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First published in the USA by HarperTeen,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2018
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018
Published in this ebook edition in 2018
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk
Text copyright © Caroline Leech 2018
Cover © Harper Collins Children’s Books 2018
Cover design by Aurora Parlagreco
Cover art by RekhaArcangel/Arcangel (girl) and Rixipix/Getty Images (background)
Typography by Aurora Parlagreco
Caroline Leech asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008249151
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008249168
Version: 2018-07-24
To the lumberjills who served in the Women’s Timber Corps in the forests of Scotland 1942–1946
To Perryn, Jemma, Kirsty, and Rory
You are my everything
Epigraph
John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And mony a canty day, John,
We’ve had wi ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
But hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
from “John Anderson, My Jo”
ROBERT BURNS, 1759–1796
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Books by Caroline Leech
About the Publisher
WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS TRAINING CENTER,
SHANDFORD LODGE, BRECHIN, ANGUS
FRIDAY, AUGUST 14TH, 1942
Maisie’s shoulders burned, her palms were torn, and her ax handle was smeared with blister pus and blood. Again.
The woods were airless today, and it made the work even harder than usual. As a bead of sweat ran down from Maisie’s hair toward her eye, she stopped to wipe her forehead with the sleeve of her blouse, knowing she’d probably just added yet another muddy streak to those already across her face. Maisie wondered how on earth she’d be able to get herself looking presentable enough to go to a dance by seven o’clock. She’d only be dancing with her friends, but still, she didn’t want it to look like she’d spent the week up to her knees in dirt and wood chippings. Which, of course, she had.
Perhaps it was just as well there was no chance that some handsome chap would ask her to dance. She would bet a week’s wages—all thirty-seven shillings of it—that there were none of them left in Brechin these days, not since every man aged between eighteen and forty had been called up to the war.
Maisie stood and stretched out her back, pretending to study the tree she was attempting to chop down. When would this constant ache disappear? Even after two weeks of learning how to fell, split, saw, and sned, she still woke up each morning feeling like she’d gone ten rounds in the ring with a heavyweight champion. She had blisters on her hands from the tools—four-and-a-half-pound axes, six-pound axes, crosscut saws, hauling chains, and cant hooks—and blisters on her feet from her work boots. There were even blisters between her thighs where the rough material of her uniform chafed as she worked.
“I bet the WAAF and ATS recruits don’t hurt this badly all through their training,” she moaned to her friend Dot, who was working two trees over. “I still think the recruitment officer lied to me. She made it sound like the Women’s Timber Corps would be a walk in the park.”
“Or perhaps a walk”—Dot flailed her ax again toward the foot of her own tree—“in the forest.”
“Very funny,” Maisie replied, then blew gingerly onto her stinging fingers. “Bloody hell, that hurts!” She pulled out her once-white handkerchief and dabbed at her hands, hoping to feel some comfort from the soft, cool cotton, and watched Dot swing the ax a couple more times. Again and again Dot’s blade seemed to bounce off the wood as if it were made of India rubber, exposing no more of the creamy flesh under the brown bark than had been visible five minutes before.
Maisie glanced behind her to see if their instructor, Mr. McRobbie, was watching, but he was talking to another recruit farther up the line of trees, so she let her ax-head rest on the ground. She had been issued this six-pound ax when training began, but right now, it felt like a forty-pound sledgehammer. She reached into her pocket and withdrew her whetstone, the smooth flat stone she used to set her blade. Mr. McRobbie had drummed into them the importance of having a whetstone with them at all times, to keep the cutting edge sharp and clean, but Maisie had discovered another use for it. She laid the stone, warm from her body heat, onto the blisters of her hands one by one, sighing as the discomfort was eased, if only for a few seconds.
Still Dot was hacking away at the tree.
Maisie sighed. “Do you want me to finish that off for you? We’ve got a dance to go to tonight, remember, and the way you’re going, you’ll still be slapping at it at midnight.”
“Uggghhh,” grunted Dot with one more swipe. “What am I doing wrong? I feel like I’m doing it the way he showed us, and I’ve got blisters a mile deep to prove it, but I don’t ever make any difference at all! Bloody thing!”
Dot kicked the toe of her boot at the trunk and there was an ominous creaking sound, as if the tree were about to topple. Dot recoiled and jumped clear, but the tree stayed where it was.
Maisie burst out laughing. “Perhaps you should kick the tree into submission.”
“Oh, get lost!” Dot retorted, but then she began to laugh too. “I only want to find one thing on this training course that I can actually do properly, because cutting down trees certainly isn’t it.”
Maisie felt sorry for Dot. She was shorter and slighter than Maisie, though certainly not the smallest of the women in their group, yet Dot couldn’t seem to get the hang of any of the techniques Mr. McRobbie had shown them. After only two weeks, Maisie already felt quite competent at using the tools they had been given so far, but Dot was not progressing at all. That fact was not only making Dot anxious, it was starting to worry Maisie too. They were only two weeks into their six-week training course, but it had been made clear that anyone could be sent home at any time for failing to make the grade. She couldn’t bear it if her new friend were thrown off the course. Who would Maisie have to talk with and work beside then?
The other women doing the Timber Corps training were all very nice, but that was the problem—they were all women, in their twenties and thirties. Only Dot was close to Maisie in age, and even then, Dot was already nineteen, almost two years older than Maisie. But it was comforting to have a friend of roughly her own age, someone who treated her like a teammate rather than a child.
Maisie had certainly felt like an adult last month when she’d walked into the recruiting office in Glasgow and told the sergeant behind the desk that she wanted to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, or even the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was all ready to argue with him that since she was a grown woman taking control of her life, she didn’t need to finish her final year at school because it was about time she did her bit for the war effort.
But the sergeant hadn’t argued with her. He’d instead pointed her to the next office, where a friendly woman told her with a smile that, at seventeen, she was still too young to become a WAAF or a Navy Wren, or even to join the ATS.
Imagining the smug expression on her father’s face as she returned home with her mature and independent tail firmly between her legs, Maisie tried not to whine. “So is there nothing I can do instead?”
“There’s the Women’s Land Army,” the woman replied. “They take Land Girls from seventeen, if you’d fancy working on a farm. It’s hard work, but if you like the outdoor life …”
Maisie could rather see herself walking through fields of golden corn swaying gently in the summer breeze, chewing lazily on a stalk of barley as the sun warmed her skin.
“… you’d be working with crops and with the animals. You know, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and the like …”
Cows? Horses? Pigs?
A shudder ran down Maisie’s aching back even now, remembering that conversation. She might enjoy working with chickens or maybe sheep, but not big animals like cows and horses. She especially hated—no, she feared—horses, ever since the rag-and-bone man’s Charlie, a brutish Clydesdale, had taken a swing at Maisie with his huge head and left a nasty dark-red graze and a blooming bruise on her arm with his enormous teeth. How old would she have been? Eight perhaps? It still made her feel queasy.
“No, not animals. I can’t do animals.”
The woman had frowned at her.
“Well, I’m not sure there’s much else other than munitions, dear,” she’d said, “and a bright and healthy girl like you doesn’t want to be stuck in a factory all day, surely. Oh, wait now, here’s something …”
She’d rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “This is quite a new setup, but according to this, they’re taking girls from seventeen into the new Women’s Timber Corps. It says here that because of the German sea blockade, supply ships can’t get through to bring timber to Britain. Therefore, we need to get the wood from our own forests. Of course, all our foresters are soldiers now, so they’ve created this, the WTC. How does that sound?”
When Maisie didn’t immediately respond, the recruiter had continued. “Would trees be more your thing, dear?”
Trees? Trees certainly didn’t have teeth. “Yes, thank you,” Maisie had said, “that sounds spot on. I think trees might be much more my thing.”
From somewhere nearby, a whistle blew three times, long and loud. Miss Cradditch, the WTC training officer at Shandford Lodge—known as Old Crabby to all the recruits—had a particularly piercing and insistent whistle, but right now no one cared since it signaled the end of the workday. Next stop, the Brechin dance.
As Maisie walked with Dot and the others down to the Hut C dormitory to gather her towel and soap, she knew she’d made the right decision at the recruiting office. After only two weeks on the course, Maisie was already proud to be training as a lumberjill.
Maisie stared down into the brown-speckled bathwater with distaste. The luxury of the long, deep baths she’d enjoyed at home before the war seemed so long ago now, since all she was allowed to bathe in these days were her strictly rationed five inches of water. And with so many women in the camp, and only three proper bathrooms upstairs in Shandford Lodge, the old manor house that had been converted into the WTC training center, there had to be a roster for who bathed when. It had been four days since Maisie’s last turn to have a bath, and since those days had all been hard physical work, half of the Shandford woods appeared to have made its way into the bath with her.
The water, which barely covered her legs, wasn’t even warm, but it was wet and soothing, and she felt herself relax immediately. After all, she was one of the lucky ones, having her bath on the same day as they went dancing, so she slid as much of her body down into the water as she could, while also trying to keep her hair dry. She considered her hands, not sure if she should risk putting open sores into such filthy water, but how else was she going to soap the rest of her body? Throwing hygienic caution to the wind, she picked up her small, pink WTC-issued bar of carbolic soap, just as someone banged on the bathroom door.
“Come on, Maisie, don’t take all night.” Dot’s voice was muffled by the thick wood. “The truck’s leaving in less than an hour. You need to hurry! Do you even know what you’re wearing yet?”
So much for that long luxurious bath!
“All right,” Maisie shouted back, quickly rubbing the soap up to a stinging lather between her hands. “I’ll be down in a few minutes, and maybe you can help me decide.”
Once she finished her bath, Maisie ran down to Hut C to get ready. She had only brought two dresses from home, so it wouldn’t be hard to decide on an outfit. Many of the other women had worked the whole day with curlers under their decidedly nonregulation head scarves, but thankfully, Maisie only needed to brush out her shoulder-length blond hair and pin it up at each side. Dot’s short dark hair was even quicker, just combed and tucked behind her ears, so the two of them were ready with time to spare.
As they waited for the truck to arrive, Maisie and Dot watched the older women fuss with whatever face powder, mascara, and lipstick they had saved from before the war—it was almost impossible to get hold of any makeup these days, especially in the wilds of Scotland. All Maisie had done was smear a little Vaseline on her lips to give them a shine. She’d only be dancing with the other lumberjills, so what was the point?
Even so, Maisie was excited to be going out. Two weeks after leaving home for her new adventure, tonight felt almost like a rite of passage.
Brechin Town Hall, where the dance was being held, was a dour place, with dark marble columns and heavily ornate carvings on the walls and ceiling. To make things worse, the blackout blinds were already in place over the tall windows, meaning that none of the summer evening light would filter into the hall. The dance organizers had done their best to cheer things up by bringing in some spotlights and hanging some brightly colored banners from the gallery above the dance floor, so Maisie wasn’t complaining. They were lucky to be allowed out from camp for any dance at all.
When the WTC girls had arrived, the band was already playing on a raised platform at the far end of the hall, and after a couple of numbers, Maisie had decided that the musicians were rather good. Brechin was a small town in the middle of nowhere, after all, not a metropolis like Glasgow. She was soon having fun, dancing either with Dot or with Mary, a red-haired girl from Aberdeen, and before long, Maisie noticed that her aches and pains had eased significantly.
Maisie couldn’t help but notice that some of the other lumberjills were moaning about the lack of men to dance with. But what had they expected? With the war on, there were only a few locals left to go dancing, and they were only old men and young boys. Some of the boys were near Maisie’s age, strutting around with gangly arrogance, even though it was clear they were not yet old enough to be called up, but Maisie studiously avoided making eye contact with any of them. She was quite happy to dance with her new girl friends. No pressure, no need to explain, they could just have fun.
However, not long before the end of the dance, the atmosphere suddenly changed, and heads began turning to look toward the front doors. Maisie was dancing again with Mary, and the two of them were forced to stand on tiptoe to see what was happening. Who had arrived, and why was it causing such a fuss?
Maisie strained to see over the other girls to the front, where more than a dozen men were standing inside the main door, nicely dressed, in suits and ties, each in turn handing his hat to the elderly cloakroom attendant, who was suddenly standing straighter and smiling wider than before, now that there were some handsome men in the room.
All right, not many of them were handsome, but even so …
A ripple of whispered excitement washed around the room as the first of the men reached the edge of the dance floor. “Americans, Americans, Americans …”
Maisie tugged at Mary’s arm. “Come on—let’s keep going. I like this tune too much not to dance to it.”
All through the rest of that number, however, Mary kept glancing over her shoulder.
“They’re Americans, though, Maisie!” she hissed, and then giggled. “Look, look! That one’s asked Lillian to dance. And that tall blond girl from Hut B has nabbed one too. Oh my goodness, they’re not wasting any time, are they?”
Mary was now so distracted that they were virtually at a standstill again, and Maisie found herself getting quite annoyed, though she wasn’t sure if it was with Mary or the men.
“It’s quite rude, really, turning up so late, don’t you think?” Maisie grumbled. “There’s only a dance or two left.”
Clearly Mary didn’t agree. She grabbed Maisie’s hand and pulled her over to a table at the edge of the dance floor. “Then there’s only a chance or two left to land a dance with one of them!” she declared, and leaned casually against a chair, pushing her chest out and pouting more than a little.
Maisie could feel the blush rising in her own cheeks at this blatant show of … of what, she didn’t know, but she didn’t much like it. She grabbed her handbag from the nearby table where she’d left it and headed for the ladies’ to comb her hair, cool her face, and sulk a little. Her whole evening had been spoiled, thanks to those men.
Once she’d collected herself, Maisie realized she was actually feeling quite anxious. But that was ridiculous—it was only a bunch of men, for goodness’ sake, even if they were Americans.
Back at the table, there was no sign of Mary. Maisie’s neck was aching again, so she bent her head forward, pulling her shoulders down and back, to stretch out the muscles. As she did, she became aware of someone hovering nearby and, without lifting her head, she glanced sideways along the floor until she found a pair of polished black leather shoes sticking out from dark tweed trousers with wide cuffs.
“Go on!” she heard an American man say. “She won’t bite, you know.”
A woman giggled at his comment.
The shoes suddenly moved toward Maisie, a hopping, stumbling approach, as if their wearer had been shoved from behind. Maisie jumped back in alarm, whipping her head up to see who was about to crash into her.
The man attached to the shoes managed to catch his balance by grabbing onto the chair beside Maisie just before he bumped into her. Beyond him was a blond man, grinning widely, with one of the other WTC girls—Maisie didn’t know her name—hanging on his arm.
The shoe man looked mortified, a frown furrowing deep lines across his tanned forehead.
“My apologies,” he said, his voice deeper than Maisie had expected, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But some people seem incapable of minding their own business.”
He glared over his shoulder, but the blond man only laughed and pulled the woman toward the dance floor. When Maisie didn’t immediately reply, the shoe man coughed to clear his throat.
“My friend thinks that I should ask you to dance, since there can’t be many more numbers left before it ends.”
Maisie said nothing. What could she say? Certainly, it would be nice to dance for once with someone who was taller that she was, someone who didn’t expect her to lead the whole time as Dot and Mary did. But she’d prefer him to ask her to dance because he wanted to, not because his friend told him to.
“I mean …” He looked embarrassed now. “It’s not that I don’t want to ask you to dance, it’s just … oh hell! Pardon me! What I mean is … well, I don’t dance.”
Maisie’s humiliation grew with each word.
“Well, why did you come then?” she asked, sounding snippier than she’d meant to. “It’s a dance. What else did you think you would be doing?”
As she turned away, wishing the ground would swallow her up, fingers closed around the top of her arm, not tightly, but with enough pressure to stop her.
“Look, I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, so she turned to face him again. “We got ourselves off on the … er, wrong foot, so to speak, which is a shame.”
He dropped his grip on her arm and shrugged apologetically. There was an earnest expression in his dark-brown eyes, now that she really looked at him, and the skin around them was like soft leather, tanned and supple, but with tiny wrinkles, as if he squinted into the sun too often. Or as if he were always smiling. Except he wasn’t smiling now, he was grimacing. At her.
“And while I don’t usually ask women to dance,” he began again, “we’ve found ourselves into this rather embarrassing situation now, so perhaps I should make the effort. If you’d like me to, that is.”
Though Maisie heard the words, she was wondering how an American like him could have ended up on a Friday evening in August in Brechin, of all places, and why he …
“Miss?” He was frowning again. “Would you like me to?”
Maisie startled. “Sorry. Pardon me? Yes! Erm, no, erm, sorry?”
His expression shifted into wry amusement at her embarrassment.
“I asked whether you would mind if I were to ask you to dance?”
In her blushing confusion, Maisie took a moment or two to work her way through the question.
“I think so?” she said. Was that the right answer? “Or …”
Then he smiled, and sure enough, the soft skin around his eyes wrinkled up in tiny folds. It was unnervingly infectious and Maisie couldn’t help but smile back.