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“Because,” she said eventually, “the idea of staying at home with a large group of men was worse.”
Maisie reached for her friend’s hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re the best friend I could have hoped to find, Dot. I couldn’t have survived the last few weeks without you.”
Maisie was about to add how much she was dreading the postings being announced later that evening, in case she got separated from Dot, but why make it even worse? Even the thought of it made her nervous, so instead, she reached to put her arms around Dot.
Dot immediately shied away. “Best friend or not,” she cried with a sudden grin, “you are not hugging me while you smell as bad as Mary’s granny!”
(#ulink_69f0be29-51ca-59cf-ac22-8ee60a394ded)
WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS CAMP
AUCHTERBLAIR, CARRBRIDGE, INVERNESS-SHIRE
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
, 1942
And then, training was over. The morning of the final day, the huts had been cleared, cleaned, and inspected before breakfast. Chores finished, Maisie stood with her suitcase, alongside all the other lumberjills, in front of the lodge waiting for the trucks to arrive to take them to their new camps. Maisie was looking forward to her next adventure, but was sorry to be losing so many new friends almost as soon as she’d found them.
When the postings had been announced last night, there had been squeals of delight as some close friends learned that they would move on together, but there had been tears too.
Miss Cradditch had read down the list of recruits alphabetically, each name immediately followed by one of the WTC camps around Scotland. Helen and Phyllis had learned almost immediately that they had been posted together somewhere in Perthshire, then Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia had found out that they would all be at the Advie camp, near Grantown-on-Spey. Maisie had grown anxious as Old Crabby reached the names beginning with M.
“McCall, Margaret,” Old Crabby had shouted, and Maisie’s stomach had lurched. “Auchterblair, Speyside.”
Maisie had been sure she hadn’t yet heard Auchterblair called out after anyone else’s name, but if the camp was in Speyside, she would be close to Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia, even though they wouldn’t all be at the same camp. But then, as Old Crabby had continued down the list, and no one else was assigned to Auchterblair, Maisie had grown uneasy. She didn’t want to go somewhere by herself.
Finally, Old Crabby had reached the last name on the list.
“Thompson, Dorothy.”
Dot had raised her hand. Maisie hadn’t been able to breathe.
“Auchterblair, Speyside,” Old Crabby had shouted, and a huge weight had lifted from Maisie’s heart. She and Dot were moving together to Auchterblair, wherever that was. Scary though it was to leave Shandford Lodge, at least she’d have Dot at her side. Then she and Dot had hugged each other, and all the other girls had joined in too, everyone laughing and crying at the same time.
How ironic, Maisie thought as the first Bedford rolled up the drive, that she had shed more tears last night about leaving her new friends from Shandford Lodge than she had when she’d left her family in Glasgow.
The trucks, it turned out, were not only arriving to pick up, they were also dropping off. Down clambered a new set of fresh-faced lumberjills-to-be, all soft, silent, and clearly terrified. Watching the new arrivals, Maisie could see how much she had changed from the new recruit of six weeks ago. Not only was she slimmer and fitter now, more tanned and muscular, Maisie knew she was different inside too. She wasn’t scared anymore to handle an ax or saw, or to drive a car—actually, she was still a little scared of the car—and she’d swum almost naked in a loch and had had her first dance with a man. She felt older, and wiser, and best of all, she had friends now, good friends, and these women loved and respected her. They treated her not as a child, but as an equal.
And that felt right. Maisie was not the spoiled child who had walked down Sutherland Avenue without a backward glance six weeks earlier. She was Maisie McCall of the Women’s Timber Corps. She was a fully trained lumberjill, ready to go out into the forests to work—and to work bloody hard—to help her country win the war.
But suddenly, Maisie wished that her parents could see her now, and Beth too. They would be proud of her. Surely.
Maisie felt a surprisingly strong twinge of … something. Homesickness, or guilt? What if something happened to her? Or to her parents, or Beth?
Old Crabby interrupted her thoughts by calling for everyone going to Speyside, the camps at Ballater, Grantown-on-Spey, and Auchterblair, to board the truck on the far side, which was leaving shortly. Everyone else was to board the two nearer trucks to be taken down to the train station.
But as the other girls began picking up their luggage, Maisie quickly crouched down and clicked open her suitcase. Rummaging, she found the postcard she’d bought a month earlier. Even though it had been tucked inside a book, it was still crumpled and torn at one corner. But it would have to do.
Her only pencil was the thick-leaded one that she used to mark measurements on the cut timber, but that too would have to do. On one side of the bent card, Maisie wrote her mother’s name and their home address, and then on the other side:
Completed WTC training. From today, Sat Sept 12, will be stationed at WTC Auchterblair Camp, Carrbridge, Inverness-shire.
Maisie
Entrusting her suitcase to Dot, Maisie ran over to where Old Crabby stood on the lodge steps and held out the postcard.
“Would you mind posting this for me, Miss Cradditch?”
Old Crabby grunted something as she took the card. Then she grunted again when Maisie grabbed it back and scrawled additional words.
Sending love to you and Li—
She had started to write “Lilibet,” the sweet nickname for Beth that they’d borrowed from Princess Elizabeth, but writing that felt too … well, Maisie wasn’t in the mood to be quite so nice to her family yet.
She wrote instead, “Sending love to you and Beth,” handed over the card, and sprinted for the truck.
It wasn’t comfortable, bouncing around on the hard seats in the back of the Bedford, listening to the engine whine and the gears grind as the driver urged the vehicle higher and higher into the Cairngorm Mountains, and Shandford Lodge was soon far behind them. They passed through pretty villages like Laurencekirk and Aboyne, and eventually reached Ballater, where they dropped off half of the lumberjill load, including Catherine and Anna, who tumbled out with hugs and promises to write.
It was certainly beautiful countryside, the road looping over steep and majestic hills, and through wide swathes of treeless wilderness. Soon, though, a thick fog rolled over the road, blocking the view.
They stopped for the driver to have a smoke, and so they could disappear behind a gorse bush to have a pee. As they climbed aboard again, the driver told them that it wasn’t so much fog as a low cloud on a high road, which crested hill after hill as it rose and fell. Either way, they spent the next part of the journey peering into a thick curtain of mist. The air grew colder, and Maisie was glad to have her heavy WTC-issue coat. She’d been sitting on it to cushion the bumps, but since a bruised bum was preferable to frostbite, she now wrapped the coat tightly around herself, and Dot did the same with hers, as they huddled together on the bench. Had they really swum in a loch only yesterday? Maisie shivered at the thought.
The truck gradually wove down from the mountains, to where the countryside was flatter, warmer, and sunnier, with the road passing through dense woodland shade at times, and at others giving them glances of the sparkling River Spey. They dropped Mairi, Mary, and Cynthia at Advie, near Grantown-on-Spey, which left only Maisie and Dot in the back, and at last, they reached Carrbridge and Maisie felt a rush of excitement. In a matter of minutes, she would be a real lumberjill in a real forest camp, and her real life would begin.
Beyond the last stone house in the village, there was a hand-painted sign pointing to a track going off to the right, which said simply NOFU. Maisie would have thought no more about it but for the appearance of two men walking out from that track and onto the main road, talking animatedly and paying no attention to the three-ton truck hurtling toward them.
The quick-thinking driver threw the wheel, and the Bedford lurched, missing the men, but slamming Dot and Maisie hard against each other. The driver swore loudly, and Maisie heard shouts from behind. She looked back, expecting to see raised fists and angry faces, but instead, the two men were waving enthusiastically and shouting something at the truck. Before Maisie could stop her, Dot was waving back.
“Dot, don’t!” Maisie grabbed her friend’s hand.
“Why not? They were only being friendly.” Dot retrieved her hand from under Maisie’s and started waving again. “See?”
Maisie looked back as one of the men—the darker-haired of the two—lifted one hand in the air, flourishing a lit cigarette, and bent low in a deep, if slightly unsteady, Jacobean bow.
Neither girl could suppress their laughter at this ridiculous gesture, even as they were again bumped together when the driver negotiated a tight turn up another track between high hedges. Back on the road, the blond man shoved against his still-bowing friend, knocking him off-balance, though somehow the dark-haired man managed not to fall. As they disappeared from view behind a hedge, the two of them were wrestling like little boys after school, apparently having already forgotten about the girls in the truck.
Something dawned on Maisie then. She knew the dark-haired man with the broad smile and the deep bow. She’d seen him before, she was sure. After the swerve, the men were already some distance away, so she hadn’t gotten a close look at his face. But his dark hair and his lopsided gait as he walked were triggering something in her mind. And that smile was somehow so familiar.
As they pulled up in front of two large log huts, set at right angles to each other with other smaller huts beyond, the puzzle piece slipped into place. The man looked exactly like the American chap—or had he been Canadian?—who had danced with her a few weeks ago in Brechin, the awful dancer, the one who had left her in the lurch. But what were the chances of it being him? And if it was, what the hell was he doing here?
The driver killed the engine, and Maisie and Dot clambered down, stretching their aching muscles and looking around for any sign of life.
Maisie dismissed the idea that she knew the man. It couldn’t be the same chap—that would be ridiculous. They were hours away from where she’d met him and the coincidence would be too great.
But what had that chap’s name been again? James, or Jack? Maisie tried to tell herself she couldn’t quite remember, all the while knowing that was a lie.
She knew his name. It had been John. John Lindsay.
Just then, a girl appeared, coming at a trot around the corner of the farthest hut. She looked to be only a year or two older than Dot, and she was tall, with a wide smile and a healthy tan, her brown hair loosely plaited into two thick braids. She was wearing WTC overalls, but also a brown leather jerkin, sleeveless and with wide pockets, out of which were hanging several leather straps.
Pulling the straps out of her pocket, she smiled and waved at them as she approached.
“Hello, everyone!” she called as if to a crowd, instead of only three people, and Maisie could now see that what she held was a horse’s bridle. “Come on, let’s find you somewhere to dump your things. You all look exhausted, and I bet none of you would refuse a cup of tea. No sugar, I’m afraid. We haven’t had any for a couple of weeks now.”
She picked up Dot’s suitcase and made for the hut on the left. “But we did get some honey on the sly from Mr. Macallan at the farm this morning, and that’s almost as good, isn’t it?”
She turned and grinned over her shoulder, clearly delighted to have found a way around the strict sugar-rationing rules. Dot followed along, apparently so mesmerized by the girl, she didn’t even object to the girl carrying her bag.
At the door of the hut, the girl turned, seeing only then that the driver had followed too.
“Sorry, love!” she said to him cheerfully. “You can’t come in here, since it’s our dormitory hut, but if you go into the mess hut through that door there, I’ll get this pair settled and come over to get a brew on. Is that all right?”
The driver nodded, and as he walked in the direction she had pointed, he pulled cigarettes and matches from his pocket and lit up.
Turning back, the girl said, “As I said, this hut is where we sleep, that one there is the mess hut and kitchen, and then at the back is the lavatory and shower block, or the Blue Lagoon, as we like to call it around here.”
Maisie and Dot laughed at that and the girl looked delighted.
“Oh, almost forgot! My name’s Nancy, and today, I’m your Auchterblair welcoming committee. On any normal day, though, I look after the horses.” She waggled the bridle at them. “Actually, only one horse now, since we lost Elsie.”
“Lost her?” cried Dot. “Oh no! How did she die?”
“Oh, no, she didn’t die. No, we lost her to the camp at Grantown. But we’ve still got Clyde. You’ll meet him in the morning, sweet old chap.” Nancy pulled open the door. “Clyde’s a big handsome Clydesdale—he’ll pull anything that’s too big to haul by hand, especially useful up on the hills, when the trucks can’t always get close.”
Maisie felt her mouth dry and her throat tighten. Why did it have to be a Clydesdale and not a donkey? The memory of her encounter with the rag-and-bone man’s massive beast, Charlie, was making her pulse race.
But no, she was not a child anymore. She was a lumberjill now, and she could handle being beside a horse without bursting into tears.
At least, she hoped she could.
“Do you two like horses then?” Nancy said as she waved them inside.
“Actually,” Maisie said as she passed Nancy, “I’m not much of a horsewoman. I’d rather stick to my ax and saw.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re scared of an old horse?” A strident voice came from the far end of the hut. “How silly!”
Looking around the gloomy room, Maisie saw a dozen or so neatly made beds lined up on either side, iron headboards against the walls. Two small windows let in only a little of the bright sunshine from outside. In the far corner, in the low light from a paraffin lamp, a woman was sitting in an upright chair at a table, shuffling several pieces of paper into a pile in front of her. As Maisie watched, the woman brought a rubber stamp down with two emphatic thumps—once on an inkpad and once on the top sheet of paper—and thrust the papers into a large envelope, winding the little string around the button with perfectly manicured fingernails to close it up. She was exquisitely made up, with perfect lipstick and primped blond hair neatly rolled, suggesting that she might not spend as much time with an ax and saw as Maisie and Dot had been. Maisie tucked her own cracked and crusty hands into her pockets and wondered what she should say in response.
Before she could decide, the woman stood up and consulted a typewritten sheet on a green metal clipboard before approaching Maisie and Dot.
“So, you’re my new recruits, are you?” she drawled, reaching out a hand, giving Maisie no option but to shake it, blisters or not. Closer up, Maisie could see that the woman was probably only in her midtwenties. “My name is Violet Dunlavy, and I’m the WTC officer in charge around here. So as long as you girls do exactly what is expected of you, we’ll all get along nicely. Isn’t that right, Nancy?”
Nancy was now leaning against the doorjamb, and Maisie got the distinct impression that she was trying not to roll her eyes.
“That’s right, Violet,” Nancy replied, her friendly tone sounding only a little forced, “we’re all one happy family here.” She walked up to the other end of the dormitory and set Dot’s suitcase next to a pile of linen at the foot of a bare bed.
After a moment, Violet continued, her cut-glass accent betraying barely a hint of Scots. “And you must be, um …” She ran a long nail down her paper.
“That’s Maisie McCall,” said Dot, peering at the list on the clipboard. “And I’m Dot, I mean, Dorothy Thompson.”
“Yes, here you are. Margaret and Dorothy.” Violet noticed what Dot was looking at and snapped the clipboard tight to her chest. “Well, your timing is perfect, because I’m filling out the work schedule for the coming week. Generally, we all pitch in together at Auchterblair. Some of us are specialists, like me as the team leader; then we have Agnes in the kitchen, and you’ve met Nancy, who sleeps in the stables,” Violet chuckled as she waved her pencil vaguely in Nancy’s direction. “I’m only joking about that, obviously, though sometimes I think she would, if I let her. You rather enjoy spending your life ankle-deep in muck, don’t you, Nancy?”
“At least it’s honest muck,” Nancy replied tartly as she disappeared through the door.
“Each to his own, I suppose,” muttered Violet as she began to scribble on her paper. After a moment, she looked up again, giving them a beatific, but not quite believable, smile. “Get acquainted with everyone this evening, and you’ll start work at dawn tomorrow. I’ll post the schedule shortly, but bear in mind that it’s for this week only, since next Monday, we’ll be joining the noh-foo chaps for something big.”
“Noh-foo?” asked Maisie. “What’s that?”
“Noh-foo. N. O. F. U.” Violet spelled it out with a sigh, and Maisie recalled the painted sign she had seen down on the road. “Canadian lumberjacks. They’ve a camp toward Carrbridge, and they call themselves the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit. But that’s such a bloody mouthful. Noh-Foo’s so much easier.”
“And do they—” began Maisie.
“Please!” snapped Violet. “You must stop interrupting me so I can inform you of your duties.”
Maisie did as she was told, though not willingly, as Violet pulled her fallen smile back onto her face and turned to Dot. “This week, Dorothy—”
“You can call me Dot if you—”
“This week, Dorothy,” Violet said, clearly determined to ignore Dot, “you will be helping Agnes, our cook. Breakfast preparation begins at four a.m., so don’t be late. And you, Margaret—”
“It’s Maisie, actually.”
“You, Margaret, will be—”
This woman’s manner was already riling Maisie, and seeing Dot shrink back from her sharp tone was more than Maisie would put up with.
“Violet,” Maisie said, being overly polite, “I think you might have misunderstood. Please call me Maisie, and please call her Dot.” Maisie couldn’t remember ever being so assertive before, but she knew she could not let this snooty woman win even such a petty argument. “Thank you so much.”
Violet stared at Maisie for a moment, her nose lifted as if to avoid a bad smell. “As you wish,” she said eventually, then cleared her throat as if what she was about to say would choke her. “Dot, you’ll be in the kitchen, as I said, and Maisie, you will be with Nancy in the stables. You’ll only stay with them this week, just until you can follow the camp routine. Then you’ll be out working with all the other girls in the woods. And Maisie, I do not want to see you wearing anything but your WTC uniform. Nancy is already on a daily warning about that hideous leather ensemble of hers, so please do not think you can copy her.”
Maisie cringed. She certainly did not like Violet. Not only was Violet being rude to them, she had assigned Maisie to work in the stables even after Maisie had said she was uncomfortable around horses. Well, she could always ask for a change.
“Violet, about the stable duty, would it be possible for me to switch—”
Maisie’s earlier assertiveness dried up under Violet’s glare, as if she were trying to decide if Maisie was daring to be insolent yet again.
“Stables first, trees later. That’s what it says on my schedule,” Violet trilled, her voice tight and brittle. “And at Auchterblair, we never argue with the official schedule.”
“But you only just wrote the—”
Violet dismissed Maisie’s comment with a wave of her hand, and then pointed her clipboard toward the bed where Dot’s case lay. “Pick any of the empty beds down there, and get yourselves unpacked. The rest of the girls will be back in about an hour or so, and dinner will be served at six on the dot.”
She immediately looked at Dot and let out a loud, horsey laugh. “On the dot! And you’re Dot! How funny! Oh, you know, I can be quite hilarious sometimes.”
Violet tucked her clipboard and the fat envelope under her arm and looked at them, her face stern again. “By the way, HQ would not be happy to know that there was any fraternizing going on between a lumberjill and a NOFU chap. And neither would I.” She frowned for a second longer, then her face brightened and she let out another horsey bray. “Especially if you were trying to fraternize with the particularly handsome chap with the dreamy brown eyes. Consider yourselves warned, ladies—he’s mine!”
With a strangely tinkling giggle at her own hilarity, Violet disappeared out of the door, leaving Maisie and Dot to stare at each other before bursting out laughing.
