I fell in love the same day a girl at the factory lost a quarter of herself.
     Quite a day for maiming, quite a day for surprises.  A dark winter morning, no lighting on the streets what with the black out.  Before you even reach the gates the sulphur crawls into your lungs, drainy and gaggy.  In the locker room we call The Slops we wind on our cotton turbans.  Different colour according to the shift you do, and I’m blue today, because I’m on the six-till-six shift, hair right up inside.  Mr Simpson says the turbans is washed once a week but them nits aren’t half breeders and there’s no itching like nits under a turban.  The Lousy Nitwits, we are.
     — Mum would never’ve stood for this, I say to my sis Marjorie when we swap shifts.  — Can you imagine what she’d say to Hitler?
     — She’d say, Is it true you’ve only got one ball, mister? Goes Marje.
     Which is rubbish, because Mum was quality, she didn’t have no dirty mouth, but it makes us laugh.  Marje has Mum’s mouth — the shape of it I mean, not the nicely-spokenness.  But today she looks all in, in her orange turban.  I’m prettier than Marje, and I notice it then.  I even think: if it was marks out of ten she would be a six and I would be an eight-and-a-half.  With lipstick and powder, nine, I am not boasting I am just telling the truth here.
     Before Mum’s illness and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ at the funeral, there was ironed sheets, proper scones, polished doorknockers, all the fusspot stuff that me and Marje used to laugh at which was also sneering.  But with the war coming so soon after that, things got buggered and stayed that way, me and Marje not having any of Mum’s famous elbow grease or whatever it was stopped mould growing indoors and butter going off.  Just me and Marje in charge — just two stupid girls — and Dad posted off to Singapore to fight the Enemy, and then his letters that stopped coming.  Sheets rumpled as they come, hens turning up in the kitchen to peck and splatter and Marje no longer a virgin because of Bobby.
     Mum would’ve died.
     Anyway Marje was lucky not to be on the day-shift as it turns out, wearing an orange turban and not a blue one like me and Iris.  Lucky to be leaving to go home, so that all she ever heard was a faraway noise, and even then, she said, she never made the connection.  She was tired, reckoned it was just a bomb, paid no notice.  And when I mentioned it in Chicago later, she’d clean forgotten it.  Funny the things you wipe out.
     But I remembered.  I was there.
     There’s a whole row of us working in blue turbans.  Maisie Wheeler on one side of me, and Iris Jones on the other and Maisie’s yakking about a blast in Sheffield, hit a tram and got the driver and the conductress electrocuted.
     — It shrank them both to the size of dolls! Says Maisie.  — I swear.
     — Load of bollocks, says Iris, how can an electric current do that?
     And I’m puzzling it over, it sounds true to me, because no one understands electricity, it is that close to magic, and then the ten o’clock bell goes which is our cue for a sing-song so we forget about tram conductors shrunk to the side of dolls and away we go.

     Along the street she wheels a perambulator,
     She wheels it in the springtime and in the month of May,
     And if you ask her why the hell she wheels it,
     She wheels it for a soldier who is far, far away.
     Far away, far away, far away, far away.
     She wheels it for a soldier who is far, far away.

Iris is singing too.  I know, because I’m standing right next to her.  But my turning-blade has some muck in it, and all of a sudden I need a better rag, so I go up to the line and get one from Mr. Simpson, still singing.

   Above the shelf her father keeps a shotgun,
   He keeps it in the springtime and in the month of May,
   And if you ask him why the hell he keeps it,
   He keeps it for a soldier who is far, far away,
   Far away, far away —

I’ve got my rag, and I’m just coming back.  My mouth’s still open from singing the chorus when it happens.
   The bang’s so loud it splits your head in half.
   Then a big whoosh, and the whole world gets sucked up and thrown.  And there’s Iris, being chucked into the air like a little scrap.  Torn apart, she is, because out gushes the red blood and there’s bits that looks like meat from the butcher’s.  Maybe mince.
   And you see her whole arm and shoulder spat sideways and flop to the floor.  And there, look.  There’s her arm and her hand that has a ring on its finger which is now allowed in here because it says clearly in the rules, No jewellery permitted.
   An engagement ring, it looks like.  There’s another surprise, see.  She’s a dark horse, ain’t she?
   I try to shut my mouth which is still open from the singing, but I can’t.  It’s gone dry.
   I just stare at Iris’s arm and hand and shoulder on the floor, not wanting to look at the mince bit that’s left behind possibly still alive cos it’s screaming.
   Damage: Total loss of one arm and one shoulder, because like Mr Simpson says, the manufacture of munitions is not a blinking joke, girls.