read.