My chest grew tight with the same kind of panic I’d felt in the green strangeness of the Jamaica bush.
But I couldn’t turn around and run screeching home this time.
Neither one of us could.
Volunteer Ellen McEwen:
There’s always someone telling you to move on if you’re a Traveller. There’s always someone calling you dirty or sly, or slamming a door in your face. Filthy sleekit tinker. That’s what I live with, and not just me, but all my family too. Then the war came along and gave me a chance to be someone different.
It wasn’t that folk changed the way they felt about us, mind. It wasn’t some la-di-da virtuous ‘fighting a common enemy’ rubbish. It was just that once I was in uniform, folk couldn’t tell where I’d come from.
The war began when I was eighteen, and my twin brother and I joined up at the same time early in 1940. Euan went for a soldier and was sent to France, but a lass like me wasn’t going to have to shoot at people. I became a driver for the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. I was proud to do it, and I had steady wages I could share with my mam and dad if they told me a post office to send it to.
When I finished the training course and was assigned to be the driver for an RAF aerodrome, no one at my new RAF base had the least idea where I’d come from. Scotland, aye, that was clear, but the English erks and airmen didn’t know I was a Traveller. I became a gadgy dilly like the other girls, living under a roof and wearing a uniform, and no one but me kent I’d rather be sleeping in a camp tent.
And I kept quiet about it.
At first it wasn’t on purpose. But when I realised folk weren’t bothered about me, I was careful not to let them know. A fresh start. No need to stir up trouble, aye? There was no women’s barracks at RAF Windyedge so I was billeted at the Limehouse, Nancy Campbell’s pub in the village, and she didn’t bat an eyelash over me staying there. She was just the crabbit sort who wouldn’t take well to a fiery-haired, long-legged Scots Traveller lass staying under her roof, but she tolerated me well enough. It was grand being tolerated instead of shunned.
Better than that, at the airfield and in the pub, it was grand being liked by the RAF lads and trusted by their commanders. It’s true that Jamie Stuart knew who I was. We were both at RAF Windyedge late in the summer of 1940. But he was an old friend and didn’t give my game away. He had his own posh family that he tried to keep quiet about, being the laird’s son educated at Eton and all that. My mam and dad used to camp on his grandad’s land.
We were lucky to be close by, and I missed him when 648 Squadron went up to Shetland – I worried about him the way I worried about my own twin brother.
But apart from the worry, if I’m honest, the war so far made me grow a mite comfortable in ways I’d never expected. I didn’t think about the future – how did anyone? Should I go back to my own folk, would I marry, could I make a living? No one needed to decide any of that now, not when we might all be speaking German in another year! I might as well enjoy myself in my wartime job, enjoy being just the same as other folk.
And then in November 1940, it all turned over. After November 1940, I couldn’t be so comfortable.
It started with Nan Campbell asking me to do her a favour on my way back from delivering a load of engine parts to Deeside near Aberdeen. She had two guests arriving to stay at the Limehouse and needed help getting them there. One was Jane Warner, Nan Campbell’s ancient auntie, who had broken her hip and had to walk with two sticks. She’d just come out of hospital and had no other place in the world to go. The other was the girl Nan hired to help her auntie make the journey, and to look after her a time. Could I collect them in the Tilly from the nearest bus stop, Nan asked – the Tilly was the Hillman Minx van I had charge of, converted for carrying bags of stuff or a troop of men, with wooden benches in the back under a canvas top. Nan’s old auntie had brought piles of luggage and couldn’t possibly walk two miles to the Limehouse.
I said I didn’t mind, and when I got back from Deeside, there was the old woman waiting with her young assistant at the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. They did make me laugh, all among their furs and their cases, when I pulled up! They looked like a pair of imperial Russian princesses running away from the Red Revolution.
The hired lassie gave me a surprise, for her smooth skin was the pale brown of milky tea or the inside of a fiddle. I wondered if crabbit Nan Campbell knew she’d hired a black girl. It had all been done over the telephone and in the post, and if this lass was anything like me, she might not have said. It’s easiest not to say, if you’re trying to get work. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to be able to hide her secret for much longer.
She was a pretty young thing, neat and small, with a heart-shaped face that looked a mite fed up at the minute. She wore a sleek black mink coat that shone more glossy than her dark hair, and she had a flute case on a long strap carried over her shoulder. The poor old lady, also bundled in a pile of fur, had fallen fast asleep waiting for me to turn up. She sat perched on one of her cases, bent with her hands clasped together over her sticks, her forehead resting on her knuckles.
I parked the Tilly at the bus stop and got out to help with the luggage. The old lady jerked awake as I slammed my door shut behind me.
I’d only ever spoken to one other black person in my life, and it had been a most uncomfortable conversation. But I was going to have to live under the same roof with this one. I swallowed hard and reminded myself she was just hired help and I was an ATS volunteer. She wasn’t going to start by calling me a dirty tinker, and I’d better not start by making her feel like a British Colonies outcast.
‘I’m Volunteer Ellen McEwen,’ I said, taking great care with it. ‘I’m the ATS driver for RAF Windyedge. I also stay at the Limehouse.’
‘I’m Louisa Adair,’ said the lassie, sharply holding out her hand, like a challenge to fight.
I shook hands with her. Her grip was very firm for somebody so slight and so polite. I made an effort. ‘What a bonny coat!’ I told her.
‘The furs belong to Mrs Warner,’ Louisa said, waving the other hand towards the old woman. ‘The only way we could get them here was to wear them!’
‘How do you do, Mrs Warner?’ I said.
‘You may call me Jane,’ said the old woman, with a look at Louisa that made Louisa smile, as if they were leaving me out of a joke between them.
‘Jane it is, then,’ I said.
I took a breath and went round the back of the Tilly to drop the tailboard so I could load up the pile of cases. It could have gone worse. Ah well!
‘Och, a gramophone!’ I sang out when I found it.
Piled on top of the biggest leather valise, to keep it off the damp ground, was a portable wind-up record player – a very good one, too, with its own loudspeaker built into a beautiful wooden case. Louisa helped me to lift it into the Tilly.
‘That’ll liven things up at Mrs Campbell’s,’ I said. ‘You’ll be popular with the airmen when the next squadron gets here!’
I was most curious about Louisa’s dark skin, but I didn’t like to ask. I didn’t let people poke their nebs into my business, and I wasn’t going to poke into hers. What must it be like, I wondered, never to be able to hide?