Free Tell it to the Bees by Fiona Shaw

leave for school. She pictured him grabbing his satchel and his coat, pushing his arms into sleeves as he set off down the street, his socks halfway down already, his collar skewed.
    This doctor bothered Lydia. She wasn’t from the same place as them. She lived differently. She’d speak differently, and that mattered. Lydia wondered what they talked of, her son and this woman. She wondered what he’d think, that his mother worked in a factory and this woman was a doctor. She wondered why the doctor wanted Charlie there.
    Around her the women gossiped and smoked. Somebody crooned ‘Secret Love’ till the bell sounded and the conveyor belt began its endless journey.
    All through the morning Lydia wondered. Her head was tilted to the belt and her hands moved without thought, doing their dance with cable, clamp and screwdriver. When she first started in this room, she’d thought how pretty the boards looked with their patterns of coloured wire. Pretty after the grey on grey of the munitions. She didn’t notice now. Only joined in the joke occasionally, when a girl left with her leaving gift, how the only thing she ever made and the one thing she never got from this place was a wireless.
    The tea-trolley was rolled round and Lydia stood and drank her tea for ten while the tea-breaker took her place at the line.
    Lunchtime, and she ate quickly in the blather of gossip and noise, the voices cutting this way and that. Cheap stockings to be got at a place behind the station. A girl got in the family way and flung out for it, till the problem disappeared and no more said.
    â€˜It’s the mother should be ashamed. Girls die of that.’
    â€˜Least she can get herself a husband.’
    â€˜Might have queered the pitch for a baby, though. She won’t be telling any hubby about that, now will she.’
    Then it was on to a pair found carrying on in the wire store.
    â€˜Hard at it, they were, when the line controller came in. Bad luck. He’d lost his watch, only went in to search for it.’
    â€˜Locked, I heard they were.’
    â€˜Then she’ll be needing more than new stockings,’ Dot said, and Lydia laughed with the rest.
    Arrangements were being made, for the pictures, and for dancing at the Grafton. Dot nudged her.
    â€˜You coming?’
    â€˜I don’t think so.’ Lydia looked down at her shoes.
    â€˜Come on. Charlie’s old enough now. And there’s always his aunt.’
    Lydia followed Dot’s glance across the cafeteria. Robert’s sister Pam was sitting with an older group of women. Feeling their eyes on her, she looked across at them.
    â€˜Or Annie? She could come and sit in with Charlie. They’re good pals, aren’t they?’
    â€˜She gets precious little time free from her mother. I don’t want to ask her to give up some more. Besides which I think there’s a young man lurking somewhere.’
    â€˜Keeping his distance from Pam, I should think, if he’s got his head screwed on right.’ Dot nudged again. ‘Look, she’s going to give you a smile.’ She made a wave with her hand and grinned.
    â€˜Don’t,’ Lydia said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want Charlie round there if he doesn’t have to be.’
    Pam must have said something to the women sitting with her, because Lydia saw several heads turn, quizzical, and Pam’s in the middle, stony with dislike.
    â€˜She really has it in for you. Stealing her boy,’ Dot said, her voice sarcastic.
    â€˜Leave it, Dot.’
    â€˜What is it, ten years since you moved here?’
    â€˜Pam doesn’t get over things,’ Lydia said.
    â€˜Yes, we all know that. We all know how her mum died and her dad died and how she kept her baby brother out of Park Hill single-handed with only the rats for company.’ Dot’s voice was singsong with scorn. ‘Working nearly to death to bring him up.’
    â€˜But it’s