bloody well not going to call it a triumph! We had enough of that cockamamie in the last war! Our readers deserve to know the bald facts!”
“Mr. MacTavish!” I ripped the cover off my typewriter, wishing it were his scalp. “How do you expect to win the war if you’re going to take that attitude?”
“Do you really think people believe all this twaddle about victory?”
“Yes,” I said, then hesitated. “Well, they want to believe it! They rely on the newspapers and the radio to buck them up! How can any mother’s son go off to fight if he thinks he isn’t coming back? And how can any mother bear to let him go? The way you talk, you’d like everybody to roll over and surrender!”
MacTavish’s voice was gloomy. “I don’t think we should give up the ghost, don’t get me wrong. But this cursed propaganda sticks in my craw!”
“It’s not all lies. There are lots of stories about heroism and human sacrifice that are the honest truth.”
“And just as many in the German papers, I expect.”
I was running out of arguments. “Don’t you feel one spark of loyalty to the king, Mr. MacTavish?”
“Why should we swear allegiance to that stammering idiot? The royal family is nothing but a bunch of Krauts in disguise, anyway. Queen Victoria and that so-called consort of hers spoke German when they got between the sheets!”
“Please, Mr. MacTavish,” I said faintly. I didn’t want to imagine anyone between the sheets, let alone the crowned heads of Europe.
“All right, Miss Limey-Lover, I’ve had my say. I’ve never heard of winning a war by running away, but from now on I’ll keep my opinions to the editorial page. You can spoon-feed the ignorant masses. I don’t have the stomach for it.”
“Thank you, Mr. MacTavish!” I tried to keep the crow of satisfaction out of my voice.
He swivelled his oak chair and bent over his desk. “Have you heard what they’re calling the British Expeditionary Force now?”
“No, Mr. MacTavish.”
“Back Every Friday.” He chuckled. I let him have the last word.
With the fall of the continent, enlistment soared. Farms and families no longer kept the men from joining up, and the women didn’t even try to talk them out of it. I had seen the same thing happen at hockey games. If there was a fight, every guy in the arena wanted to jump over the boards onto the ice, get right into the thick of it.
And it wasn’t only the men. A group of local girls calling themselves the Touchwood Women’s Militia began to meet regularly in the high school gymnasium to drill, to learn engine repair and to read maps.
I went down to the school one evening to take their photograph. “Do you think they’ll ever let women enlist?” I asked their leader, Monica Fisher, a pig farmer’s daughter.
“It’ll be a rotten shame if they don’t.” She scowled. “Look across the pond, forty-five thousand girls in uniform already. All the women’s militia groups across Canada are writing letters begging those old fuddy-duddies to open the doors! If I had any money, I’d pay my own way over there and join the British forces, that’s what I’d do!”
With so many men away from home, the morning train was loaded down with parcels and letters, and our postmaster, Robert Day, conscripted his whole family to sort mail. His gentle wife, Vera, worked behind the wicket each morning, and Robert Junior — everyone called him Sonny — made deliveries after school. But the bulk of the work fell to my best friend, June.
“I absolutely detest it,” she said, while we were sitting on her bed one evening after supper. “It’s the most boring thing in the world.”
I murmured sympathetically. Toiling for MacTavish was the very devil sometimes, but it was never boring.
The scarlet sunlight falling through the western window lent a rosy glow to June’s bedroom. Her walls were covered with sprigged wallpaper and she had draped a scarlet chiffon scarf over her bedside lamp. I sat cross-legged on the pink chenille bedspread with my knitting needles. June, wearing pink striped pyjamas, was putting up her blond hair in pincurls.
Everything about June was curly. Her hair was the colour of fresh, golden wood shavings. Her big blue eyes were fringed with long, curling eyelashes, and her mouth curled up at the corners. She was as pretty and petite as a china doll. Her father sometimes called us Mutt and Jeff. We called each other Posy and Prune.
“The only bright spot is when Dad lets me work behind the wicket and I can visit with people,” she said through a mouthful of bobby pins.
I smiled to myself. June knew everybody in town, and she would gossip for hours if given the chance.
“It is pretty interesting to see everyone’s mail,” June went on. “Jess Jones writes every single day to a sailor she met when she was visiting her aunt in Calgary last summer.”
“Thank goodness we aren’t in that boat. I’d hate to have a fellow, knowing I might not see him for years.” By now most of the unmarried men had left town, and several Touchwood boys had already sailed for England with the Canadian army.
“I haven’t had a date in ages,” June said, sighing dramatically as she tied a silk kerchief over her pincurls. “By the time the war is over, we’ll be old maids. If any of them ever come back, that is.”
“Better an old maid than a widow,” I said absently, counting my stitches. Three of our classmates had married in a rush, and one of them was already expecting a baby. I had no trouble filling the Matches and Hatches column.
“I’m not so sure about that,” June replied as she uncapped a scarlet bottle and began to touch up the polish on her toenails. “At least you’d have some … experience.”
I silently disagreed. I barely spoke to young men unless it was required in my job, having bigger and better things in mind. “If I ever do get married, which I doubt very much, it sure won’t be to anybody from around here.”
“Not even Charlie Stewart? I heard you two had quite a fond farewell down at the station.”
“Don’t be crazy, Prune! We used to poison gophers together, for crying out loud. I could never marry Charlie, or any other farmer, for that matter.”
June fell onto her back, riding a bicycle in the air to dry her toenails. “Well, he might look a lot different in his uniform. The flyboys definitely have the edge there.”
“It’s the colour. Blue is so much more flattering than khaki. But it’s the man inside the uniform that counts.”
“I saw Clyde Gilhooley in his blues at the post office, and even he was quite presentable. If he hadn’t been leaving the next day I might have gotten him to ask me out.”
“That’s the trouble, isn’t it? They’re all leaving.” I threw down my needles in disgust, having just finished a six-toed sock.
“Perhaps if you were
