Put Out the Fires by Maureen Lee

worked on had already been set up by the woman on the morning shift. She quickly checked what was being made, turned the starting lever, and the machine clanked into action. In no time at all, one-and-a-half-inch distance pieces were dropping into a container underneath, and Eileen felt the fine spray of the nauseous-smelling cooling liquid on her face. When she first started nearly a year ago, she’d thought she’d never get the hang of things, but now the lathe held no more terrors than operating the stove at home.
    “How’s things, Eileen?” screamed Doris on the lathe next to her, as casually anyone could whilst shouting at the top of their voice.
    “Fine!” Eileen smiled back. No doubt Pauline, who worked on her other side, had already reported seeing her on the bus, when, if things had gone according to the plan the girls all knew about, she should have merely walked along the High Street from the cottage. “I decided to put off the move for a while, that’s all.” She changed the subject. “What did you get up to over the weekend? Meet any nice fellers?”
    “If you did, I hope you kept your keks on for a change,” yelled Carmel from behind her lathe opposite.
    “I always keep me keks on, if you don’t mind,” Doris replied haughtily. “Eh, what d’you think of me hair? I dyed it a different colour.” She stepped back from the lathe and untied her headscarf to reveal a mop of mahogany coloured curls.
    “Y’look like a bloody toffee apple,” shouted Lil.
    “Well, last week she looked like a Belisha beacon with that bright orange.”
    “You’d look better, Doris, if your eyebrows matched.
    One half of your face looks as if it belongs to someone else altogether.” Doris’s eyebrows had been shaved off and redrawn with a pencil. She was never able to draw them the same shape and the left was usually higher than the other, ending in a wiggly upwards curve.
    “You’re dead nasty, you’s lot.” Doris pretended to be hurt.
    “It looks smashing, luv,” Eileen assured her. “I like that colour better than the orange.” Doris’s wide purple painted lips clashed less violently than they’d done before.
    She was a coarse, jolly girl of nineteen, and along with Pauline, who was the same age, spent all her free evenings at dances, being taken home by an endless stream of young men, mainly servicemen passing through Liverpool.
    “T’weren’t orange,” Doris shouted. “It were molted gold or something.”
    “Molten gold,” corrected Theresa.
    “Looked more like mouldy gold to me,” shrieked Carmel.
    Eileen grinned. Sometimes, it was more entertaining than the wireless, better even than ITMA, the quips the girls came out with, though some were anything but girls.
    Carmel was well into her fifties and completely toothless.
    When she spoke the words came out in a sort of mushy blur, along with a shower of spit. Her false teeth were kept in the pocket of her overalls and only brought out in the canteen. According to Doris, Carmel didn’t need cooling liquid, she could provide her own.
    Like Carmel, Theresa and Lil, although considerably younger, had been housewives until the war began.
    Almost overnight, they’d become centre lathe turners and how they managed to run their homes and take care of their large families as well as work an eight-hour shift at Dunnings, was a source of a constant wonderment to Eileen. She had nothing but admiration for their gritty determination to put in a hard day’s work, as well as their constant equally gritty good humour—though their language left much to be desired! They turned their worst catastrophes into jokes against themselves. Lil kept them in stitches describing the antics of her drunken loutish husband, and Theresa, a pretty young widow with several children who were looked after by her mother-in-law whilst she was at work, had a fund of stories about her eldest lad who seemed set on a criminal career at thirteen.
    Their favourite comment, “Well,