Free Dolly's War by Dorothy Scannell

documents, but at last I convinced him that what mattered was the fact that even if he’d had no education he was still as knowledgeable as many a more educated man and he did know how quick with figures he was. A more determined character than he, I used threats as to what I would do if he didn’t attend for the interview and examination. Finally he went, looking a little under the weather. I hadn’t told him all the lies I had written on the form for he just would not have gone for the interview, and I kept my fingers crossed that my answers to the questions on the forms would not be challenged. I felt worried for Chas and also myself. He would come home like a raging lion if a pertinent question was asked, for my husband was of that rare breed of husband – he was physically unable to tell a lie, even a little white one, indeed he couldn’t even embroider a joke, everything had to be the absolute truth for an untruth would almost choke him. I suppose that is why he rarely told a joke, for who wants to listen to a funny story related almost as a vicar announces a hymn.
    Always the eternal optimist I was sure he would pass the interview and written examination and be sent on in the afternoon to the medical officer. Although he was one hundred per cent fit, at that time an exceptionally thin man was medically suspect, and I thought I would help him through the physical examination. I filled his pockets with bags of pennies and said he could absent-mindedly put his overcoat over his arm when stepping on the scales.
    All day long I wandered from room to room. The house was quiet for Marjorie had gone back to work after her marriage, and finally when dusk was falling in came ‘The man from the Pru’ for he had passed the interview, written examination and medical examination with flying colours. Well, perhaps it isn’t quite true to say he had passed the medical with flying colours for the doctor had discovered my ruse with the coppers, but he said to Chas, ‘Give my good wishes to your dear wife and tell her you are quite healthy, for a skeleton,’ and then he had added, wearily, ‘What does it matter, the war will be on us soon and we might all be gone.’ With these cheerful words he passed my husband A.1.
    Everyone was delighted that Chas, now a Prudential agent, was released from his slavery of waiting on other people. He soon became such a conscientious and successful agent that it was a mystery to me how he ever worked as a waiter in the first place. How soon I forgot the depression of the thirties, the dole queues, men with better qualifications than his, unemployed, I even forgot how pleased we were that through being a waiter he was able to support a wife, for he would have remained an ‘ancient’ junior had he stayed with the firm he started to work for on leaving school because promotion there went to ‘friends’ of the management.
    Chas was slight and short and hardly reached up to the office counter when he first began his city career and was very proud that one of his jobs, the one with such power, was the drawing of the BLUE line across the page of the staff signing in book. This blue line was drawn across the page at 9.15 a.m. and every morning Chas, a real little Hitler, would eagerly watch the clock and at the precise second, like the sword of Damocles, inevitably and irrevocably draw the thin blue line. It mattered not that through the glass doors a tearful typist or an irate clerk could be seen approaching. Chas drew his blue line with delight. Then he handed out the late excuse slips – ‘I was... late this morning because...’ and the excuses were ingenious and varied, with the exception of the late slip which an old stalwart of the firm received every morning during the two years Chas wielded power over tempus fugit. Come rain or shine, summer, spring or fall, the old stalwart’s excuse was the same, a grand thumb to the nose