• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 561 0

gate, two hundred of them, in chairs, on crutches, limping and lurching down the invalid ramp on to the pavement – like a hospital evacuating at the start of a fire. Shortly afterwards came the speed merchants on bicycles, streams of them, ringing the little bells on their handlebars, wheeling in formation out of the main gates and swooping away down the hill to the town. How rough they were, how quick to take offence and come to blows. The women were worse than the men. Mr Newall, the foreman of her section, was given the glad eye by a different girl each week. But tonight Margo had nothing to tell them. She sat gloomily at the side of the empty grate, rubbing the tips of her fingers through her sparse sand-coloured hair, jerking her neck from side to side as if she were keeping time to some tune in her head. She listened to the six o’clock news before joining them at the table. She stirred her tea so savagely that some spilled into the saucer.

‘What’s up with you, then?’ asked Nellie aggressively, as if it were a personal affront to her that Marge was out of sorts.

‘It’s the machines, they get on my nerves. Everyone complains of their nerves.’

‘Well, it’s your own fault,’ Nellie said with satisfaction. ‘You had no need to go into munitions in the first place.’

‘Get away. I was requisitioned.’

‘That job at Belmont Road Hospital was quite good enough.’

They stared at each other with hostility, their mouths munching food.

Rita said: ‘Was that where those naughty girls were?’ They both turned and looked at her, sitting in her pink frock with the white cotton collar that could be removed and washed separately. ‘The girls with the shaved heads – to stop them running away?’

She had a picture in her head of a green tiled hall and a long corridor with its floor shining with beeswax and two figures walking towards her in dressing-gowns and slippers. Above the thin stalks of their necks two naked heads with lidless eyes and sunken mouths and on each fragile curve of skull nothing but a faint down that quivered as they moved. Like birds fallen from a nest.

‘Who told her that?’ Margo demanded, though she knew.

Nellie held her to one side as if she were listening to the wireless.

‘Who told her a daft thing like that?’ persisted Marge.

‘Auntie Nellie said they had things in their hair.’ She wished she had not spoken.

‘You don’t go to hospital for nits, Rita.’

Auntie Nellie stiffened in disgust.

‘You’re so common, Marge. That factory has coarsened you beyond belief.’

A shred of potato dropped from her lips to the plate. Mortified, she dabbed at her chin with a serviette, shaking her head sorrowfully.

‘You’re a foolish girl. I thank God Mother has been spared from seeing the way you’ve turned out.’

It was as if she were talking about a cake that hadn’t risen properly. Rita could tell Auntie Margo was giddy with indignation. It wasn’t a tactful remark to make to someone who had spent ten hours on the factory floor, clad in cumbersome protective clothing, grease daubed on her face and a white cloth bound about her head. It was all right for Auntie Nellie to live grimly through each day, doing the washing, trying to find enough nourishment to give them, sewing her dresses – she was only marking time for the singing to come in the next world and her reunion with Mother. It was different for Margo, a foolish girl of fifty years of age; she needed to come home, now, and find that somebody waited. How colourless were her lips, how dark the shadows beneath her eyes.

‘Rita,’ cried her aunt, looking at her across the table severely, ‘those naughty girls, as your Auntie Nellie saw fit to call them, had a flipping sight more wrong with them than nits. It wasn’t only their heads they shaved neither.’

And she broke into a cackle of laughter, eyes growing moist, leaning back in her chair at the joke. She was silent then, having gone as far as she dared, contenting herself with a mocking grin worn for the benefit of Nellie, tears of amusement at the corners of her glittering eyes.

When the meal was finished Nellie said: ‘Rita, tell