Chapter 15
The factory was noisy and monstrous, but Cora was warm in her overalls, thinking about the soldier’s cap as she worked. It was a relic of the soldier’s war: dust, blood, hair oil and gun oil.
Concentrating hard on the monotony of filling the pellets, Cora found her mind flying free, reliving conversations, and the radio tuned in and out of her consciousness.
She had long since stopped registering the sharp smell and vivid colour of TNT.
Time passed by playfully as it pleased, dragging sometimes and leaping forward at others, and any diversion was a welcome marker to peg the day on, to distinguish it from the previous day or the one to come.
She found herself thinking of the fair-haired man who owned the cap, and the cap was their connection. She thought about him a lot that day. Her mother had hit him while he was defenceless, and she kept coming back to that uneasy sense of shame and guilt.
What Cora remembered most about the moment the Germans arrived was her mother’s accusing scream.
It seemed, looking back over the moment, that everything else was hushed, frozen by her mother’s brutal sweep of the arm as her anger tore out of her.
Cora had the impression that the faded cap momentarily blotted out the hazy sun as it sailed through the air. Didn’t, of course, because it was instantly trampled on.
And she remembered the triumphant look that Jane had given her, knowing that her daughter would be on her side.
And I was, then, Cora thought. I sort of was, because of Owen.
But then she remembered the shock of the blow and the desperation in the prisoner’s eyes and felt only pity for him.
Back home after work, she took the cap out again and sat on her bed, wondering what to do with it.
It was worn and the grey had faded to pale blue, and when she held it to her face she breathed in the smells of earlier days.
There was another smell, too, the smell of him, the man.
Her body reacted to it, it was a good smell and she hummed with appreciation and then wondered about the safety of her soul.
She put the cap into her pocket, evidence of her mother’s wild behaviour, and her own perfidy in picking it up again, the souvenir of a good-looking man.
She couldn’t keep it and it wasn’t hers to throw away.
There was only one person she could think of to talk to about it.
Love thine enemy, as Idwal would say. Probably didn’t mean it literally, though.
She went to the window and looked out across the familiar countryside, the bare trees, the fields waiting to be ploughed, the dense dark woods, the mountains in the distance, all faded shades of grey and brown, briefly lit by an unexpected flash of sunlight through a gap in the clouds.
Later, she watched for Idwal coming home from the pub, hunched against the cold.
When she saw him, she hurried outside and asked him if she could have a word.
Idwal lit a cigarette he took from behind his ear and screwed up his eyes to look at her through the smoke. As an afterthought, he offered her one from behind his other ear.
‘No thanks,’ she said, surprised that he’d offered. What she liked about Idwal was that he had his own opinion about things and he didn’t much care what people thought. ‘You know when my mother smacked that soldier, knocked his cap off?’
Idwal nodded, frowning.
‘Well, I picked it up afterwards,’ Cora said, and she could feel the colour rush to her face. ‘But now I’ve got it I don’t know what to do with it, see.’
Idwal’s face smoothed out with relief. ‘That’s it?’ he asked her as if a burden had lifted from him. ‘That’s your problem? Dew, I thought it was going to be something terrible.’
‘Like what?’
‘Nothing specific, but you hear all sorts these days,’ he said cryptically, and now that he no longer had to use the smoke as a screen to shield behind, he stubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his boot and put it behind his ear again.
‘I’m very relieved it’s something simple.
You’ll have to give the cap back to him.
It’s his, after all, and they don’t have much in the way of possessions, going by the size of those kit bags. ’
She thought about it, and it made perfect sense. ‘But how do I do that? I don’t know his name.’
‘You know where he lives though. You pass the camp every day,’ Idwal pointed out. ‘Keep an eye out for him. You’re bound to recognise him eventually.’
It was true, Cora, Megan and Gladdie did pass the camp every day on their way to and from the factory because it was a short cut along the edge of the field, and also because it reassured them to see the prisoners safe behind barbed wire.
They agreed without bias that the Germans weren’t as wholesome as the GIs nor as seductive as the Italians.
Of course they weren’t. These prisoners were dangerous fanatics, everyone felt that.
‘And the way they look at us,’ Gladdie said indignantly, ‘as if we’ve dropped from the moon.’
‘As if they’d never seen yellow women before,’ Cora said. ‘With green hair.’
‘And hair as bright as an orange. They’ve lived very sheltered lives.’
‘Somewhere in Germany there must be women doing exactly the same job as us, writing messages on the shells same as we do.’
‘Only we do it better.’ Cora squinted at the dark yellow sky. Clouds were approaching from the hills in a dense grey line. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she said with a shiver.
After Idwal gave her the advice that he did, she’d been looking out for the man with fair hair as she passed the camp.
‘Here,’ she would say to him, throwing him the cap.
‘I think this is yours.’ And she would watch his eyes brighten.
She imagined apologising to him on behalf of her mother.
But she wasn’t sure that one could apologise for another person.
She could only apologise for herself, for not throwing the cap back to him when she’d had the chance.
She imagined explaining to him about Owen and at the same time, remembering that he was the enemy, and the words the guard said to her: killed a lot more people than him.