What had become of the inhabitants we had no way of telling. Later, as we searched the houses for suitable billets, one of the men discovered something and shouted for the rest of us to come.
I arrived with Lateef. As soon as we saw what was there, he shouted at everyone, telling them to wait downstairs. He indicated that I was to stay.
There were the bodies of four young white women in the upstairs room. Each was naked and each had been assaulted sexually. My heart had begun to beat faster at my first sight of them, as the fates that could have befallen Sally and Isobel had been prominent in my imagination for some time. It took only two or three seconds to establish that these women were unknown to me, but even so my heart continued at an accelerated pace for some minutes afterwards.
My early alarm soon turned to shock and then to anger. Each of the women was young and had been physically attractive. Their deaths had come after a long period of helpless agony: the torment was embedded in their expressions. Each one was tied hand and foot, and had evidently struggled to escape from the bonds in her last few minutes of life.
The men who assaulted them had disfigured their bodies with either bayonets or knives, slashing them many times in the region of their genitals. There was blood all over the floor.
Lateef and I discussed what we should do. I suggested that we bury them, but neither of us relished the task of carrying the bodies downstairs. The alternative that Lateef suggested was to burn the house. It was set apart from the ones nearest to it, and it did not seem likely that the blaze would spread to others.
We went downstairs and spoke with the others. Two of the men had been sick, the rest of us felt nauseated in the extreme. Lateef’s suggestion was adopted, and a few minutes later the house was fired.
We moved away to the other end of the village and set up a camp for the night.
For a variety of reasons I was one of the few men who worked in the cutting-shop of the factory. In spite of the equal-pay legislation that had gone through in the last months of the government immediately prior to Tregarth taking office, there were still many different kinds of work which were exclusively or nearly exclusively the domain of women. In the bulk-cloth industry cutting is one of these.
My only colleagues of my own sex were old Dave Harman, a pensioner who came in mornings to sweep the floor and make tea, and a youngster named Tony who tried to flirt with the younger women but who was treated by them all as a cheeky young urchin. I never discovered his true age, but he couldn’t have been less than twenty. How he came to be working at the factory I never asked, and there built up between us a kind of male understanding that unified us against the vulgarity of the women.
My own relationship with the women was acceptable once we had overcome the initial problems.
It was thought, for instance, by a sizeable number of the women that I had been brought in as some form of supervisor or inspector, and whenever I attempted to speak to them I was treated with cold politeness. In this, my college-rounded vowels did little to help. Once I had established in my mind what was the probable cause of the friction, I went to great pains to let them know my position in the cutting-shop. When this was clear the atmosphere lightened considerably, though there were still one or two women who could not but retain a slightly distant air. Within a few weeks things had relaxed to the point where I felt as if my presence was taken for granted.
With this relaxation came a growing vulgarity of behaviour. In my relatively sheltered life to this point — sheltered in the sense that I had not mixed with large numbers of working people — I had lived by the assumption that women were the more socially restrained sex. It may of course have been the developing national situation which encouraged a slackening of morality as a reaction against the new repressive laws, or simply that this group of women had known each other for years and were of a similar background. In any event, a typical working day was punctuated with obscenities, disgusting jokes and various direct and indirect references to either my or Tony’s sexual organs. Tony told me once that shortly before I had come to the cutting-shop, one of the women, in a mock-serious kind of way, had unzipped the front of his trousers and tried to grab him. He told me this off-handedly, though I could tell he had been upset by the incident.
There were several coloured women in the cutting-shop, and as the Afrim situation intensified I watched them when I could to see how they reacted. There were five Indians or Pakistanis, and seven of Negro stock. On the face of it, their behaviour showed no change, though during some of the more offensive sessions of banter, I noticed how they would remain silent.
It was my custom during this period to eat for lunch the sandwiches that Isobel made for me. This was partly in order to save a little of our money, and partly because the quality of food available in public restaurants deteriorated considerably.
I understood that the company was not receiving as many orders as it had once done, and consequently the work-load upon us was light. Following government restrictions it was not possible to make staff redundant, except at the cost of high financial penalty, and our labour-force was not reduced in any way. Shortly after I joined the firm the length of our break for lunch was increased from one and a half to two hours, and at the time of the first secessions in the armed forces it was increased by a further half-hour. Sick-leave was encouraged by our employers, though after the government’s temporary withdrawal of National Health benefits absenteeism was rare.
It became necessary to find ways of passing the surplus time in the social company of each other.
Board games were brought in from home, and packs of playing-cards. Several women brought in such things as needlework or knitting, and others wrote letters. For my own part, I used the free time for reading, but found that if I did too much of it in the dimly lit room, my eyes would begin to hurt. Very few of us ventured out during the lunch-break. Once or twice, some of the women went out shopping together, but on the whole it was considered too hazardous to be done habitually.
I don’t know how it began, but several of the women used the time to get together around the top of a bench and play on an improvised ouija board. The first I was aware of it was one day when I was walking through the adjoining warehouse with the intention of stretching my muscles. The women were in a corner of the warehouse. Seven of them actually sat at the table and another ten or twenty stood around watching. The pointer they were using was an inverted plastic tumbler, and the letters of the alphabet were scribbled on scraps of paper around the edge.
One of the older women was asking questions into the air, while the tumbler spelled out the answers from under the fingertips of the seven participants. I watched fascinated for a while, unable to determine whether the women were actually moving the tumbler voluntarily or not. Annoyed that I was unable to understand it, I walked away.
At the far side of the warehouse, behind a stacked pile of rolls of cloth, I came across Tony and one of the girls who worked with him. Although they were both fully clothed, they were lying in the normal position for intercourse, and he had his hand inside the top of her dress, holding one of her breasts. Neither of them saw me.
As I turned away there was the sound of several voices from the ouija table. One of the women, a Negress, broke away from the group and ran into the cutting-room. A few seconds later I heard her talking loudly to her friends, and then the sound of someone crying.
By the end of the following week all the coloured women had left the firm.