The Women of Waterloo Bridge Read online

  ‘I’m sorry for all you’ve been through, Joan dear,’ Mother said, taking a small step in her direction.

  Joan turned and looked out over the fence at the end of the garden, across the allotments and as far as possible above the line of trees surrounding the park. There were thousands and thousands of miles between her and Sydney. She imagined what her life might have been if Ralph had asked her to go with him; if in time it would have been her at his side for presentations and opening nights; if the child would have favoured him or her and if there would have been any more. How it would have felt to have an ocean between her and Mother. And that was it, Joan thought, turning back to the gloomy sitting room; that was the real heartbreak. Going back to things exactly as they were before she’d managed to grab something for herself with Ralph.

  Mother plucked Joan’s violin from its case and, balancing it across her forearms, walked with reverence towards Joan. Without a word, she nudged the instrument across the space between them. Joan took it from her and edged it back, placing it in Mother’s hands. Mother pushed it forward again, this time with more force. Again, Joan sent it back. ‘Don’t be silly, Joan,’ Mother said. ‘Take it.’

  This time Joan put her hand up to stop the violin’s progress towards her.

  ‘What else is there now? You’re not going to let that Svengali win, are you?’

  ‘Svengali?’ Joan snorted. ‘I loved every minute of the time I spent with Ralph. It was wonderful. Please don’t kid yourself that he had to beg me, Mother.’

  ‘That can’t be possible.’ Mother looked as though Joan had hit her a second time. ‘For some perverse reason you’re trying to shield him, but it’s too late for all that. He’s not coming back and I insist that you get on with your career.’

  Joan thrust her hands under her arms. She knew she had to keep her voice steady so she wouldn’t stoop to another hideous scene. ‘I will never play the violin again,’ she said, enunciating each word clearly and looking straight at Mother.

  ‘But Joan…’ Mother’s voice was pleading. ‘I do wish I could understand why.’ She let the violin dangle by her side.

  Perhaps, Joan thought, I have never really explained myself properly. She had huffed and puffed, sighed, sulked and shouted. But, had she ever sat down and told Mother, in plain words, how she felt?

  ‘Mother,’ Joan said, softening her voice. ‘Let’s sit for a minute.’ She guided Mother to the couch and sat beside her. ‘The violin.’ Mother’s face furrowed. ‘I don’t think playing was ever my first choice of hobby or career.’

  Mother sat up ramrod straight and her features flattened. ‘Then, what was your first choice?’

  ‘Well, that’s where the dilemma arises,’ Joan said, taking care not to lose control of her patience. ‘I was never given the chance to think about anything else I might like to do, or might be good at, as I was always made to concentrate on the violin.’

  ‘That’s because, Joan dear, you showed such aptitude when first you picked it up.’ Mother’s shoulders slumped. ‘I thought I was helping you, encouraging you.’

  ‘I would like my own life, Mother. Not yours.’ Joan looked away but could feel Mother tense beside her. ‘And now, besides all that…’ Her voice stuck in her throat. ‘It will remind me too much of Ralph. And I couldn’t bear it.’

  Joan reached out for Mother’s hand, but Mother withdrew hers to her own lap.

  ‘So…’ Mother tightened her eyes until they tapered. ‘It’s all my fault, just as it’s always been. At least now I can share that burden with Sir Ralph Myers. But, Joan dear, you are worth so much more than him. And I would implore you—’ she produced the violin yet again ‘—do not give this up for a man like that.’

  Joan had tried so hard and she could not believe that Mother was not meeting her at least part of the way. Only just managing to keep her anger in check she said, ‘Do whatever you want with it but I don’t want to see it or hear about it for the rest of my life. It has brought me nothing but misery.’

  Mother held the violin by its neck wishing, no doubt, that it was Joan’s throat she could put her hand around and throttle. ‘Well,’ she said, also making an effort to remain controlled. ‘I’m going to leave it here while you consider your other options. You’ll have to do something, you know. Now, make yourself useful while I get supper.’

  Starting in the sitting room, Joan made her way around the house pulling the blackouts closed. Then she opened the lid of the gramophone and chose a recording without strings.

  Mother was right: Joan knew she would have to find something to do and she would have to find it quickly, before Mother wore down her resolve. She watched her hands as she slid the record from its sleeve. She used them gingerly, out of habit, careful not to scrape or chafe them. She unravelled the bandage and looked at her scar. It was healing nicely, but Joan was fascinated by it as the only blemish on the soft, pampered skin. She wondered what it would be like to be a fishmonger’s wife, or dig weeds, or throw coal on the fire with bare hands.

  She remembered a conversation she’d overheard at the Hall. One of the girls’ aunties, or cousin, or maybe it was a sister-in-law, had been rejected from the WAAFs and signed on, instead, to do construction work. Joan clenched and unclenched her fists and studied the sinews and veins that appeared. Then she laughed out loud for the first time in weeks as she imagined Mother’s revulsion when she held out her hands, made thick and calloused from the building site, to be massaged. Mother would have to believe then, that she meant what she said.

  *

  As soon as Joan felt able to walk any distance, she donned her mac, rain boots and scarf and left Mother bleating after her from the door. She had never been well covered, but now the half-stone or so she had lost seemed to allow the cold to whirl around her hollows and rattle her bones. Shivering, she waited for the bus into town but when it arrived, late and crowded, she decided to walk. With each stride she felt some of her strength and stamina return. This, she thought, will stand me in good stead.

  In the few months she had been incapacitated, the bombing had been relentless. Now there was not one road on the way into Central London with all of its buildings standing. The closer she marched to the hub of things, the more ruinous the city became. A woman in a green jumper was selling cigarettes and papers from a hole in a boarded corner shop; a young girl stood staring at the shell of a house, her hand on the untouched gate; the centre of a block of flats had fallen in on itself like sand running through an egg timer. She pulled her coat tight, but knew that the chills she felt were not caused by the weather alone.

  The initial plan she harboured was to stop at any construction site she came upon and ask for a job, but each time she approached a likely-looking situation, her courage dissolved. Some sites were small and manned by one or two older men, who Joan didn’t trust not to laugh at her. Many were boarded and fenced and had no semblance of activity she could see or hear. On the corner of Regent Street and Oxford Circus, what looked like a shop and part of a hotel were being worked on by a group of men in navy blue overalls.

  Joan stood under the shelter of an overhang opposite the site and watched the comings and goings. Her newfound energy and the orchestrated movements of the workers made her smile. She could imagine herself doing what they were doing. A woman of about her age, in a smart check skirt and carrying a notepad, came out of an office that looked like a caravan and talked to a couple of men, pointing towards parts of the bomb site with her pencil. Joan took a deep breath, smoothed her hair and ran across the road.

  ‘I say,’ Joan called. ‘Excuse me. Have you a minute?’

  The young woman turned. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Joan said. ‘Are you hiring?’

  The woman twirled the pencil round in her mouth and looked Joan up and down. ‘Who are you enquiring for?’ she asked. ‘Your brother? Dad? A friend?’

  The men had stopped work and were staring at her from behind half-built walls and the rungs of ladders
. The image of her being happy here, working and humming and joking amongst these people disappeared as completely as the burnt-out building they were working on. Now she was aware of how they would pry and judge and watch and snigger. But she looked the young woman in the eye and said, ‘For me, actually.’

  There was a cough behind her, then another and another. ‘Well,’ the woman said, glancing at her colleagues over Joan’s shoulder. ‘There are women working on big building sites, but not this one, love. This is a private site. You’ll need to sign on and they’ll direct you from there.’

  ‘Sign on?’ Joan said.

  ‘At the Labour Exchange.’ Joan wanted to ask for more information, but the woman turned to resume her discussion with the men and Joan was dismissed.

  When she turned the corner towards Tottenham Court Road, she stamped her feet with frustration and cold, but the thought of returning to Mother without definite news of a job spurred her on.

  She walked and walked. Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, Somerset House, the river. Then she saw an enormous site hidden by wooden screens and sails of tarpaulin. Women were going in and out. This is it, she thought, the project her fellow musician must have been talking about. Her stomach flipped; here she could get on with it and prove her intentions to Mother once and for all. And so many women were crawling all over the works that she would go unnoticed; no interrogations here.

  She joined the queue at the enquiries window behind a woman in a rather shabby navy coat and darned stockings. Joan recoiled when she caught sight of the woman’s bitten, inflamed nails. ‘Any work going?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Got plenty, my dear,’ the man on duty said. ‘But sign on at the Exchange first and tell them you want the Bridge.’

  The woman nodded. When she turned, she looked right through dusty spectacles to somewhere in the distance beyond Joan. But she seemed to know what the man was talking about so Joan followed her. To sign on, she supposed.

  4

  April – July 1941

  Evelyn

  It was a bright Good Friday morning. The wind was strong and gusty, shepherding clouds together then scattering them into billowing clusters. Up here on the timber the cold had a knack of finding the smallest of gaps, a button left undone or a breach between scarf and collar. Tugging off a gauntlet, Evelyn rubbed under her armpit at the place where her coarse vest scratched and worried, wondering if she’d ever be able to leave it off even in the summer. She pulled her shield aside, pushed the blackened goggles high on her forehead and looked up at the struggling sun through a crisscrossed maze of cranes, buckets swaying gracefully on what looked like well-mannered crooked fingers on the end of lace-gloved arms.

  She felt giddy and grasped the side of the workbench. As usual, it would take her a minute or two to get the vastness into perspective after concentrating on her close-up welding job for so long. The Shot Tower rose above the gaffer’s hut on the gantry and, never mind the cold, she would much rather be here in the open than stuck inside that narrow, tapering building turning out lead pellets for hunting. St Paul’s pierced the clouds; at its base and pockmarking both sides of the river were pitted black bomb sites. In the distance, V-shapes streamed out behind ships and emergency craft patrolling the choppy river.

  Leaning back against a load of timber, Evelyn surveyed the activity around her. Gangs of three or four bending close to their flames were dotted along what would eventually be a road crossing. Some sort of machinery sighed and wheezed when it performed its task; concrete churned along the pumping pipes. Lengths of steel reinforcement were lifted and moved.

  She had no idea what she was doing. How it all fitted together. She’d never even thought about how bridges held their loads or kept their shape and now that she had, she was no wiser. None of the other girls did either. They simply worked on their little bit – whatever that might be – and at the end of each shift there was more to the bridge than there had been when they started.

  ‘Evelyn.’ Her name caught on the wind and trailed off towards Somerset House. The gaffer. Stooping over her work, she covered her face with her shield and lit the flame. A prod on her shoulder. Now she was for it. She turned in time to see Jim catch the stray strand of hair that he combed over his bald spot as it was whipped upwards on a particularly strong gust. He held it down with one hand and slapped his cap on with the other.

  ‘Morning, Gaffer.’

  ‘It’s Mr Adams. Or Jim will do.’

  Jim was alright. He was the shift manager least likely to have a go at you for stretching. Or take five minutes off your ciggie break for resting your eyes. He had a wife and three daughters of his own and the same bemused look came over his face when he talked about them as it did when he dealt with the women on the bridge. He motioned for her to step aside.

  ‘I wonder if you’d do me a favour. I’m expecting a visitor soon…’

  ‘Who?’ Evelyn saw herself curtseying in her dirty blue overalls to the queen, who was always out and about. Or maybe it was Churchill. ‘Winnie?’

  ‘Steady,’ Jim said, clearing his throat and taking a pencil from his top pocket. ‘A photographer from the Daily Herald.’ He checked the timetable on his clipboard. ‘He’s due in about half an hour and wants to take a couple of pictures up here.’

  ‘Oh.’ Not so exciting after all.

  ‘I thought he might snap you at work. Would that be okay?’

  Evelyn pulled her shoulders back and brushed crumbs of dried concrete from her bib and braces. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘Right. I’ll have a word with Gwen next.’ He pointed his pencil towards Evelyn’s partner, her head dangerously close to the sparks spitting from the end of the welding arm clamped in her fist. Gwen never looked up unless it was for a break or dinner. Evelyn had willed her partner to give her the slightest suggestion of wanting a chat or of acknowledging her at the very least. But no, nothing. They’d worked side by side on this section for four weeks, moving their equipment along in a wheelbarrow as their stripe of steel lengthened, but Gwen hadn’t exchanged as much as two sentences with her the whole time.

  It wasn’t as if Evelyn hadn’t tried. She talked about the dance halls she visited, she told her about being engaged to Ron and how she’d been glad when he called it off, what Dad had told her and Sylvie about how the old bridge had buckled. There was something so tired about the woman though. Dragged down, dogged and miserable. The skin around her mouth and eyes was flaking and dry and her fingers, when she took her gloves off, were gnawed raw and oozing pus; Evelyn had to look away from them. Her hair was greying from the roots to a straight line above her ears, so she must have looked after herself up until a few months ago.

  Evelyn wondered what had happened to her at that point and told her about Mum dying and other ghastly things, like the man around the corner who’d lost a leg and Sylvie’s friend who didn’t turn up as arranged one evening. When Sylvie took the Tube to where Helen had lived, the house and everyone in it was gone. Evelyn wanted Gwen to know that whatever she’d been through, she wasn’t the only one.

  During an afternoon break, Evelyn had trailed after Gwen to a cubbyhole and hunkered down beside her. She’d held out her pack of Player’s and said, ‘Ciggie?’

  Gwen turned and stared at her with that faraway, icy look in her eyes.

  Perhaps she’d used the wrong word. ‘Fag? Go ahead.’

  Gwen looked away and took a packet of papers and a tin, which she tapped, from her pocket.

  Lighting her own, Evelyn smoked in the silence. ‘Shall I fetch us both a cuppa?’

  Gwen shrugged. ‘You go on. I’ll help myself in a bit.’

  Evelyn wasn’t about to give up – they did have to work together after all. Worse luck. She flicked a measure of ash into the wind and made an effort to brighten her voice. ‘Well. I’ve told you all about my family. Dad and Mum. You know Sylvie, anyway.’ She laughed. ‘Everyone knows Sylvie. How about yours?’

  Gwen stopped still, a pinch of tobacco be
tween her fingers. ‘I… I have a husband.’

  ‘Oooh. What’s his name?’

  ‘George.’

  ‘Has he been called up?’

  Gwen shook her head. ‘He’s reserved. On the trains.’

  ‘That’s lucky. At least he comes home every night. Any kids?’

  With a start, Gwen dropped the brown shards onto her thigh then tried to brush them into a mound to pick up again. ‘Three,’ she said softly.

  Evelyn felt pleased with herself. Everyone she knew with children loved to talk about them. ‘Girls? Boys?’

  ‘Two boys and a girl.’ Gwen prised the lid off the tin and stuffed the tobacco back inside. Her fingers were trembling. ‘Changed my mind.’ She mumbled and pushed past Evelyn. ‘Tea.’

  ‘Hey,’ Evelyn called after her. ‘What are their names? Gwen.’ But Gwen didn’t turn and Evelyn kept her chattering off the subject of kids after that. Problem was, it was getting harder every day to think of what to talk about when there was no response.

  ‘What did she say?’ Evelyn asked Jim, now making his way back across the boards.

  ‘She agreed,’ he said, looking over his shoulder at Gwen. ‘But she won’t take her shield off.’

  ‘I will,’ Evelyn said. ‘Dad’ll get some surprise when he opens his paper tomorrow. Will it be in tomorrow?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Jim said. ‘We’ll ask the photographer.’

  ‘Can Sylvie be in it too?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there’s any need.’

  ‘Please. She won’t hide behind her shield. She’ll do whatever the shutterbug wants. Besides, you know she’s got a lovely smile.’ Jim had remarked on Sylvie’s smile a number of times. Everyone had.