Maggie’s War

Shirley Mann

EAGER to escape a secret trauma that is blighting her life in Manchester, 20-year-old Maggie Carpenter walks out on her teaching job at a girls’ high school and signs up to join a team of women who use the canal network to haul essential supplies across wartime Britain.

The work is tough, the hours are long, the women live in cramped cabins with no running water, and yet close friendships are soon formed on their journeys across the long and winding inland waterways. But Maggie and her two fellow travellers are all guarding secrets… secrets which could come back to bite.

Maggie’s War is the fifth story celebrating the role of women on the home front in a fascinating saga series from Derbyshire-based journalist Shirley Mann (pictured below) who follows up her compelling sagas, Lily’s War, Bobby’s War, Hannah’s War and Bridget’s War, with another exciting, emotion-filled story. Featured this time are the brave and determined women who stepped into the shoes of boatmen now serving with the forces, and travelled up and down the Grand Union Canal carrying cargoes of heavy goods like steel, bricks, cement, wood and coal.

With a close connection to Britain’s canals in her own family history, Mann researched this little-known wartime job and discovered hundreds of women applied to do the work but only about thirty were still working for the Inland Waterways by the end of the war with the rest having returned home, taking their blisters and bad backs with them!

We join Maggie in November of 1942 as the Second World War rages across Europe. After six weeks of training for the ‘cut,’ as the waterways were known, Maggie is wondering how she was ever persuaded to apply for the job by a photo of ‘a ridiculously healthy girl with a boat hook’ in a newspaper advert. But for Maggie, who is a newly qualified teacher, the job is a means of ‘escape’ from a painful secret back in Manchester so she puts up with back-breaking work, cramped living quarters shared with two strangers, no running water, and a ‘bucket and chuck it’ toilet arrangement regarding it as ‘suitable penance’ for ‘someone who deserves to suffer.’

A friendship is soon formed on board with feisty five-foot Gloria who was brought up with the boat community but is determined to leave the canal life behind when the war is over, and even fellow worker Elizabeth, a haughty housewife with two young boys at boarding school, a husband in the Mediterranean with the Royal Navy and her own personal demons, starts to find comfort in close bonds. But the deceptively calm waters of the canals harbour everything from a deserter to a dangerous gang and with the challenges that the war throws at her, Maggie is forced to
re-evaluate her own strength and find support and a spark of love in a young Army chaplain. But as past wounds resurface, she must decide if she can ever trust again…

Mann plunges readers into the challenges faced by the young women who took on what was previously considered to be men’s work, facing head-on the dangers of steering boats through the many canal locks, toiling long hours in confined spaces, dealing with heavy loads that even men struggled with, and learning how to strip and mend an engine, splice ropes and live without any luxuries.

Set against a backdrop full of wartime period detail, a compelling layer of nostalgia, mystery and romance, an exploration of the little-known life and work of an Army padre and the long-term effects of war on those who served and fought, Maggie’s War is a gripping saga full of real history, heart and immense courage.
(Zaffre, paperback, £8.99)