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 madly in love you could chase him around the world, like one of those, what do you call them, camp followers.” June gazed at the ceiling as if intrigued by this idea.
“No such luck. Monica Fisher wrote to the government and asked if her militia could enlist in the British forces if they paid their own way, and the answer came back no, absolutely not. Civilian travel is forbidden. Nothing is allowed on the Atlantic now except troops and supply ships.”
I hoped the disappointment in my voice wasn’t too obvious. Ever since Monica had given me the idea, I had cherished the notion of paying my own way to England. My weekly salary was ten dollars. I paid Mother three dollars a week for my room and board, and put the other seven into my savings account at the post office.
“Monica and that bunch are crazy, anyway,” June said. “They’d do better to concentrate on the few men that are left.”
“Prune, honestly.” Sometimes she could be so annoying. “The women’s militia doesn’t want to go overseas to chase men. They want to go for the same reasons as everybody else — to defeat the Germans.”
June widened her big blue eyes in surprise. “You sound as if you’d like to go, too.”
“I’d go in a minute, if I could.”
It was the first time I had come right out and said it: that I was longing to be where the real war was happening. But what was the use of saying it, or even thinking it? The door had slammed shut in my face.
The news from Britain was bad, but it got worse and then worse again. “Mussolini Shakes Hands with Hitler!” I hammered out the headline, pausing to stare at the wall above my desk, seeing visions of pizza and gondolas. The Italians were such a happy-go-lucky bunch. Why the dickens would they join forces with those bloodthirsty Germans?
“Nazis March into Paris!” I studied a photograph showing rows of grey-clad soldiers goose-stepping past the Eiffel Tower, and imagined jackboots marching down the main street of Touchwood. Could it ever happen here?
My heart bled for the English, who evacuated their children from cities, covered their beaches with barbed wire, blacked out the lights on their tiny island, and prepared to defend it to the death.
One sultry summer afternoon, I sat beside the radio in our office, listening to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.” His voice was low and even, but hard as steel. The only word he emphasized was the word never.
I could see the hair standing up on my forearms. I leaped to my feet and paced back and forth. “What do you say now, Mr. MacTavish?”
“I just hope he’s not talking about Canadian fields and beaches,” he replied gloomily from behind his wall of newspapers. I heard him unscrew the cap of the mickey he kept in his bottom drawer, then swallow noisily.
Each morning I arrived at work gripped with apprehension. The German navy massed on the shores of France and waited for the signal to invade. But first the Luftwaffe, outnumbering the Royal Air Force three to one, attacked Britain’s airfields.
“Battle of Britain Rages!” I banged out my headline and rushed back to the radio, my fighting spirit glowing white hot. The news was filled with tales of young Royal Air Force crews running to their aircraft in the middle of the night, flying suits pulled on over their striped flannel pyjamas.
The Battle of Britain became our battle, too. I wrote an obituary for Henry Stanton, the first Touchwood serviceman to be killed in action. His name appeared on the national casualty list, circulated to every newspaper. Casualty was such an odd word. What was casual about it? Did the military think that was kinder than calling it a violent, premature death?
Just when it seemed that things couldn’t get much