the best friend I could have hoped to find, Dot. I couldn’t have survived the last few weeks without you.”
Maisie was about to add how much she was dreading the postings being announced later that evening, in case she got separated from Dot, but why make it even worse? Even the thought of it made her nervous, so instead, she reached to put her arms around Dot.
Dot immediately shied away. “Best friend or not,” she cried with a sudden grin, “you are not hugging me while you smell as bad as Mary’s granny!”
WOMEN’S TIMBER CORPS CAMP
AUCHTERBLAIR, CARRBRIDGE, INVERNESS-SHIRE
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12TH, 1942
And then, training was over. The morning of the final day, the huts had been cleared, cleaned, and inspected before breakfast. Chores finished, Maisie stood with her suitcase, alongside all the other lumberjills, in front of the lodge waiting for the trucks to arrive to take them to their new camps. Maisie was looking forward to her next adventure, but was sorry to be losing so many new friends almost as soon as she’d found them.
When the postings had been announced last night, there had been squeals of delight as some close friends learned that they would move on together, but there had been tears too.
Miss Cradditch had read down the list of recruits alphabetically, each name immediately followed by one of the WTC camps around Scotland. Helen and Phyllis had learned almost immediately that they had been posted together somewhere in Perthshire, then Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia had found out that they would all be at the Advie camp, near Grantown-on-Spey. Maisie had grown anxious as Old Crabby reached the names beginning with M.
“McCall, Margaret,” Old Crabby had shouted, and Maisie’s stomach had lurched. “Auchterblair, Speyside.”
Maisie had been sure she hadn’t yet heard Auchterblair called out after anyone else’s name, but if the camp was in Speyside, she would be close to Mary, Mairi, and Cynthia, even though they wouldn’t all be at the same camp. But then, as Old Crabby had continued down the list, and no one else was assigned to Auchterblair, Maisie had grown uneasy. She didn’t want to go somewhere by herself.
Finally, Old Crabby had reached the last name on the list.
“Thompson, Dorothy.”
Dot had raised her hand. Maisie hadn’t been able to breathe.
“Auchterblair, Speyside,” Old Crabby had shouted, and a huge weight had lifted from Maisie’s heart. She and Dot were moving together to Auchterblair, wherever that was. Scary though it was to leave Shandford Lodge, at least she’d have Dot at her side. Then she and Dot had hugged each other, and all the other girls had joined in too, everyone laughing and crying at the same time.
How ironic, Maisie thought as the first Bedford rolled up the drive, that she had shed more tears last night about leaving her new friends from Shandford Lodge than she had when she’d left her family in Glasgow.
The trucks, it turned out, were not only arriving to pick up, they were also dropping off. Down clambered a new set of fresh-faced lumberjills-to-be, all soft, silent, and clearly terrified. Watching the new arrivals, Maisie could see how much she had changed from the new recruit of six weeks ago. Not only was she slimmer and fitter now, more tanned and muscular, Maisie knew she was different inside too. She wasn’t scared anymore to handle an ax or saw, or to drive a car—actually, she was still a little scared of the car—and she’d swum almost naked in a loch and had had her first dance with a man. She felt older, and wiser, and best of all, she had friends now, good friends, and these women loved and respected her. They treated her not as a child, but as an equal.
And that felt right. Maisie was not the spoiled child who had walked down Sutherland Avenue without a backward glance six weeks earlier. She was Maisie McCall of the Women’s Timber Corps. She was a fully trained lumberjill, ready to go out into the forests to work—and to work bloody hard—to help her country win the war.
But suddenly, Maisie wished that her parents could see her now, and Beth too. They would be proud of her. Surely.
Maisie felt a surprisingly strong twinge of … something. Homesickness, or guilt? What if something happened to her? Or to her parents, or Beth?
Old Crabby interrupted her thoughts by calling for everyone going to Speyside, the camps at Ballater, Grantown-on-Spey, and Auchterblair, to board the truck on the far side, which was leaving shortly. Everyone else was to board the two nearer trucks to be taken down to the train station.
But as the other girls began picking up their luggage, Maisie quickly crouched down and clicked open her suitcase. Rummaging, she found the postcard she’d bought a month earlier. Even though it had been tucked inside a book, it was still crumpled and torn at one corner. But it would have to do.
Her only pencil was the thick-leaded one that she used to mark measurements on the cut timber, but that too would have to do. On one side of the bent card, Maisie wrote her mother’s name and their home address, and then on the other side:
Completed WTC training. From today, Sat Sept 12, will be stationed at WTC Auchterblair Camp, Carrbridge, Inverness-shire.
Maisie
Entrusting her suitcase to Dot, Maisie ran over to where Old Crabby stood on the lodge steps and held out the postcard.
“Would you mind posting this for me, Miss Cradditch?”
Old Crabby grunted something as she took the card. Then she grunted again when Maisie grabbed it back and scrawled additional words.
Sending love to you and Li—
She had started to write “Lilibet,” the sweet nickname for Beth that they’d borrowed from Princess Elizabeth, but writing that felt too … well, Maisie wasn’t in the mood to be quite so nice to her family yet.
She wrote instead, “Sending love to you and Beth,” handed over the card, and sprinted for the truck.
It wasn’t comfortable, bouncing around on the hard seats in the back of the Bedford, listening to the engine whine and the gears grind as the driver urged the vehicle higher and higher into the Cairngorm Mountains, and Shandford Lodge was soon far behind them. They passed through pretty villages like Laurencekirk and Aboyne, and eventually reached Ballater, where they dropped off half of the lumberjill load, including Catherine and Anna, who tumbled out with hugs and promises to write.
It was certainly beautiful countryside, the road looping over steep and majestic hills, and through wide swathes of treeless wilderness. Soon, though, a thick fog rolled over the road, blocking the view.
They stopped for the driver to have a smoke, and so they could disappear behind a gorse bush to have a pee. As they climbed aboard again, the driver told them that it wasn’t so much fog as a low cloud on a high road, which crested hill after hill as it rose and fell. Either way, they spent the next part of the journey peering into a thick curtain of mist. The air grew colder, and Maisie was glad to have her heavy WTC-issue coat. She’d been sitting on it to cushion the bumps, but since a bruised bum was preferable to frostbite, she now wrapped the coat tightly around herself, and Dot did the same with hers, as they huddled together on the bench. Had they really swum in a loch only yesterday? Maisie shivered at the thought.
The truck gradually wove down from the mountains, to where the countryside was flatter, warmer, and sunnier, with the road passing through dense woodland shade at times, and at others giving them glances of the sparkling River Spey. They dropped Mairi, Mary, and Cynthia at Advie, near Grantown-on-Spey, which left only Maisie and Dot in the back, and at last, they reached Carrbridge and Maisie felt a rush of excitement. In a matter of minutes, she would be a real lumberjill in a real forest