Chapter Text
When all is said and done, the war ends like one last bomb blowing the lid off the world.
In the dark of winter, the fuse is lit: with victory on the horizon, production slows and the third shift is discontinued. The ones who hold on to their jobs keep their eyes straight ahead, pretending they don't hear the fuse hissing ever closer.
It doesn't last—a lit fuse never does—and with a handful of quiet words the explosion ignites: “...signed the act of unconditional surrender…” Every person with a ticking heart streams out to fill the streets with shouts of joy, unanimous in celebration from one coast to the other.
On the surface, at least. Betty fixes an answering grin to her face and looks about at her fellow bomb girls, wondering if she could possibly be the only one with terror written plain on her heart. They change out of their coveralls and join the festivities in the street, and it doesn’t feel like the very last time.
They don’t say goodbye.
The war ends, and Kate leaves on some kind of low-budget victory tour. Though she doesn’t need to, Gladys moves into Kate’s empty room, and Betty is glad of it.
“You needn’t rush,” Gladys says, but Betty has lost her job and occupation and income in one fell swoop, and she has a mortgage to pay. More than that, she has a purpose to find. When she left the farm to join the women war workers in the city, she didn’t exactly look five years ahead and decide what she would do when the war came to an end. Put your shoulder to the wheel, sure: done. Now what?
The government offers occupational training for women war workers: housekeeping, hairdressing, waitressing. Betty stares at the image of Rosie the Riveter on the front flap of the pamphlet and wonders if good ol’ Rosie is learning how to trim hair. Is this what they worked so hard for?
She circles ads in the paper, goes from shop to shop, and hears the same thing a hundred times: “That job is waiting for someone who fought.” Disapproving frown. “Don’t you think you had your time in the spotlight? Our boys are home.”
But why? she cries out in the dark of her mind. Why do they get first pass? I would have fought if they let me! When she drags her defeated limbs to the unemployment office, barely holding back tears of shame, the woman behind the counter looks pointedly at her left hand.
“Now that the war’s over, you see to finding a man to take care of you. Wouldn’t you much rather be at home looking after a baby instead of standing in this long line?” Encouraging smile. “You’re so young, it must feel like the war took all your best years, but don’t you worry. Keep trying. You find yourself a man.” The woman holds out the cheque but doesn’t release it until Betty nods, bent under the weight of so much expectation and shame.
She barely makes it home before the tears crash down like waves on the shore of a sea she’s never seen, and she wails again in the dark of her little house, with Gladys’s arms around her. “Why? What do they have that I don’t? I’m as good as any man, twenty men!” The words tumble out, wet and crumpled, but it’s nothing she hasn’t said before and that’s almost worse.
Of course, she goes to bed that night and gets up the next morning and starts all over again. Every day she sits down at the kitchen table and pores over the classifieds, and every week she waits in line at the unemployment office. They ask if she’s looking for work and she says yes, and she hates every minute of it.
One hundred and thirty two days after the end of the war, Betty’s unemployment cheque comes with a slip of paper bearing the address of a bakery uptown. When she calls the listed number from one of the phones the office provides, she is offered a job baking bread for forty-eight hours a week, at thirty-five cents an hour.
Her stomach plummets to the floor, and it actually physically hurts her to say she’ll take the job. She doesn’t have a choice; she knows that much, and she’s grateful when Gladys stifles her own incredulous reaction.
“D’you think they’ll send you home with the leftovers?” she asks, smiling softly, and Betty shrugs one shoulder.
“I’m not sure it would be a good thing if they did. I can’t afford to outgrow my clothes.”
Gladys pauses, and Betty can just see her cataloguing her beautiful gowns. Even if she can afford more, it would be a shame. “You have a point.”
It’s not a bad job. She leaves the house long before dawn and spends the day on her feet, punching dough harder than she ever punched a girl in a boxing ring. The scent of yeast and warm bread becomes her perfume, and she has to admit it’s better than the smell of amatol.
Still, she barely manages to scrape together enough each month to pay her mortgage, and the utilities, and the milk on top of that, and most weeks Gladys ends up bearing the brunt of the grocery shopping. Betty is too tired and beaten down even to argue.
On a Sunday morning early in December, Betty is mending the pocket of her winter coat at the kitchen table while Gladys reads the newspaper. She makes an abrupt, loud “hm!” noise and Betty looks up.
Gladys begins to read aloud. “Former Bomb Factory to House University Students. A local allied bomb factory forty minutes east of Toronto, abandoned at the end of the war, is in the process of being converted to a satellite campus for the University of Toronto. Preparing for an influx of soldiers-turned-students, the university’s St. George campus does not have the necessary capacity.
“Et cetera, et cetera…” She trails her finger down the page. “Due to the amount of renovations necessary, including the demolition of buildings contaminated by explosive materials, the facility could not be opened for the fall session, but will welcome a class of fifteen hundred in January.”
Gladys shakes out the newspaper to fold it closed, and looks up at Betty with bright eyes. “I think we’d better go have a look-see.”
“If you say so,” Betty murmurs, bending her head back over her sewing. Gladys will have her way.