LITMIR.BIZ

      Later that morning, Maisie and the others followed Mr. McRobbie for their final chopping lesson through the paths of the estate to where the old woods butted up to a wide stretch of pine plantation. Here the trees stood like soldiers on a parade ground, set at regular intervals, in rows and columns, each about five yards away from its neighbor. Maisie was pleased to see that here there was almost no underbrush or scrubby grass below the trees to get in the way of her ax, only a carpet of fragrant brown needles.

      On Mr. McRobbie’s order, the lumberjills all lined up along the first row of sturdy trees, one girl to each trunk, and set to work to chop it down. Although she was gradually figuring it out, chopping hadn’t turned out to be as easy as Maisie had expected. But it was early days, she kept telling herself, because by the end of the course, she would know how to chop and saw, how to fell a tree, how to clear all the small branches off it—that was snedding—and also how to roll the logs using their cant hooks, and then haul the timber away with hooks and chains. They were also learning the uses for the different woods, and how to cut to a specific measurement. The trees the girls were chopping today were Scots pine, so they would probably end up sawn to short lengths as pit props for coal mines, or perhaps as fence posts, with the wastage going for charcoal. But for any of that to happen, the lumberjills had to get the trees down first.

      “Don’t swing so wildly, lassie!” Maisie heard Mr. McRobbie shout at someone farther down the line. “You’ve to let it sing. Hear the music in your head, and let it flow through your arm and into your blade. I told you that yesterday. Have you still not found yourself a chopping song yet?”

      Maisie was relieved Mr. McRobbie had started at the other end of the line, because she hadn’t found her chopping song yet either. Mr. McRobbie had been telling the girls for days now to find a song with good rhythm that helped them to time their ax swings. But Maisie was struggling to come up with a tune that worked. Nearby, Lillian had clearly found hers. She was humming a short musical phrase over and over as she lifted her ax away from the tree, one, raised it high on two, rounded it over above her shoulder on three, and brought it slicing down into the wood on four. Perfection, exactly like Mr. McRobbie had shown them last week. The motion was smooth and controlled, and Lillian’s tree trunk was growing narrower at the waist with every cut.

      “That’s it, lass, you’re doing a grand job,” said Mr. McRobbie as he spotted Lillian’s easy action. “Now get those cuts down as close to the ground as you can, so we don’t waste that bottom foot of wood, not while there’s a war on.”

      He stepped back a little and raised his voice to address the whole group.

      “So, there’s a bunch of Canadians”—Maisie stopped to listen, ax above her head—“working up the road right now, and do you know how they’ve been cutting down the trees over there?” Mr. McRobbie glared around him. “At knee height! And even, some of them I saw, at waist height. I couldn’t believe how much they were wasting, so I went to have a wee word with them and I put a stop to it.”

      Canadians. Up the road. Not Americans then.

      Lillian began to hum and swing again, and Maisie groaned in frustration. When he’d demonstrated what he meant by a chopping song, Mr. McRobbie had sung an off-tune “Auld Lang Syne” as he’d swung again and again in rhythm to the music, but when Maisie had tried the same tune, it didn’t fit her action at all.

      “Find some music that means something to you,” he’d exclaimed passionately to the assembled recruits, “a song that flows from your breath to your ax, to your blade, to the tree.” The old man had looked like he could have started to dance with his ax, right there, and a few of the girls had mocked him quietly from behind.

      And yet, his strange method seemed to work. Each day more and more recruits were swinging and chopping like professionals, and now the clearing was a cacophony of harmony and counterpoint, half-hummed dance tunes from Anna and Mary, and a medley of fully sung operatic arias from Phyllis. Everyone seemed to be singing except for Dot and Maisie.

      As Maisie wondered about borrowing a tune from Phyllis, a thought popped into her head.

      What song would John Lindsay hum as he was swinging his ax? Suddenly a tune came into her mind. It was the one she and John had danced to, albeit briefly and disastrously, last night, and it had been playing on the wireless in the dining room this morning too. What was it called? She could hear the tune quite clearly now, though she couldn’t recall all the words.

       Keep smiling through, just like you always do,

      Something blue skies something something far away.

      It was one of Vera Lynn’s songs, she was sure … “We’ll Meet Again,” that was it!

      Before the music escaped her mind, Maisie lifted her ax and weighed it in her hands for a second or two. Then, as she began to sing the opening words of the song under her breath—“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when”—she hefted the ax away, curved it up and around behind her head, and brought it down sharp into the bark of the log.

      Amazingly, it did the trick, and the blade cut cleanly through the bark. She kept singing quietly to herself, and although her movements were not exactly effortless, they were certainly more synchronized, as if she and the ax were suddenly one effective machine, not two engines pulling against each other.

      Maisie let out a cry of delight as the ax bit sliced cleanly again into the flesh of the tree.

      “You’ve found it at last, have you?” Mr. McRobbie laughed as he approached, though he stayed a safe distance from Maisie’s swing arc. “I knew you’d get it soon enough. And what about you, Miss Thompson?”

      A grunt of effort, a thick slap of metal hitting wood, and a groan of frustration came from behind Maisie, as Dot failed yet again to make even so much as a dent in her tree.

      “Well, lass, you maybe haven’t found quite the right song yet,” said Mr. McRobbie as he walked away. “But keep on trying.”

      “Grrrrrrr!”

      Dot was holding her ax handle as if she wanted to throttle the life out of it.

      “Did you just growl at your ax?” Maisie snorted.

      “It’s so bloody frustrating!” Dot cried. “How am I the only one who can’t do this?”

      “Oh, come on, you’re not that bad.”

      Dot pointed at Maisie’s log, and then held out her hand to her own, the surface of which could best be described as a little scuffed.

      Dot suddenly lifted her ax up high over her head—not the way they’d been taught at all—and brought it down hard on the tree in fury. The impact ripped the handle from Dot’s grasp, spinning it straight at Maisie, who hopped to the side just in time. The ax buried itself in the ground close to where Maisie had been standing.

      “Be careful!” she cried, but seeing Dot’s torn face, she felt more sympathy than anger. “Remember to treat your ax ‘as if it were your first-born bairnie, with love and with care.’” Maisie was mimicking their instructor’s strong Angus accent so well that Dot eventually gave a wry smile.

      “Sorry, Maisie. But I’m serious. I’m so rubbish at this, they’re going to send me home.”

      “Oh, nonsense. They will not. We’ve got plenty of training yet before we get posted to a camp to do this for real, which is more than enough time to sort you out.” Maisie

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