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But the sergeant hadn’t argued with her. He’d instead pointed her to the next office, where a friendly woman told her with a smile that, at seventeen, she was still too young to become a WAAF or a Navy Wren, or even to join the ATS.
Imagining the smug expression on her father’s face as she returned home with her mature and independent tail firmly between her legs, Maisie tried not to whine. “So is there nothing I can do instead?”
“There’s the Women’s Land Army,” the woman replied. “They take Land Girls from seventeen, if you’d fancy working on a farm. It’s hard work, but if you like the outdoor life …”
Maisie could rather see herself walking through fields of golden corn swaying gently in the summer breeze, chewing lazily on a stalk of barley as the sun warmed her skin.
“… you’d be working with crops and with the animals. You know, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and the like …”
Cows? Horses? Pigs?
A shudder ran down Maisie’s aching back even now, remembering that conversation. She might enjoy working with chickens or maybe sheep, but not big animals like cows and horses. She especially hated—no, she feared—horses, ever since the rag-and-bone man’s Charlie, a brutish Clydesdale, had taken a swing at Maisie with his huge head and left a nasty dark-red graze and a blooming bruise on her arm with his enormous teeth. How old would she have been? Eight perhaps? It still made her feel queasy.
“No, not animals. I can’t do animals.”
The woman had frowned at her.
“Well, I’m not sure there’s much else other than munitions, dear,” she’d said, “and a bright and healthy girl like you doesn’t want to be stuck in a factory all day, surely. Oh, wait now, here’s something …”
She’d rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “This is quite a new setup, but according to this, they’re taking girls from seventeen into the new Women’s Timber Corps. It says here that because of the German sea blockade, supply ships can’t get through to bring timber to Britain. Therefore, we need to get the wood from our own forests. Of course, all our foresters are soldiers now, so they’ve created this, the WTC. How does that sound?”
When Maisie didn’t immediately respond, the recruiter had continued. “Would trees be more your thing, dear?”
Trees? Trees certainly didn’t have teeth. “Yes, thank you,” Maisie had said, “that sounds spot on. I think trees might be much more my thing.”
From somewhere nearby, a whistle blew three times, long and loud. Miss Cradditch, the WTC training officer at Shandford Lodge—known as Old Crabby to all the recruits—had a particularly piercing and insistent whistle, but right now no one cared since it signaled the end of the workday. Next stop, the Brechin dance.
As Maisie walked with Dot and the others down to the Hut C dormitory to gather her towel and soap, she knew she’d made the right decision at the recruiting office. After only two weeks on the course, Maisie was already proud to be training as a lumberjill.
Maisie stared down into the brown-speckled bathwater with distaste. The luxury of the long, deep baths she’d enjoyed at home before the war seemed so long ago now, since all she was allowed to bathe in these days were her strictly rationed five inches of water. And with so many women in the camp, and only three proper bathrooms upstairs in Shandford Lodge, the old manor house that had been converted into the WTC training center, there had to be a roster for who bathed when. It had been four days since Maisie’s last turn to have a bath, and since those days had all been hard physical work, half of the Shandford woods appeared to have made its way into the bath with her.
The water, which barely covered her legs, wasn’t even warm, but it was wet and soothing, and she felt herself relax immediately. After all, she was one of the lucky ones, having her bath on the same day as they went dancing, so she slid as much of her body down into the water as she could, while also trying to keep her hair dry. She considered her hands, not sure if she should risk putting open sores into such filthy water, but how else was she going to soap the rest of her body? Throwing hygienic caution to the wind, she picked up her small, pink WTC-issued bar of carbolic soap, just as someone banged on the bathroom door.
“Come on, Maisie, don’t take all night.” Dot’s voice was muffled by the thick wood. “The truck’s leaving in less than an hour. You need to hurry! Do you even know what you’re wearing yet?”
So much for that long luxurious bath!
“All right,” Maisie shouted back, quickly rubbing the soap up to a stinging lather between her hands. “I’ll be down in a few minutes, and maybe you can help me decide.”
Once she finished her bath, Maisie ran down to Hut C to get ready. She had only brought two dresses from home, so it wouldn’t be hard to decide on an outfit. Many of the other women had worked the whole day with curlers under their decidedly nonregulation head scarves, but thankfully, Maisie only needed to brush out her shoulder-length blond hair and pin it up at each side. Dot’s short dark hair was even quicker, just combed and tucked behind her ears, so the two of them were ready with time to spare.
As they waited for the truck to arrive, Maisie and Dot watched the older women fuss with whatever face powder, mascara, and lipstick they had saved from before the war—it was almost impossible to get hold of any makeup these days, especially in the wilds of Scotland. All Maisie had done was smear a little Vaseline on her lips to give them a shine. She’d only be dancing with the other lumberjills, so what was the point?
Even so, Maisie was excited to be going out. Two weeks after leaving home for her new adventure, tonight felt almost like a rite of passage.
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Brechin Town Hall, where the dance was being held, was a dour place, with dark marble columns and heavily ornate carvings on the walls and ceiling. To make things worse, the blackout blinds were already in place over the tall windows, meaning that none of the summer evening light would filter into the hall. The dance organizers had done their best to cheer things up by bringing in some spotlights and hanging some brightly colored banners from the gallery above the dance floor, so Maisie wasn’t complaining. They were lucky to be allowed out from camp for any dance at all.
When the WTC girls had arrived, the band was already playing on a raised platform at the far end of the hall, and after a couple of numbers, Maisie had decided that the musicians were rather good. Brechin was a small town in the middle of nowhere, after all, not a metropolis like Glasgow. She was soon having fun, dancing either with Dot or with Mary, a red-haired girl from Aberdeen, and before long, Maisie noticed that her aches and pains had eased significantly.
Maisie couldn’t help but notice that some of the other lumberjills were moaning about the lack of men to dance with. But what had they expected? With the war on, there were only a few locals left to go dancing, and they were only old men and young boys. Some of the boys were near Maisie’s age, strutting around with gangly arrogance, even though it was clear they were not yet old enough to be called up, but Maisie studiously avoided making eye contact with any of them. She was quite happy to dance with her new girl friends. No pressure, no need to explain, they could just have fun.
However, not long before the end of the dance, the atmosphere suddenly changed, and heads began turning to look toward the front doors. Maisie was dancing again with Mary, and the two of them were forced to stand on tiptoe to see what was happening. Who had arrived, and why was it causing such a fuss?
Maisie strained to see over the other girls to the front, where more than a dozen men were standing inside the main door, nicely dressed, in suits and ties, each in turn handing his hat to the elderly cloakroom attendant, who was suddenly standing straighter and smiling wider than before, now that there were some handsome men in the room.
All right, not many of them were handsome, but even so …
A ripple of whispered excitement washed around the room as the first of the men reached the edge of the dance floor. “Americans, Americans, Americans …”
Maisie tugged at Mary’s arm. “Come on—let’s keep going. I like this tune too much not to dance to it.”
All through the rest of that number, however, Mary kept glancing over her shoulder.
“They’re Americans, though, Maisie!” she hissed, and then giggled. “Look, look! That one’s asked Lillian to dance. And that tall blond girl from Hut B has nabbed one too. Oh my goodness, they’re not wasting any time, are they?”
Mary was now so distracted that they were virtually at a standstill again, and Maisie found herself getting quite annoyed, though she wasn’t sure if it was with Mary or the men.
“It’s quite rude, really, turning up so late, don’t you think?” Maisie grumbled. “There’s only a dance or two left.”
Clearly Mary didn’t agree. She grabbed Maisie’s hand and pulled her over to a table at the edge of the dance floor. “Then there’s only a chance or two left to land a dance with one of them!” she declared, and leaned casually against a chair, pushing her chest out and pouting more than a little.
Maisie could feel the blush rising in her own cheeks at this blatant show of … of what, she didn’t know, but she didn’t much like it. She grabbed her handbag from the nearby table where she’d left it and headed for the ladies’ to comb her hair, cool her face, and sulk a little. Her whole evening had been spoiled, thanks to those men.
Once she’d collected herself, Maisie realized she was actually feeling quite anxious. But that was ridiculous—it was only a bunch of men, for goodness’ sake, even if they were Americans.
Back at the table, there was no sign of Mary. Maisie’s neck was aching again, so she bent her head forward, pulling her shoulders down and back, to stretch out the muscles. As she did, she became aware of someone hovering nearby and, without lifting her head, she glanced sideways along the floor until she found a pair of polished black leather shoes sticking out from dark tweed trousers with wide cuffs.
“Go on!” she heard an American man say. “She won’t bite, you know.”
A woman giggled at his comment.
The shoes suddenly moved toward Maisie, a hopping, stumbling approach, as if their wearer had been shoved from behind. Maisie jumped back in alarm, whipping her head up to see who was about to crash into her.
The man attached to the shoes managed to catch his balance by grabbing onto the chair beside Maisie just before he bumped into her. Beyond him was a blond man, grinning widely, with one of the other WTC girls—Maisie didn’t know her name—hanging on his arm.
The shoe man looked mortified, a frown furrowing deep lines across his tanned forehead.
“My apologies,” he said, his voice deeper than Maisie had expected, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But some people seem incapable of minding their own business.”
He glared over his shoulder, but the blond man only laughed and pulled the woman toward the dance floor. When Maisie didn’t immediately reply, the shoe man coughed to clear his throat.
“My friend thinks that I should ask you to dance, since there can’t be many more numbers left before it ends.”
Maisie said nothing. What could she say? Certainly, it would be nice to dance for once with someone who was taller that she was, someone who didn’t expect her to lead the whole time as Dot and Mary did. But she’d prefer him to ask her to dance because he wanted to, not because his friend told him to.
“I mean …” He looked embarrassed now. “It’s not that I don’t want to ask you to dance, it’s just … oh hell! Pardon me! What I mean is … well, I don’t dance.”
Maisie’s humiliation grew with each word.
“Well, why did you come then?” she asked, sounding snippier than she’d meant to. “It’s a dance. What else did you think you would be doing?”
As she turned away, wishing the ground would swallow her up, fingers closed around the top of her arm, not tightly, but with enough pressure to stop her.
“Look, I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, so she turned to face him again. “We got ourselves off on the … er, wrong foot, so to speak, which is a shame.”
He dropped his grip on her arm and shrugged apologetically. There was an earnest expression in his dark-brown eyes, now that she really looked at him, and the skin around them was like soft leather, tanned and supple, but with tiny wrinkles, as if he squinted into the sun too often. Or as if he were always smiling. Except he wasn’t smiling now, he was grimacing. At her.
“And while I don’t usually ask women to dance,” he began again, “we’ve found ourselves into this rather embarrassing situation now, so perhaps I should make the effort. If you’d like me to, that is.”
Though Maisie heard the words, she was wondering how an American like him could have ended up on a Friday evening in August in Brechin, of all places, and why he …
“Miss?” He was frowning again. “Would you like me to?”
Maisie startled. “Sorry. Pardon me? Yes! Erm, no, erm, sorry?”
His expression shifted into wry amusement at her embarrassment.
“I asked whether you would mind if I were to ask you to dance?”
In her blushing confusion, Maisie took a moment or two to work her way through the question.
“I think so?” she said. Was that the right answer? “Or …”
Then he smiled, and sure enough, the soft skin around his eyes wrinkled up in tiny folds. It was unnervingly infectious and Maisie couldn’t help but smile back.
“You think you would mind?” He was clearly teasing her now. “Or you think I should ask you to dance?”
Maisie gave him an exaggerated sigh. “Is every question you ask this complicated, or is this how all Americans talk?”
“Not every question, no. But sometimes, it can be more fun this way.” He held out his hand toward her.
Maisie hesitated. It might not have been the most romantic invitation, but it seemed like a genuine one after all that. And maybe this might be fun.
“Thank you,” she said, laying her hand onto his. “I’d very much like to dance.”
Her heart sped up as they walked the few steps to the dance floor and waited for a space to allow them to enter the dance. But then she noticed that his fingers were moving strangely against her own, and Maisie’s delight quickly evaporated. She’d forgotten about her blisters, and could only imagine how unpleasant they must feel against his palm. Before she could pull her hand back out of his, however, he lifted it up and studied it, frowning again, as if trying to work out a puzzle. Maisie realized with a sinking feeling that he was trying to work out why a young woman would have the callused hands of an old crone, disgustingly rough, with hard-crusted blisters and sharp-edged cuts and cracks. Embarrassment again flooded through her and she snatched her hand from his grasp, tucking both her hands around her waist to hide them from his scrutiny.
“They’re awful, I know,” she burst out. “But it’s the work, the tools. They rip up our hands, and there’s nothing we can do to protect them. It’s vile, I know.”
“Tools?” he asked.
“Axes and saws, in the woods. I’m with the Women’s Timber Corps.” Despite her embarrassment, Maisie lifted her chin defiantly, already anticipating the same derision she had received from her father. “I’m training to be a lumberjill.”
“A lumberjill, eh? Hmmm.” He seemed to be suppressing a smile, and Maisie felt her hackles rise. Why did men find that so ridiculous?
But instead of sneering, he took one of her hands back, resting it flat on his, and let his thumb rub gently across her palm and up her index finger, hesitating briefly by each blister, just disconcertingly long enough for her to feel the warmth from his touch.
“I mean, they issued us with gloves,” she blurted out, “but they’re all too big, so when you’re using an ax, it feels like your hands are slipping on the—”
“Pig fat,” he said.
What had he said? It sounded like pig fat to Maisie, but that was too bizarre, even for an American.
“Pardon?”
“You need pig fat and Vaseline,” he said again, smiling now.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Rub your hands with a mixture of pig fat and Vaseline morning and night, and this shouldn’t happen anymore.”
“But …” Maisie wasn’t sure what to say. “But how would you know …?”
Slowly he turned over his free hand and held it out flat next to hers. Even in the low light, Maisie could see that he had once had blisters in almost all the same places as she had on her own hands—on all three pads of each finger, the two on the thumb, as well as across the bridge and the heel of the palm. His weren’t fresh and crisp and sore as hers were, but there was a distinct whitening of hard skin in each place, the pale shadows of blisters where calluses lay as a permanent reminder of pain in his past. His scars matched hers.
He turned his hand over so it again lay palm to palm on Maisie’s. A sudden wave of relief caught her by surprise. He understood and he wasn’t repulsed.
“But how did your hands get like that?” she asked.
“You’re not the only one who knows how to swing an ax,” he replied with a wink.
The band had begun a new song. Maisie recognized the tune, but in the confusion of having her hand held by a stranger, she couldn’t place it right then. He seemed to know it, though, because he glanced up at the band and grinned, squeezing her hand between his.
“Perhaps we can talk about my magic blister potion later, but while the band is still playing this lovely song, maybe we ought to dance?”
“Thank you. I’d like that”—Maisie let herself smile a little too—“and I’m Maisie, by the way.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Maisie. My name’s John Lindsay.”
It became very clear, very quickly, that John Lindsay was a dreadful dancer.
When he had first guided Maisie into the crowd of slowly spinning couples, she’d enjoyed the reassurance of having his warm hand on her back. And once she had swallowed down the embarrassment of having this tall and rather handsome man holding her so close, Maisie almost relaxed. But then they’d stumbled, bumping into two other couples, and Maisie had had to fight to keep herself from falling. Whether it was because she’d lost her balance when she lifted her eyes to look up into his for a moment, or whether he’d simply tripped over his own feet, she wasn’t sure, but either way, this was not how she had hoped her first dance as an independent woman would go.
As John tried again to swoop Maisie around the dance floor, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was risking life and limb, his larger frame and extra weight always pulling her off-balance. This was fast becoming a nightmare. How could a young and obviously fit man be so completely incapable of dancing?
She risked another glance up at his face, expecting him to be smiling apologetically, but there was no smile. In fact, it was as if the earlier sunshine had been smothered by the darkest of storm clouds. He was frowning, as if concentrating hard, and his breath came heavily now. Then she noticed that he seemed to be swallowing again and again. Was he unwell or in pain? Or was he drunk? She hadn’t smelled any beer or whisky on him, but even so …
Suddenly, John took Maisie by the elbow and walked her to the side of the dance floor, where he let her go and staggered against the nearest chair, appearing to have difficulty catching his breath. Then, barely glancing up, he held out his hand, palm toward Maisie, as if trying to keep her away.
“I can’t do this. I’m sorry, Maisie. I really can’t.”
“What’s wrong?” Maisie wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or annoyed. “Can I get you some water maybe?”
John didn’t reply but turned and walked unsteadily toward the front entrance. Hesitating only long enough to proffer his cloakroom ticket and grab his hat from the attendant, John disappeared out of the door.
What the hell had that been about? He might not have been much of a dancer, and he certainly wasn’t much of a gentleman either, but even so.
