‘I promise, sir.’

  ‘The army needs signallers, people who can translate and send Morse code quickly, who can be trusted never to say a word of what they’ve sent or received. Most of the post office men joined up in 1914 or ’15 and . . . and there aren’t enough of them left now for the jobs that need doing.’ He means they have all been killed, thought Jean, or too badly wounded to work again.

  But women signallers? She’d never heard of such a thing. There’d been no reports of women doing any such work in the newspapers.

  ‘Orders need to be sent continuously from headquarters to the battlefront or the trenches and back again,’ Captain Balfour continued. ‘The generals have finally accepted that these new telephone machines are useful, but telephone calls can be intercepted by the Germans. Code is easier to send in Morse.’

  Jean couldn’t think what to say. She just nodded.

  ‘It’s dangerous. You’ll be working at headquarters, not on the front line of course, but even headquarters can be bombed. You’ll be working with men, too, rough men sometimes, men who’ve been fighting this war for nearly three years already. You’ll be working seven days a week for maybe ten hours a day or more, living in barracks.’

  ‘I’d be in the army?’

  ‘No. You’d stay in the postal service, seconded to the women’s army, the WAAC. You’d get the same pay you get now, with a five pounds bonus at the end of each year of service, and two weeks leave a year.’

  A year . . . Jean stared at him. She’d never even spent a night away from home before.

  ‘We need people we can trust to be loyal to Britain. You’re a headmaster’s daughter, with two brothers in uniform. Well, Miss McLain? Don’t say yes unless you’re sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t scream, or faint, or have hysterics?’

  She met his eyes. ‘I won’t have hysterics. I won’t faint either. I’ve screamed sometimes, but I know how to be silent.’

  ‘Very well, Miss McLain.’ Captain Balfour stood and gave a small formal bow. Jean stood and made a tiny old-fashioned curtsey back.

  ‘You will receive a letter shortly telling you where to go, and what to bring. You will need to pass a physical, too, but I am sure that will be no problem. Have you been inoculated for smallpox?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Will . . . will I be able to come home for Christmas, sir?’

  ‘I wish I could say yes, Miss McLain. But truthfully, I do not know.’

  Chapter 3

  BUTTERWOOD, APRIL 1917

  Papa gave her ten shillings, a hot water bottle, a miniature edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, so tiny it fitted in her pocket and needed bright light to read, the warm travelling rug she had been advised to bring, as well as a suitcase no larger than its owner can carry unassisted, and a block of chocolate wrapped in oilcloth he told her ‘to keep for emergencies’.

  Miss Pigeon gave her a notebook to use as a diary, which Jean already knew was not allowed, but she couldn’t tell Miss Pigeon that. Everyone in the village by now knew she was to be a WAAC, but no one knew she was to be a signaller. They probably thought she’d serve in a canteen, a bright young face to cheer men coming back from the front.

  Jean thought Papa guessed at least a bit, perhaps, because he insisted she kept practising her Morse code in the week they gave her to get ready. He also explained cryptography to her, how to substitute letters or numbers so no one knew what a message said if they didn’t have the ‘key’, the solution to the puzzle.

  It felt like a game until she remembered men’s lives might depend on her answers.

  Mama’s knitting needles flickered from dawn till they went to bed, knitting her three new pairs of woollen knickers, two pairs of gloves that left her fingers free of wool, and three pairs of ‘combinations’. Mama also made her a small cloth sewing kit, which Jean packed along with her spare petticoat to go under the uniform she’d be given, pyjamas, bed socks, a Bible, a dressing gown and six handkerchiefs.

  It didn’t seem much to take to war.

  The day before she left Miss Pigeon made her a special tea, with a farewell cake topped with strawberries and cream, and pickled collar of pork with early lettuce hearts.

  It was hard to say goodbye to the small post office that had been her world for over a year, starting the brisk walk from home in the dark and arriving home after dark in winter, or in the long, sweet dawns and twilights of summer, smelling of flowers or ripening wheat. In city post offices the women worked an eight-hour day, but here in the village Jean and Miss Pigeon had to begin sorting the mail at seven in the morning, and didn’t finish till eight at night, with two deliveries by the ‘outdoors’ mail women on foot a day, except on Sunday when there was only one.

  But life moved slowly in the village, between its fields of wheat, with its placid cows who knew the routine of milking as well as their owners. There might be a ‘rush’ of three customers when the men walked home from the fields, or half a dozen customers at lunchtime when the women had the washing done on a Monday. There were also long hours when the letters were all in their pigeonholes, the ex-servicemen’s pensions were paid, the postal order forms neatly stacked, the penny and halfpenny stamps waiting to be torn from the top left-hand side, the correct way to tear a stamp from the sheet, just as there was a correct method for all post office work.

  Jean had hours free to read a book borrowed from the Literary Institute, knitting socks, balaclavas or bellybands for Arthur or William while she read, or to sit with the brown pot full of tea and a pile of potato cakes with Miss Pigeon, who knew everything about everyone in the village, and was happy to share the gossip as she knitted. Almost every woman in Britain knitted these days, and many of the men too.

  Mrs Wilson waited for letters from her daughter in Australia; Mrs Smith had two daughters in service down in London. Nearly all the village waited for letters or postcards sent by sons fighting abroad. Post office employees knew everything, which was why the oath had to be taken. I will not pass on anything I read or hear or see.

  Jean had thought Miss Pigeon might expect to be told why the army wanted a chit of a girl. But Miss Pigeon was no fool, despite her old-fashioned long skirts and the corset she’d had fitted twenty years earlier. Whatever Jean would be doing with the army, Miss Pigeon knew it would not be selling stamps, and even possibly suspected she would not be serving cups of tea in a canteen.

  Papa and Mama were the only people on the platform the day she left for basic training at Folkestone, suitcase in hand and travel rug under her arm, with a small linen bag of sandwiches and an apple for the journey. It was only when she saw Mama’s resolute smile, despite the tears she refused to wipe, that Jean realised how empty the headmaster’s house would be, two sons gone, and now their daughter too.

  For an instant even Papa, who could quell a hundred boys with a lift of his eyebrow, looked frightened as the train snorted to a halt, hissing steam, and the conductor opened a carriage door for Jean. But then he too forced a smile.

  People were always saying, ‘We must all make sacrifices for the war,’ now that sugar and meat and cheese were often impossible to find in the shops, fences were left unmended and thatch roofs were leaking. For the first time Jean realised that perhaps the hardest sacrifice of all was to let your children go.

  ‘God go with you, my darling,’ said Mama, still valiantly smiling as the train conductor reached down to help Jean with her suitcase.

  ‘Off to the seaside for a holiday, young lady?’ asked the conductor.

  ‘My daughter has joined the WAACs,’ said Papa quietly.

  ‘A chit like you?’ The conductor laughed, as if he didn’t quite believe it, but wasn’t going to say so to Papa in his dark suit and top hat. He winked at her. ‘Well, you give the Jerries what for from me.’

  The train was full of uniforms, but Jean found a ladies’ carriage in which five women sat, none of whom seemed to know each other, for they were reading while silently knitting. The women glanced up at her curiously as Jean bent down to wave to Mama and Papa through the window, and then her parents were gone, as well as the woods where she had walked all her life just coming into leaf, the station with its beds of early primroses, and everything she’d known.

  Chapter 4

  BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978

  The flood had seeped almost to their toes. The late afternoon sun hovered above the horizon, sending the water red and rippling gold. It was beautiful, the way a coiled tiger snake looked beautiful until it struck. Arjun leaned against the rubbish bin, forcing himself to look at Mrs McLain. If he didn’t look at the flood maybe the water would stop rising.

  ‘How did you feel?’ he asked.

  It seemed impossible that this small old woman with faded eyes and wrinkles like an apple left in a schoolbag all holidays had ever been a sixteen-year-old girl in a train full of soldiers in 1917.

  But then World War I had always seemed impossible anyway: armies hiding in muddy trenches and fighting for years over a few metres of ground, battles where tens of thousands of men died in a day because some general in England said so. World War I had been just so stupid . . .

  ‘I felt guilty,’ said Mrs McLain quietly. ‘Because I sat down in the middle of that train seat with a grin I’d been hiding for the past ten days. Yes, I was going to miss Mama and Papa. But I was finally going on the same kind of adventure as my brothers. I was going to help win a war! The war to end all wars! A chit of a girl from Butterwood.’

  ‘But World War I didn’t end war. It was all for nothing!’ said Arjun, trying to listen for screams or yells from the semi-submerged mall. But it was too far away. All he could hear was the deep rush of water as it pushed across the land, and the distant mooing terror of cows.

  ‘You know nothing about it,’ Mrs McLain said sharply. ‘Yes, the war was a tragic waste of almost a whole generation, but that was the fault of the ignorant men in charge. It took those British generals years to accept that telephones might be useful on a battlefield. The British ammunition wasn’t even good enough to penetrate German armour! But what do you think would have happened if we hadn’t fought that war?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The kaiser — the German king — was a madman. He’d been preparing for that war for years. People in conquered countries like Belgium were carted off as slave labour for Germany. The German army dismantled whole factories and moved them to Germany. That’s what would have happened to France, to England, and then the whole British empire, including Australia. They wanted us for our wool and wheat and minerals.’

  ‘My ancestors were in India.’

  ‘And India was part of the British empire too back then, not that I’m defending the British empire.’ Mrs McLain shrugged. ‘But I didn’t know any of that then, not the good nor the bad, just that I might finally have adventures like the girls in the sixpenny magazines.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Not much,’ she said, and nibbled a bit more chocolate.

  Chapter 5

  FOLKESTONE, APRIL–MAY 1917

  The training camp was like her boarding school, though Jean had only been a day girl there. First she was fitted for her uniform, a mud-coloured dress with a white collar, and a khaki coat, that came in either ‘too big’ or ‘too small’. Jean’s was ‘too big’, which was better than Lyndall’s — her buttons burst open every time they bent over in ‘physical jerks’. Even the WAACs’ round-brimmed hat and the solid shoes looked better suited to a school than any kind of army uniform.

  Meals were boarding school meals, lumpy porridge or watery mashed potato, mince stews that were mostly lumps of swede in pallid gravy, followed by rice or tapioca, and once a week the excitement of prunes.

  The WAAC trainees were based at the old Metropole hotel, which sounded exotic. But it had been shut for years, then used as a hospital for men from the Polish army. Now six hundred women slept in small hard beds, with no sheets and army blankets that had to be folded the exact way before they went up to cold concrete cubicles that smelled of mice and disinfectant for a brief wash in a basin, then physical jerks in a sea wind gusting ice and rotting seaweed before breakfast.

  Seagulls whirled and laughed above them. When the wind blew from France the women could hear the mutter of the guns, and even when it didn’t Lyndall said she could feel the vibration, like a thousand Guy Fawkes Nights just over the horizon.

  Lyndall had the bed next to hers and had curly blonde hair and brown eyes that looked deeply expressive even when she was just eating toast. Lyndall actually was twenty-one, and worked in a library, but planned to be an actress after the war. She had enlisted hoping to be posted to an entertainment troupe. But she also mentioned that she drove her father’s car, so Jean suspected a job driving an officer was more likely.

  Drill twice a day, marching in squares, this way, that way, right turn, left turn, over and over, perhaps to keep them occupied, as there wasn’t much else for them to do, except for attending lectures on how to address an officer, and why they should never speak to an officer or any other male. The gates were locked at five o’clock each night.

  The only excitement was the biweekly list of who was due to cross the Channel to France.

  Jean knew that for her, at least, none of the training would be the least bit of use, because she would likely never have to march again, and already she knew she’d be working side by side with men, and so would have to talk to them, even the officers.

  Lyndall and the other women were friendly, though none became a friend. They were so much older — twenty-one at least. Some of the women were married and had children, cared for now by grandmothers or other family. Most were to be clerks, or cooks, or drivers, and some didn’t say what they were going to do, which meant they were probably in Signals too, especially the women who’d worked as telephonists before they’d come to Folkestone.

  And then, finally, her name was on the list. Thirty young women, all dressed the same, as on a school excursion, were shepherded through the dank port air by Miss Eglamore — the women in charge weren’t given an army rank, just referred to as ‘supervisors’. Miss Eglamore spoke to the women as though she was a form teacher, herding them up the gangplank onto a grey ship on a grey sea under a darkening grey sky, then down the companionway to ‘The Ladies Lounge’ where they wouldn’t be tempted to speak to the hundreds of other passengers, who were all men.

  ‘Please put on your lifebuoys, ladies,’ ordered Miss Eglamore, pulling her own over her head.

  Jean wriggled into hers. It was bulky and uncomfortable, and meant she had to perch on the edge of her seat like a seagull about to take flight.

  ‘Do we have to wear these all the way to France?’ someone asked.

  ‘Silence in the ranks,’ said Miss Eglamore, who had obviously been copying officer behaviour. ‘I don’t want to hear anybody querying orders.’

  The muttering of the ship’s engines became a rhythmic thudding. Men shouted. The ship began to move, wallowing slightly.

  ‘Any idea where we’re headed?’ asked the woman next to Jean quietly.

  Jean shook her head. Presumably they were destined for a port in France or Belgium, but it could be Timbuctoo or the moon. She did know Miss Eglamore had a khaki envelope in her coat pocket that she was not allowed to open until they reached port. The envelope presumably contained the information about where to go next, either to a local barracks, or to another ship or train.

  The woman next to her must have been trying to make conversation, because she turned to the woman on the other side, asking where she had learned French.

  Twenty minutes later Miss Eglamore was seasick into a basin. The smell of vomit made Jean nauseated, too, so, taking advantage of the poor woman’s distraction, she pulled her coat about her, checking the block of chocolate Papa had given her was still in an oilcloth bag in her pocket, and took her travelling rug up on deck. The deckchairs were all taken, but a young man quickly stood up for her to take his. He wasn’t wearing a lifebuoy — none of the men she’d seen was.

  Jean nodded her thanks — ‘Do not speak to men’ obviously applied until she began her real work. But the young man lingered as she wrapped her rug around her, glad of its thickness as she tried to get comfortable with the lifebuoy bulging into her back.

  ‘I say,’ the young man offered, ‘I’ve never met a WAAC before.’

  Jean was immediately suspicious. Some of the English newspapers had claimed that the newly formed WAACs were all immoral women being sent to ‘entertain’ the men in France, and not with songs and dancing. If this young man thought she was a woman of loose morals, he could think again.

  ‘We are not allowed to speak to gentlemen,’ she said stiffly.

  He grinned. ‘And officers aren’t allowed to socialise with other ranks.’ He had a lieutenant’s insignia on his great coat. ‘But no one can see us.’

  He’s right, she thought. The grey sky had turned to darkness, and the ship had only the dimmest of lights so it didn’t attract enemy ships or planes or U-boats. But if anyone heard them, she risked being dismissed. She wriggled again so that the lifebuoy was at the small of her back, which wasn’t quite as bad.

  ‘Hard to get comfy? Cheer up — at least no one’s shooting at us. My name’s Alan Galbraith.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Would you like some chocolate?’ He held out a block to her.

  Jean hesitated. Taking a piece of chocolate wasn’t speaking, was it? And she wanted to keep her own stash for emergencies.

  She smiled at him and broke off a piece from his offering. It was fruit and nut, her favourite. There wasn’t any rule that said you couldn’t smile at an officer, was there? And he looked like an Alan, too. It was a reassuring name and he seemed nicely rock-like, with broad shoulders under his coat. She thought his hair might be red under his cap.