Читать книгу The Battle Within - Philip Gibbs - Страница 5

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Marjorie Manning, one of Pearl’s friends, sat next to her that morning in the bus from Ashleigh Heath to Farningham, four miles away, where Pearl would dash for an overcrowded train to London. Marjorie Manning was only going as far as Farningham where she had a job in the munitions factory. Four or five of her fellow-workers were in the bus and said “Good morning” very brightly as they passed. The woman conductor in loose blue trousers and tunic waited to touch the bell until another young woman made a rush across the green and dropped her handbag, spilling all its contents before getting in.

“Can’t you get in time for once?” asked the woman conductor with a kind of impatient patience. “You’ve left your lipstick on the grass.”

“Oh, I’ll abandon that,” said the girl breathlessly.

She took the last seat opposite in front of Pearl and Marjorie Manning and turned round to them laughingly.

“One of my bad mornings,” she said. “I had to get the children dressed in time for school, and Shirley overslept herself, the little wretch. I could hardly drag her out of bed.”

She turned back in her seat and waggled two fingers at another young woman who was standing in front.

“I always time myself by the wireless,” said young Mrs. Manning. “It’s always a terrible rush.”

“Yes,” said Pearl absent-mindedly.

She was thinking back to her own night. After tearing up those letters and photographs she had not had much sleep until she had taken a couple of aspirins. Her mother had called her a quarter of an hour late, and had cooked the breakfast although she had been driving the car until nearly midnight.

“We are all getting a little tired,” said Marjorie Manning. “One of the girls fainted in the factory yesterday. Perhaps she’s going to have a baby. Mrs. Marlow says she’s been walking out with a Canadian soldier. But it may be due to the long hours. If this war goes on for another year or two we shall all be skin and bone.”

“Do you think so?” asked Pearl, listening with only half an ear because of her secret thoughts. Perhaps she ought to have kept one photograph of Karl, the one in Austrian peasant dress.

Five more people crushed in at Marley Green.

“Get farther up in front!” shouted the woman conductor. “Make a bit of room there.”

Marjorie Manning gave a little laugh. “We ought to have elastic buses,” she said.

Pearl Haddon did not answer this. She was very busy with her own thoughts. Now that she had killed Karl—in her heart—she felt curiously alone and empty, and yet with a kind of relief, as if some ghost had been exorcized from her spirit.

“My two babes are in quarantine for chicken-pox,” said Marjorie. “It’s an awful nuisance.”

Marjorie glanced at Pearl and laughed. “It’s no use talking to you,” she said. “You are miles away with your own thoughts.”

“Oh, I’m sorry!” exclaimed Pearl. “I missed some sleep last night. Please tell me again.”

There was no time to tell anything. They had reached Farningham and there was a general exodus from the bus. The women munition workers, including Mrs. Manning, got out.

One of them, a tall girl with a scarf tied round her head—it made her look like a fair Madonna—stopped for a moment before she got out of the bus to speak to Pearl, who was still sitting there.

“Have you heard anything about Anthony?”

“Nothing has come through yet,” answered Pearl.

“Oh well,” said the girl with a sharp sigh.

“I’m watching out for him,” said Pearl. “I’ll let you know if anything comes through. Sorry it’s so long, Faith.”

“Thanks,” said Faith Harding, whose husband was missing from the Eighth Army. He had been missing for three months in Tunisia.

Marjorie Manning slipped her hand through Faith’s arm as she stepped off the bus.

“Any news of your Anthony?” she asked.

“Not yet,” said Faith Harding. “Perhaps tomorrow. I’m not worrying. I know he will turn up all right.”

“Grand morning,” said another factory worker, who speeded up to join them. “I would like to do a day on the river instead of punching holes into a fibre frame, and then doing it again with frightful repetition. But I’m not grousing. The Eighth Army is doing jolly well. Now we shan’t be long.”

They had a five minutes’ walk to the munitions factory, down some steep steps to the river-bank. The sunshine of a glorious Spring lay upon the old red roofs on the outskirts of Farningham and the sky was almost cloudless. About sixty women were hurrying to the factory. One of them wore a smart coat, not exactly suitable for factory work. A number of them wore trousers, and one girl had a yellow sports jacket as though she was going to play polo. There was a pretty young woman in a Spring frock looking as fresh as a daffodil. One woman, more elderly than the others, might have been cast for the part of an English dowager in a Hollywood picture. Peace-time factories would not have seen them, but Hitler’s war had altered their way of life and the Ministry of Labour had recruited them compulsorily—if they had not volunteered—as whole or half-time workers on the Home Front. They were among the women of England who were helping to win the war for liberty by making some small parts of the war machine now roaring and grinding over the desert tracks in North Africa.