Warlight(65)
He had assumed he would always be independent and gateless. He felt he knew the intricacies of women. He may have even told me earlier that his numerous suspect professions were to affirm his independence and lack of innocence to others. So now, as he simultaneously attempted to calm her, to make her understand the less innocent, less truthful world, he needed in some way to bring her out from her focused self-defeating self. Were there many conversations before he suggested marriage? He knew she needed to be aware of what he really did, before she could make a decision. It must have shocked her—not because he might be taking advantage of her but because of something more surprising. He was offering a safe path out of the closing world she was in.
She moved with him into a small flat. There was no money for anything larger. No, I suspect they did not think of me. Or judge me or dismiss me. That is my sentiment from a distance. They were in a busy life, where each farthing mattered, where every tube of toothpaste was bought at a specific price. What was happening to them was the real story, while I still existed only in the maze of my mother’s life.
They were married in a church. Agnes/Sophie wished for a church. A clutch of associates were there, along with her parents and her estate-agent brother—one girl from work, a couple of “lifters” he used on jobs, The Forger of Letchworth who was his best man, as well as the merchant who owned the barge. Agnes had insisted on him. The parents, then, and six or seven others.
She needed to find another job. Her co-workers at the restaurant were unaware she was expecting a child. She bought newspapers and looked through the classifieds. Through a contact of The Darter’s from that earlier time, she found work at Waltham Abbey, which was reemerging now during the post-war years as a research centre. It was where she’d once been happy. She knew its history, had read all those pamphlets on our borrowed barge as we moved silently beneath loud birdcalls or rose slowly within the locks of those canals dug during the previous century to connect the abbey’s source of weapons to the arsenals along the Thames at Woolwich and Purfleet. Her bus took her past Holloway Prison, along Seven Sisters Road, and let her off at the grounds of the abbey. She was back in that same rural landscape where she had once been with The Darter and me. Her life had become circular.
She worked at one of the long tables in the airless, cavern-like rooms in East Wing A, two hundred women focusing only on what was in front of them, never pausing. No one spoke; they sat on stools too far away from one another for conversation. Apart from the noise made by the movement of their hands, there was silence. What was this like for Agnes, so used to laughter and argument while she worked? She missed the chaos of those kitchens, unable to talk, get up and look from a window, tethered instead to the speed of an unhesitating conveyor belt. They changed locations on alternate days. One day in the East Wing, the next day the West, always wearing protective goggles, measuring the ounces of explosive on a scale, spooning it into the containers that slid by. Grains of it were caught under her fingernails, disappeared into her pockets, into her hair. It was worse in the West Wing, where they worked with the yellow crystals of tetryl, packing it into a pill form. The stickiness from the explosive crystals remained on their hands and turned them yellow. Those who worked with tetryl were known as “the canaries.”
Lunch hours allowed conversation but the cafeteria was another enclosed space. She took her packed lunch and walked south to the woods she remembered, ate her sandwich by the riverbank. She lay on her back, exposing her belly to the sunlight, she and the baby alone in this universe. She listened for a bird or the movement from a bush stirred by wind, some alarm of life. She walked back to the West Wing, yellow hands in her pockets.
She did not know what really took place in the strangely shaped structures she passed, where steps disappeared underground into climatic chambers built to test new weapons in desert heat or arctic conditions. There was barely evidence of human activity. On a hill in the distance was the Great Nitrator, in which nitroglycerine had been made for over two centuries. Beside it, underground, were its immense wash pools.
Accessing the old files in the Archives had given me knowledge of the half-buried buildings that Agnes would have walked beside when pregnant with Pearl. I knew now what all those buildings and landmarks at Waltham Abbey had been used for. Knew that even the seemingly innocent forest pool into which Agnes at the age of seventeen had leapt, was where underwater cameras had been set up to measure the power and effect of explosives that would later bomb the Ruhr Valley dams in Germany. That forty-foot-deep pool, where Barnes Wallis and A. R. Collins tested their bouncing bomb, was where she had surfaced, shivering and breathless, then climbed onto the deck of the mussel boat and shared a rolled cigarette with The Darter.
—
At six in the evening she walks out from the gates of Waltham Abbey and catches a bus back to the city. She leans her head against the window, her eyes gazing over the Tottenham Marshes, her face darkening as the bus passes under the bridge at St. Ann’s Road.
Norman Marshall is there in the flat when she returns—her pregnant body exhausted as she passes him without letting him touch her.
“I feel filthy. Let me wash first.”
She hunches over the sink and pours water from a bowl onto her head to remove the gunpowder grains from her hair, then frantically scrubs her hands and arms up to the elbows. The gum-like filling used to pack cartridges into boxes and the tetryl have attached themselves to her like tree resin. Again and again Agnes washes her arms and as much of the skin on her body as she can reach.