With that, Phyllis pulled herself up into the driver’s seat and beeped the horn twice as the ignition roared.
Maisie looked around for the truck’s usual driver, a man named Eddie, but there was no sign of him. She clambered aboard the flatbed anyway, sitting down just as the truck lurched off toward the main road.
For the first time in hours—days even—Maisie felt cool, fresh air ruffle her sweaty hair and blouse. Was this what Phyllis had planned? A refreshing breeze for the trip home? But then Phyllis drove past their usual turnoff, and they were almost to Forfar before she suddenly swung the truck off the road and down a rutted dirt track. Maisie grunted involuntarily as she was thrown around with the other girls, bouncing on the hard truck floor every time Phyllis hit a bump. Fortunately, Phyllis soon slammed on the brakes, cut the engine, and jumped down from the cab.
“Follow me!” she cried, and was over a gate and off down a footpath beside a recently harvested field before anyone could ask her where they were going. Soon, Maisie was picking her way with Dot and the other lumberjills along the side of the barley stubble toward a wooded area at the far side of the field.
Maisie had long since given up trying to guess where they were being led when she heard excited cries followed by a splash. As she and Dot came through the thick curtain of young larches, an expanse of dark-blue water extended away from them. The sun dappled silver onto the surface, and ripples extended out across the long and slender loch. Suddenly, a naked Phyllis rose up from the surface, spraying water around her, and Maisie found herself clapping and laughing with delight.
“Come on in, everyone!” Phyllis cried through the sheet of water pouring over her face. “It’s glorious!” Then she turned away and, bending double, gave a neat surface dive back into the water, a move that brought her bare buttocks up to the surface for a split second before they vanished again, followed by her legs, with a neat scissors kick of her feet.
Catherine, Mairi, and Mary clearly needed no second invitation, because they were already tearing off their sweat-soaked uniforms and charging over the soft grass into the water. The older women, Cynthia, Anna, and Helen, were a little more genteel, folding their uniforms neatly on top of their boots before tiptoeing down to the edge and easing themselves into the water with gasps and giggles.
“This is fantastic!” Maisie cried to Dot, as she tried to undo both bootlaces at the same time. “Why did no one think of doing this before?”
One boot came off, then the other, and Maisie was undoing the buttons on her blouse when she realized that Dot was still standing, fully dressed, staring at the women in the water, who were all splashing each other and laughing like children.
“Come on, Dot,” said Maisie, “let’s get in there quick. We’re all so hot, I reckon we’ll set the loch to boil like a kettle.” Maisie was down to her underwear when Dot turned away from her, gazing instead into the trees behind them.
“Don’t be embarrassed.” Maisie lowered her voice a little. “It’s only us girls.”
Still Dot didn’t move.
“Can’t you swim?” Maisie asked gently.
“No, it’s not that.”
“If you can’t swim, don’t worry, it doesn’t look deep. At least come in as far as your waist, so you’ll get cool. I’ll stay beside you, in case.”
“It’s not that I can’t swim.” Dot was now fingering the top button of her blouse. “It’s … well, I don’t have a swimsuit.”
Maisie almost laughed, but stopped herself in time when she saw Dot wasn’t joking, and it struck Maisie that she had never seen Dot get dressed or undressed in front of anyone else. Maisie, like all the others, got her uniform or her pajamas on beside her bed, without really thinking who else was around, but Dot never did. In fact, Maisie couldn’t work out where Dot did dress—under the blankets, or in the ablutions block behind the dormitory huts? Wherever, she was always dressed ahead of everyone else.
“Well, neither do they,” she said kindly, indicating the girls already swimming. “And neither do I.”
“I know, but …”
Maisie was torn. She desperately wanted to swim, but Dot looked so upset. Either way, she was standing on a loch shore in nothing but her underwear, so she really ought to decide—
That was it!
“We can swim in our bra and knickers then.” Maisie suggested. “It’s so warm today, they’ll dry out again in no time.”
Dot glanced back at the cool water of the loch, and a faint smile began to break through the worry.
“I know I’m being ridiculous, but—”
“You’re not being ridiculous, but you are wasting valuable swimming time. So come on, get those boots off!”
A minute later, Maisie grabbed Dot’s hand and led her to where the soft mud at the water’s edge cooled their feet even before the chilly water could make them gasp as it wrapped around their ankles, then their knees. There was a chorus of catcalls from the other women as Maisie took a deep breath and plunged into the water.
It felt wonderful, as if the water was sloughing off every bit of dirt and sweat that had caked her skin over the last few weeks, cleansing her in a way that no five inches of tepid bathwater ever could.
From somewhere a bar of soap had appeared—a very ladylike pale lilac soap that smelled wonderfully of lavender—and eventually, it was passed to Catherine, who then passed it to Maisie. For months now, the only soap they’d been able to get with their ration books was carbolic, harsh, bright pink, and sold in utilitarian blocks. So being able to rub this soft and silky, sweet-smelling lather over her skin and into her hair was sheer luxury, even if there was mud oozing between her toes, and pond weed—at least she hoped it was pond weed—grabbing at her ankles.
Tempting though it was to linger with the soap, Maisie offered the bar to Mary, who was chatting nearby to Dot and Mairi. Dot, Maisie noticed, was looking relaxed now, but was also making sure everything below her shoulders stayed under the water.
Mary took the soap, sniffed it, and pulled a comically disgusted face. “What a choice to make,” she said. “I can stay stinking like a sweaty cesspit, or I can use this soap and smell like my granny instead.”
“Well, I thought it smelled lovely,” said Maisie as she eased herself back under the water again, moving her head from side to side to clear the soap from her hair.
As Maisie surfaced again, she saw that Phyllis and Helen were now standing on the grass beside their clothes. Helen was squeezing the water from her long brown braid as Phyllis rubbed her short hair into a messy crown with her undershirt. Although Maisie wouldn’t have hesitated to strip off to swim if it hadn’t been for Dot, she was still struck by Phyllis’s and Helen’s complete lack of embarrassment. Neither seemed to find it the slightest bit unusual to be standing naked in the open air, whereas Maisie knew that she would soon be rushing to get her clothes on as quickly as possible. Even though her belt was these days pulled two notches tighter than when she’d first arrived at Shandford Lodge, proving how much flatter her belly had become from all the physical work, Maisie was still self-conscious about her size. Hadn’t her parents been telling her she was fat—or “hefty,” to use her father’s expression—all her life? Perhaps Phyllis and Helen were lucky enough to have kinder, more sensitive parents.
Just then, something caught Maisie’s eye from the trees beyond where Phyllis and Helen stood. A face peeked out, then another, and then a third. Maisie distinctly heard giggling and realized that they were being watched by three young boys of perhaps eleven or twelve.
Instinctively,