Daisy's Wars Read online




  Meg Henderson

  was born in Glasgow. She is a journalist and the author of the bestselling memoir, Finding Peggy, and three novels, The Holy City, Bloody Mary and Chasing Angels.

  Praise for Meg Henderson’s novels:

  THE HOLY CITY

  ‘A hugely absorbing story. Henderson brings the horror and pain of wartime experiences vividly to life with vigorous humour, commonsense wisdom and vitality.’

  Observer

  BLOODY MARY

  ‘A novel full of the rich detail of domestic lives, told with humour and sharpness.’

  Scotland on Sunday

  CHASING ANGELS

  ‘Henderson writes from a position of uncompromising humanity. A strong, atmospheric writer with gifts of insight, she has a sharp and tarry black humour, so while she attacks the objects of her wrath, she leavens the battle with a running current of dark and infectious wit.’

  Glasgow Sunday Herald

  Also by Meg Henderson

  FINDING PEGGY: A GLASGOW CHILDHOOD

  THE HOLY CITY

  BLOODY MARY

  CHASING ANGELS

  THE LAST WANDERER

  SECOND SIGHT

  A SCENT OF BLUEBELLS

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2005 by HarperCollinsPublishers

  Copyright © Meg Henderson 2005 and 2012

  The moral right of Meg Henderson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-194-1

  Version 1.0

  MEG HENDERSON

  DAISY’S WARS

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  1

  If there was one thing wireless operator Daisy Sheridan had learned it was never relax in the tower. You sat there as the boys went off, cheered on by every female on the base; looking forward to the end of your shift and hoping that by then all the boys would have made it back safely, though you knew they wouldn’t. But even when losses were confirmed and the stragglers rolled in, if you were smart some instinct kept you alert. Now here it was, the unexpected, as sure as eggs is eggs.

  ‘Daisy, I’m not going to make it back,’ the voice said. ‘The old kite’s in bits, the crew are dead and I’ve taken one in the head. Something wrong with my eyes, can’t see much, and my chute’s useless.’

  ‘Oh, here we go,’ she replied tartly, ‘another one trying for the sympathy vote.’

  The boy at the other end of the line laughed quietly. ‘Have I got it?’ he asked. ‘The sympathy vote, I mean?’

  From the moment the boy’s voice had come over the radio Daisy was aware that the atmosphere in the Langar tower had suddenly become still and silent as the others listened to the conversation, willing him to make it home. It was always like that, on a wing and a prayer, as they said.

  ‘No, you haven’t!’ she said archly into her mike. ‘Do you think you’re the first Fly Boy who’s tried that line on me, sunshine?’

  He laughed quietly again. ‘Daisy, will you write to my mother?’ he asked.

  ‘You really are determined to carry on with this, aren’t you?’ she sighed. ‘What makes you think I write to mothers anyway, sunshine?’

  ‘We all know that you do, Daisy,’ he said softly. ‘Promise me? Tell her I was a good, clean-living boy!’

  ‘Now I know this is a joke!’ Daisy snorted. ‘Stop fooling around and get back here. We’ve got you, we can see you. Just put less effort into trying to chat me up and more into flying and you’ll make it.’

  There was no reply for a moment, save a crackling on the line. ‘If I do make it back,’ he said eventually, ‘will you marry me, Daisy?’

  ‘Now we’ve got to it!’ she said sceptically. ‘Are you a millionaire by any chance?’

  ‘How did you guess?’ the boy laughed. ‘You know I wouldn’t have dared ask if I hadn’t been!’

  ‘Then of course I’ll marry you. So get your arse back here in one piece,’ Daisy replied, ‘and no excuses, I’ve got witnesses.’

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘Yes, fiancé of mine?’

  ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘And what do you think I’ve been doing?’ she demanded. ‘I have pilots out there in real trouble to deal with and I’m on the line to a chancer like you. I’ll be on a charge over this, y’know! And another thing, it would be polite to discuss the ring now that we’re betrothed, don’t you think? Will it be a nice, big, flashy family heirloom?’

  For a moment the line crackled again as she listened to the sound of breathing, the noise of a sick engine in the background, then nothing. For a long moment there was silence, then Daisy felt a collective sigh as the entire tower let out the breath it had been holding. Another one gone, another boy lost, and he hadn’t been that far away either. Almost imperceptibly Daisy lowered her head for an instant to steady herself. ‘Any chance of a brew?’ she asked calmly, already turning to the next call.

  The Control Officer bent over her and said quietly into her ear, ‘I wouldn’t log that last one,’ and Daisy nodded wordlessly without looking up. Everyone knew that eyebrows were raised from time to time over her conversations with pilots in trouble as they tried desperately to make it home after a raid. The rule was that only official jargon should be used and every word had to be logged, but everyone also knew that Daisy handled situations like this with ease, effortlessly performed several tasks at once, was never out of her depth and didn’t blub – who could ask for more? That’s what they said, anyway, she knew that, Daisy always coped – in an unmilitary manner it was true, but she coped. The stragglers were still coming home from the raid, those who would come home that was, and the names of those who wouldn’t were already being wiped off the blackboard, though you never really gave up hope till you had to.

  Without looking up, Daisy wondered which of the names being wiped off at that moment was his and what kind of chap the boy had been. Her mind was already turning to the letter she would send to his mother telling her what a good, clean-living boy he had been, how they had all loved him and would miss him terribly. Then she tossed her head slightly and went back to work.

  At the end of the shift the other WAAFs waited for her.

  ‘You go on,’ she said, ‘you’ll be lighting up gaspers as usual and I prefer clean air, thanks.’ Every time she said something of the sort she was taken back to her childhood and living with a mother who had had to fight for every breath she took, turning anyone with a lit cigarette or pipe into an enemy. Her mother was gone now too, but Daisy still hated tobacco smoke. It made her cough for her mother’s sake, she always thought, rather than her own.

  She quickly turned her thoughts away. She didn’t want to think about Kathleen, she just wanted some space so that the sound of the boy’s voice would leave her mind, but she had th
ought in the wrong direction if she was looking for a diversion. She left the tower to walk alone in the cool morning air, smiling to herself as she wondered why the others didn’t ask her how the smell of aircraft fuel and burning didn’t offend her ‘clean air’ demands – burning flesh too, often enough.

  She gave another shake of the head. ‘Daisy Sheridan copes!’ she told herself quietly. ‘Behave yourself, girl!’

  She did cope, it was true, but sometimes she needed a little time alone to file the latest incident in her mind, to commit it to where thoughts of her mother already lay, in the care of ‘the real Daisy Sheridan’, rather than the one people saw, the one she seemed to be on the outside. They were all there, the people and events she didn’t want to think about, at some time or other, like ghosts inhabiting her mind, all being cared for by ‘the real Daisy Sheridan’ until she had time to deal with them properly. During this long war there were so many ghosts that she often wondered if there would be enough time left in her life when the fighting was over to think about them properly.

  ‘When the war is over’ – that was what everyone said. They had said it so long already that it had lost its meaning; nobody could really look ahead and visualise a war-free time. For five bleak years everyone with someone in the Forces, and that meant almost every family in the entire country, lived in dread of receiving a telegram from the War Office that started ‘I regret to inform you …’.

  The war had become a habit, that was the truth. There were children who had been born and gone to school knowing nothing but drabness, rationing and fear, knowing their fathers through photos and tales told by mothers who had no way of telling if they might ever see them in the flesh. Funny to think she had ever been a child like that herself, and not too many years ago either; but, on the other hand, she had never really been a child like that, when she came to think of it. Neither of the Sheridan girls could ever be described as like other children.

  When she thought of Kay a picture came into her mind of her older sister on the stage in one of Newcastle’s Hibernian clubs. It wasn’t her first memory, but it was the one seared into her brain, probably because it was so perfect. Daisy had been about seven years old, so Kay must have been about nine, her delicate, heart-shaped face with the big, bright blue eyes framed by her hair, a cascade of dark red waves that ended at her waist, a child of truly exquisite beauty. As Kay stood, her small feet slightly hen-toed, on the worn wood of the floorboards, bathed in a single cheap spotlight, the colour of her eyes had been intensified by a puff-sleeved dress in a satiny, shiny material of the same vivid blue. The colour complemented her colouring perfectly and the dress was strewn with sequins that shone like diamonds, sequins her mother and Daisy had sewn on by hand. To complete the false glamour that was Little Kay Sheridan, a big matching bow held her hair back from her face as she sang of emotions she didn’t understand and probably never would. ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, she had sung that night, always her big closing number, their father Michael’s favourite song in honour of their mother, Kathleen – and judging by the Irish Geordie audience, a favourite of theirs too. Kay sang to them in her clear, strong voice, evoking nostalgic thoughts and memories of Ireland, the country where they still felt they belonged, and she sang with such feeling that tears always ran down the cheeks of people who were three or four generations removed from Ireland, but still regarded the green, green land across the sea as ‘home’.

  In the corner of the stage, Kathleen Sheridan sat on a shaky wooden chair, her eyes gleaming, her cheeks two bright red circles as her lips silently moved in time with her daughter’s, her face reflecting the feelings on Kay’s innocent face in this well-rehearsed routine.

  Even then, though she was two years younger than Kay, Daisy had been amazed at how easily the audience had been fooled by what sounded like emotion in her sister’s voice. She was a great turn in the Irish clubs, Little Kay Sheridan, just as her mother had been before her, but one day Little Kay would be a great star. That’s what everyone said, wiping their tears away after Kathleen had been safely taken home once more, and not least because of her wonderful voice. They loved to cry, that’s what Daisy had learned. People liked nothing more than sentiment, real or imaginary, it didn’t seem to matter, especially to the Irish, but then she had already half-understood that. They had never been welcome in Newcastle: even those born and bred in the city were regarded as foreigners. Having an Irish name was a handicap that made sure you didn’t belong in what was, what had become, your own home in your own country, the only one you’d ever known.

  The Sheridans had fared no worse than others, better than many, but they were still Irish and that meant Catholic and Fenian. You carried it with you like an ugly scar, so that you were only really at ease among similarly disfigured people. That scar was what held the exiled Irish together.

  ‘Your great-grandfather Bernard was just a boy from a poor farming family,’ Daisy’s father would tell his own. ‘He had to leave a home in a beautiful land where he was loved and come to a hostile place like this just to stay alive.’

  He would shake his head mournfully at this point, as he did at various points throughout the tale, and Daisy wasn’t very old before she knew in advance where each shake would come.

  ‘Those who could afford it went to America,’ Michael continued, ‘but the really poor like Bernard had to go wherever work was to be found, to big cities like this damnable place.’ Another sad shake of the head followed.

  Newcastle had been rich in industry in the early 1800s, with chemical works, shipbuilding, engineering, coal mining and, at just that time, the invention of the railways. Most of the new arrivals became navvies, building railroads and viaducts, camping beside the newly built lines, surviving cheaply, saving what they could to one day afford to bring their wives and families or their sweethearts over to Newcastle.

  ‘All they wanted was to be able to earn enough to look after their own, to have normal family lives,’ Michael continued, ‘but the only work they’d give the Irish was the hardest and worst paid, so they could only afford the dirtiest and cheapest lodgings. Bernard was going to work on the railways, he had family working as navvies who had spoken up for him, and he would’ve joined them if it hadn’t been for Lord Londonderry.’ Another shake.

  In 1844, Lord Londonderry, who owned coal mines in Seaham in nearby County Durham, was in dispute with his workers, so he threw them out of their jobs and tied homes and brought in 150 Irishmen to do the work instead – for lower wages, of course. Bernard had jumped at the chance. His earnings wouldn’t be as high as those of the miner he was replacing, but they were considerably better than he could have earned for equally back-breaking work building the railways. If the Geordie miners didn’t want it, he and another 149 did.

  ‘He landed at Whitehaven and had to walk over miles of moorland to get to Seaham, but he didn’t care. He knew he could earn good money sinking shafts for new mines and that if he worked hard he could afford to bring the lovely Niamh over from the ould country.’

  ‘The lovely Niamh.’ That was how Michael always described his grandmother, making Daisy feel that she had a special relationship with the old woman she had no memory of. Daisy had entered the world as ‘the lovely Niamh’ had been taking her leave of it, but they shared a bond.

  What Bernard and the others didn’t know then, and, in their circumstances, probably wouldn’t have cared about if they had, was that the incident would become another weapon against every Irishman or woman in the Newcastle area for all time. They became known as ‘the Seaham Scabs’, though local myth would transform the numbers from 150 to thousands, and the stigma of the Irish Blacklegs would encompass anyone with an Irish name for generations to come. Even fifty years later, when work was slack, miners of Irish descent like Daisy’s father were laid off first from pits where they had worked for three generations longer than the English miners who were kept on.

  ‘Was it fair that my grandfather and the others took the jobs an
d homes of other men?’ Michael Sheridan would ask with a shrug when he recounted the old tales. ‘Probably not. We wouldn’t have liked it much if it had happened to us, now, would we? But when people are starving the first things out of the window are principles. Besides,’ he would say with a note of bitterness, reaching for the bottle once again, ‘I think we’ve been punished enough by this city for the sins of our grandfathers, don’t you?’

  Listening to him, Daisy would nod firmly because that was what her father wanted, but she didn’t really feel as he did. She understood the hurt, but she didn’t feel it, nor the melancholy. That was mainly a male thing, though she sympathised with Michael’s feelings over the treatment of generations of Irish Geordies. Sometimes, in the retelling of the old stories, she would glance at Kay, trying to gauge her sister’s reaction, but there was no expression there, save the one she always had, beautiful but blank.

  ‘Their only crime had been to be starved into taking any work they could get and to love Ireland!’ Michael’s voice would rise in a kind of crescendo at this point. ‘And God knows, the one they lived in didn’t want them.’ And here his voice would crack completely.

  And, Daisy knew, it lost few chances to let them know they would never be accepted, no matter how long they were there, which in turn made them keep to themselves, living, working and socialising only with each other, keeping alive a vision of the green place across the sea that they had left, never to set foot on again.

  Daisy understood that, but she didn’t understand why generations who had never seen Ireland seemed to remember it even more strongly and lovingly than those who had. Somehow she didn’t feel part of their maudlin, defeated attitude that all too often led to the bottle. That, she began to understand as she grew older, was part of the problem. What it did to her was make her determined that she wouldn’t be there any longer than necessary. It gave her the will to move on from Newcastle and from the way the Irish all too often dealt with the city. She didn’t know where or when she would achieve this, but she did know that she didn’t belong to either side, and she didn’t want to belong either. There was a world out there where all these ancient hurts, tiresome resentments and mindless animosities didn’t matter, and that’s where she belonged.