one

Cheshire

In four days I had learned to answer to Paddy, Cock, Chuck, Kid and, occasionally, Cloth-ears. To dress and undress before twenty-three strangers. To make my bed on biscuits: to unmake and barrack it. To sleep in a room almost devoid of furniture, curtainless and cheerless. To eat for breakfast steamed fish, grey in colour, surrounded on the plate by equally grey water; leathery sausages with tasteless insides; reconstituted eggs, pallid and, whether served scrambled or as omelettes, flavourless and of a rubbery consistency; to drink hot, sweet tea brewed in urns as big as a washday boiler. Tea rumoured to be strengthened with washing soda and spiked with bromide to lull our sexual urges.

I had left my home in Dublin, gone to Belfast and from there sailed across the Irish Sea in a force nine gale, transferred to a packed train suffocated almost by smoke and smuts, then ridden in the back of an army vehicle and eventually arrived at my destination. At an army barracks in a Cheshire town to be trained as a woman soldier.

In Belfast I took the King’s shilling, signed on for two years and became a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. All this I did for love. Not for King and country but for the love of a man. A man I adored with all the love of my seventeen-year-old heart … my first and only love who could send shivers up my spine, make me feel faint, blush, tremble, lose my appetite and light candles to the patron saint of hopeless causes. For if ever there was a hopeless cause my love affair was one.

The object of my passion, hopes and dejection wasn’t aware of my existence. I loved from across the street, from glimpses in the chip shop, across aisles in mass. I watched him in the dance halls tangoing, fox-trotting in the arms of expert glamorous dancers.

I walked miles around the city hoping for a sight of him. Found where he lived and haunted the street. And on occasions when I saw him pretended great interest in the nearest shop window. Through it I saw how tall he was. How well built. His trench coat and soft hat … Like Humphrey Bogart only handsomer. Humphrey Bogart had an ugly face. My love looked like Victor Mature. I’d seen the flash of his white teeth, his big brown eyes.

In work I talked about him to anyone who would listen. I dreamt about him, wakening just as he was about to kiss me, declare his love. Closed my eyes and tried to sleep again, to recapture the dream. My mother said she thought I was run down. I might need a tonic. Or maybe I was costive. There followed an inquisition about my bowels. She promised a dose of opening medicine.

Sometimes, often, studying myself in the mirror I saw the reason why I didn’t attract him. I was tall for my age, lumpy, my nose was too long, my eyes too small, my hair lank brown, straight and cut as if a pudding basin had covered it while the shearing took place. And my breasts bobbed inside my jumpers. My mother promised to buy me a brassière. But like many of her promises it never materialized.

And then one day in a magazine the solution as to how I could captivate my love stared me in the face. I would go to England. Join the ATS. I was looking at a recruiting advertisement for the Women’s Service. Looking at the