That’s me swinging at Galdor’s garage. It was early morning by the time I finished cleaning up at the Chop Shop, and on the way home I felt like perching on that old tyre and letting my mind rest for a while. It had been a very busy week. I hold two other jobs, as a hostess at the Fiume (the local jazz club) and the Empire Burlesque Theatre.
I wasn’t tired because of the actual work; I actually enjoy that. It was all the thoughts and feelings I’d been carrying on my mind that were weighing me down. My boyfriend, who I love deeply, is fighting a war I know very little about, and communications are scarcer and scarcer. It’s only natural, and I understand, but I’m also thinking it might be time to stop waiting and be surprised when he comes back. If he comes back. You see, I’m losing hope that he’ll come back. War changes a person. I can see it in my friend Syl, who runs the garage with her grandfather Galdor and drove an ambulance during the Great War. I can see it in my brother Petr, who wandered around Europe for years after the war ended and whom I went to look for and found in Berlin unsure as to how to go on.
I’m positive that this war will be for Jake more like it was for Syl than for Petr, but I’m fully aware he’ll be a changed man when it’s over. And while I know I’ll still love him, I do -no matter what-, I’m not so sure how he’ll feel or how he’s feeling. I’m not a jealous person, but the war shows us aspects of us sometimes we’re not aware of, and that’s part of the change. He may decide to settle down in a new place, or stay helping the war victims, or simply need some space. And I know I would understand. With a very heavy heart, I would understand. Hoping he would choose to come back and build a life with me, I would accept and understand his decision.
The war has affected everyone -those of us who stayed as well. People talk of a “new woman”; those who were robbed of their husbands and had to go out to work and manage to feed and raise their children on their own. And even though it affected us less than it did those in Europe in a way, the fear of that Great War still looms over us as well. We party like there’s no tomorrow, for, for all we know, there may not be a tomorrow indeed. War children like me, girls and boys too young to take part but old enough to understand, know some things will never be like those our parents or grandparents told us about their youth.
I’m deemed a flapper often enough. And I certainly dress the part. But I’m also a business woman, and there are more and more in town. I depend on my new family, not on a man. I run my business on my own, with the help of my friends and the protection of the family, but I don’t have a husband to come home to, or to wait for. Men leave, and sometimes don’t come back.
Syl is a modern woman herself, although I don’t know what lies behind that.
And, if you’re wondering, well yes, I do feel a pang of pain when I walk by thinly veiled windows around dinner time and see wives cooking for their husbands, or families sitting down together for a meal.
Bea Shamrock 