She gave a small smile as Mary came bustling in with the tray of tea things held out before her like the cure for all ills. Bobby could almost believe Reg’s statement that things would be all right in his wife’s calm, motherly presence. War was a force to be reckoned with, but so was Mary Atherton.
‘Now then, what’s to do?’ Mary said, putting the tray down on Bobby’s desk. She frowned when she caught sight of the OHMS envelope. ‘Oh,’ she said in a gentler tone. ‘You’ve not had bad news, love?’
‘You might say so.’ Bobby nodded to the letter in Reg’s hand.
Wordlessly, Reg handed it to her. Wordlessly, Mary read it and handed it back. Then she started pouring the tea with an air of businesslike efficiency.
‘Well?’ Bobby said.
‘Well what?’
‘What do you think?’
Mary stirred some tinned milk into the teas and handed Bobby a cup.
‘You knew it was a possibility, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘A lot of girls will be opening a letter like this since that new National Service Act has gone through.’
‘I knew it could happen, but I didn’t think it would happen quite so soon.’ Bobby stared into her teacup, hoping to find answers in the thinly brewed liquid. ‘What I can’t understand is why I’m to go to a recruiting centre for this medical. That means the forces.’
‘Is that not what you said you wanted when you’d to go register?’ Reg asked.
Bobby massaged her temples as she thought back to that day in the summer when she, along with a lot of other women her age, had been summoned to Bradford Employment Exchange to register for war work if it ever became a necessity. So much had happened since then, she’d half-forgotten it.
‘I told the clerk my preference was Land Army,’ she said. ‘I thought that if it did happen – conscription of women – then I might be able to get a place on one of the local farms. Then the Soviets came into the war, and the Americans, all those menjoining the fight, and I started to hope…’ She gave a soft laugh. ‘…started to hope maybe they wouldn’t need us girls after all.’
Mary’s gaze fell on Bobby’s reporter’s notebook, lying on her desk covered in shorthand. ‘Did you tell them all you could do?’
‘Well, yes, I…’ Bobby pressed her fingers into her eyes, suddenly unutterably weary. She was so very, very tired of this damned war. ‘They asked about qualifications and work experience. I told them I was a reporter and I’d been a typist before that, and I’d learned secretarial skills at Pitman’s College. I didn’t think it would make much difference.’
‘Seems it must do.’
Another sob bubbled up. Reg gave an awkward little cough. Bobby had learned over the past fourteen months that a kind heart lay under her employer’s gruff exterior. Still, he was a man – a Yorkshireman at that – and he was naturally embarrassed by any display of emotion from the womenfolk.
She dashed the tear away. It was pathetic, she knew. People were being called up every day. Some of them – many of the men and even some of the women – would be sent to face horrors Bobby couldn’t begin to picture. Some might never come home. But they had to go, because the consequences of losing this war were too horrific to even imagine.
Yet here she was crying because, what – she’d be homesick? Miss her job, her friends, her family? Men and women made greater sacrifices all the time. Her own Charlie had left a comfortable job in a reserved occupation to do his duty as a bomber pilot, risking death daily for a higher cause. And here was Bobby Bancroft, sobbing because she was being asked to do a bit of typing for the war effort.
But it wasn’t only that she’d miss her home and job. It was her father. The thought of letting him live by himself after what had happened the last time. That dreadful night she had rushed home to Bradford, not knowing if he was dead or alive. And thenthere was her sister Lilian, pregnant and unmarried, needing her…
Her gaze drifted to Reg’s lame left leg, damaged beyond repair in the last war.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose I must seem like a scrimshank or something, when the two of you have given so much.’
‘Now don’t talk daft,’ Mary said. ‘Them sort of propaganda words is all well and good for the pictures, but that’s not real life. We’re women, Bobby, not soldiers, and there’s more to that than keeping only our husbands and bairns – others who depend on us, when they’ve no one else to depend on. A woman makes a house a home.’
‘I can’t help feeling guilty though.’
‘Well, you’ve no need. Now have a mouthful of tea then come into the kitchen, the pair of ye, and we’ll talk it over while young Bobby has a bite of breakfast. You can’t deal with a shock on an empty stomach. The bairns have gone off to school, so it’s just we three.’
Bobby sipped her tea obediently, finding the tone of command a balm to the helplessness she was feeling. Mary was right: she did feel a little stronger after swallowing it. She followed Mary to the kitchen, Reg bringing up the rear holding the letter.
A homely scene met them. One of Mary’s hens was ensconced in a cotton wool-lined vegetable crate by the fire, her feathers fluffed contentedly. Ace the border collie, who belonged to the two evacuees, sat diligently to attention beside her as if he were the hen’s personal bodyguard.
‘Daft hound thinks yon Hetty’s a sheep,’ Mary said as she guided Bobby into a chair at the kitchen table and started filling a plate with bacon and toast.
‘Why is she in the kitchen?’
‘Jessie brought her in this morning coughing away, poor old biddy. Whisky and quinine’s the best thing for a hen that’s taken cold, but she should be so lucky nowadays. A warm spoonful of Reg’s brown ale is the best I can do for her. Lord knows what flavour our boiled eggs will be next week.’
