by Shirley Mann
Don’t run off with any ‘fly’ boys!
Love,
Danny
He folded the letter into his top pocket, next to one he had written to his mother last night. He had started to tell his family less and less about the war, concentrating on complaining passionately about the food, a subject he knew would give his mother’s concerns a focus. It was hard to say something yet reveal nothing. Each soldier’s letter was carefully scrutinised to make sure no information could be gleaned that might be of advantage to the enemy. Danny’s initial sense of adventure had been quickly suppressed by the relentless grind of misery, discomfort and hunger had epitomised life on the move but the worst was the reality of the seemingly endless numbers of supine bodies that were laid out along the route, testament to the fierce fighting that he and his tank transporter had missed the day before. Buzzing with flies and beginning to stink in the heat, it was a smell that Danny, and every other survivor of the desert would never forget. The units were constantly on the move, bivouacking in makeshift tents. He hoped the newsreels were being judicious in what they showed back home of the war in Africa. He knew his parents often went to the pictures and he could imagine them sitting in the cinema, bolt upright, eyes staring at the black and white version of the carnage he had witnessed. Surely Pathé would not be that honest to a nation longing for good news? Danny had almost stopped worrying about himself but he worried constantly about how the death of their only son would devastate his parents. It was simply luck that had kept him safe this long. He did not dare think about how the odds of survival were decreasing.
One thing Danny had learned to do was to switch off images that disturbed him, so he went back to the girl in the red velour hat. He loved imagining her standing opposite him again. He pictured her laughing and he felt a jolt of pure delight.
Instead of the miles and miles of sand glistening in the relentless sun, he saw Lily on one of their first dates up to Higher Swineshaw Reservoir. Manchester, with its chimneys and elegant buildings, was stretched below them in testament to a history of growth, elegance and prosperity. There was no hint of what the fates had in store for it. It was a beautiful day and the bilberries had just come out. He remembered Lily was trying to keep up with him as he tackled the steep path in front of them. Eventually, she had stopped, saying indignantly, ‘Danny Jackson, if you have any hopes of ever kissing me, you have to stop marching off up this hill and let me get my breath.’
With that, he had run back to where she was and swept her up into his arms. She had tossed her head back and laughed as he tried to run with her up to the top. She knew how to flirt, he reluctantly acknowledged. He also knew how innocent she was and how predatory servicemen could be.
‘Take care, Lily’ he pleaded as he buried his cigarette in the sand and prepared to climb back into his cab.
Chapter 5
It was six a.m. and Lily hugged her coarse, grey blanket, hanging on to the last remnants of sleep and warmth. The barracks at Innsworth were freezing, hardly warmed by the antique boiler in the middle of the room. She glanced up at the small window above her iron bedpost, pushed back the blackout blind an inch and saw the panes were imprinted with beautiful snowflake patterns. It had been a baptism of fire for Lily since she had arrived at Gloucester station just one week ago for a month’s initial training.
In the bed next to her, a brown woolly hat poked out, dislodging the sanitary towel that was looped over the huddled figure’s ears as an eye mask.
Lily scanned the now-familiar room. Behind each bed, the blue-grey WAAF uniforms were hanging up like regimented puppets. Brand new when they were given out, they had been pushed, pummelled and re-positioned in a vain attempt to give each girl individuality.
Now every single one of those girls was part of an enormous war machine.
Alice, the girl next to Lily, groaned and turned over, leaving her ineffective face mask on the rough pillow. Alice had established herself as a force to be reckoned with from the very first day when she swept into the hut, clomping down the wooden floor in her heavy, black lace-up shoes, making straight for the bed next to Lily.
‘Lordy, these beds are awful,’ she had exclaimed in strong Lancashire tones to the whole room. She pushed the three separate mattresses together and frowned. ‘My backside’ll soon disappear between these. No wonder they call them ‘biscuits’, they’re as hard as my Auntie Mavis’s shortbread. I wouldn’t give the cows this bedding,’ she added, prodding the straw pillow.
Alice had been brought up on a farm on the Pennines and was a product of harsh conditions with a healthy respect for nature and absolutely none for would-be invaders. Lily, a cosmopolitan girl, was quick to realise that her own city nous was completely outdone by a girl who could move a herd of cows with just a stick.
Alice immediately decided she and Lily were going to be best friends and with a mixture of calm control and a great deal of giggling, she gained Lily’s undying love.
Lily looked round enviously at the curled-up figures in the beds. They did not seem to find the endless rules here difficult. She traced the icy patterns on the window above her, catching sight of the piece of paper the girls had stuck behind the cardboard that formed the blackout. It was a ‘Naughty Chart’ and Lily could just see her name at the top of the list. She was getting into trouble for everything: inadequate kit inspections, reporting for duty a couple of minutes late and, most of all, forgetting to salute an officer.
The door opened with a bang and an impossibly cheerful hut corporal charged in, yelling instructions and threats in equal measure at the same time as the loudspeaker went off. Up and in uniform an hour earlier, she had no sympathy for lay-a-beds and she banged on the end of each bunk with a baton as she marched through the line of beds like a steam train. Every girl had quickly learned to tuck her feet underneath her to avoid the thwack of the wood.
The groans in the room were universal but all twenty girls tumbled out of their beds and started to scrabble for their tin hats holding their wash kits.
Lily hopped from foot to foot on the freezing floorboards and then poked her toes under the bed, trying to find her shoes.
‘Hell, I forgot to polish my buttons,’ she realised, remembering looking with pride the night before at her gleaming shoes, her hat which was buffed, and her gloves which were neatly folded, but she had forgotten the damned buttons, which were decidedly dull. Pulling her pyjama sleeves down over her hands, she grabbed her jacket and started to rub furiously at the brass domes, but it was too late, everyone else was heading across the freezing cold parade yard for the ablutions block.
Alice was in front of her and Lily had to push her way through the throng of girls.
‘Alice, Alice,’ she hissed. ‘I’ve forgotten to polish my buttons. What am I going to do?’
‘Do the crime, do the time,’ her friend retorted over her shoulder.
‘Can’t you stand in front of me? Maybe he won’t see.’
‘That man could see through a brick wall.’
‘I’m doomed,’ Lily said.
‘Yep, it’s no dancing for you this weekend,’ Alice muttered through her teeth as she swilled her face in the freezing water.
Lily’s shoulders drooped.
‘I’ve got cabin fever and I’ve been looking forward to being allowed out – and there’s a dance this week.’
‘You’ll have a much better time on duty here, stamping up and down in the cold or cleaning pans,’ Alice said, then relented. ‘He might not notice; you might get away with it.’
The two girls looked at each other. Their grimaces said it all.
Amy, a thin, wan girl from Coventry came up behind them. She was the quietest in the group. The close quarters had encouraged all of them to chat openly about their homes, boyfriends and their experiences of the war so far, but Amy was a closed book. She always managed to appear without a sound somehow and Lily jumped as she almost stepped back into her. ‘Sorry,’ Amy said, apologising as usual. She smiled acros
s at them both. ‘I could stay and keep you company if you like, Lily. I’m not fussed about going out.’
‘Don’t be daft, Amy,’ Lily replied. ‘I’ll be doing jankers somewhere and even you’re not noble enough to want to clean kitchens or peel spuds. No, you go out and have a good time. It’ll do you good. Besides, look at this hair of yours! We’ve got to get it to curl for your big night out.’
‘Well, that won’t happen,’ Amy fingered her completely straight brown hair. ‘Maybe you’ll just get a warning. He’s not that mean.’ She emptied her faded pink hot water bottle into the sink.
‘You never think anyone can be horrid,’ Lily said.
She looked enviously at Amy’s sink of warm water. In her early morning panic, Lily had forgotten her hot water bottle with its residue of warm water.
‘That’s so typical of me,’ Lily grumbled inwardly as the familiar pang of homesickness waved over her. ‘Oh Mum, how am I ever going to survive without you to look after me?’
Putting her penny in the plughole to hold the cold water, Lily started to rinse her face quickly to get the torture over with. She rubbed the mouse-gnawn soap against her flannel as if it were a tarnished button. The rules were being stringently imposed on all of them. One hair out of place, one item of kit in the wrong order and there were penalties. One thing she was learning in this war was that there was no sympathy for anything except the precipice between life and death.
Washing and getting ready for the dreaded morning fitness session was a very brief affair on these cold mornings. There was no comfort in the ablutions block and no one wanted to dawdle. They all dressed in their vests, the ‘blackout’ navy blue knickers and plimsolls and headed out into the early morning light. The air was painfully cold and the only thing to do was to embrace the exercises with gusto to prevent frostbite setting in. Some of the larger girls struggled with jumping up and down and the panting got louder and louder, but they all had to admit, reluctantly, that they were getting fitter and the WAAF skirts were starting to be a little looser around their waists.
From being a group of individuals from different backgrounds, Lily’s unit had merged into one entity, marching up and down the parade ground, eating together, getting dressed together and sleeping next to each other. They helped each other with their ties, unused to such male accessories, and they measured each other’s skirts to check they were exactly sixteen inches from the ground. Lily had been surprised to see how quickly they had started to think of themselves as part of a whole rather than individuals or as someone’s daughter or sister or sweetheart. They moved as that entity now, dressed in their uniforms, towards the cabbage-smelling cookhouse for breakfast, chattering about the two abiding subjects of conversation – hunger and cold.
‘Oh for an egg from a real chicken!’ Marion said, for once voicing the thoughts of many. Reconstituted egg was like eating rubber and if the girls had not been facing two hours of marching up and down in the freezing winter temperatures, they might have pushed the congealed omelette to the side of the plate. But gnawing pangs of hunger and a rumbling stomach did not help one’s posture on parade and a slouching torso was soon picked up by the sergeant.
‘Susie, don’t eat off your knife.’ Marion peered in disgust at the offending girl next to her.
Susie, a no-nonsense blonde from Wolverhampton, made a face once Marion had turned back to her meal, and continued eating off her knife, to the stifled laughter of the group.
Marion was from Chelsea in London and was looked on as a more sophisticated being. She was nineteen, like most of them, but her knowledge of glamorous places such as Bond Street and Westminster gave her an edge on the girls from the provinces. Marion never lost an opportunity to remind her fellow WAAFs that she was not used to roughing it and that she came from a family of titles and insignia. Her uniform was handmade, and she made a point of stroking it as she laid it out for morning inspection, while the others suffered from scratching and chafing from the rough, standard-issue WAAF woollen cloth. Marion revelled in their envy, making the most of flaunting the tempting array of face creams, dried fruit and magazines that were regularly delivered to her pigeon hole.
‘I can do without,’ Alice muttered to Lily, ‘but I don’t need reminding all the time that I’m suffering.’
Lily looked around at the group at breakfast and cupped her hands around her mug of tea to savour the last dregs of warmth from the weak liquid. These women were becoming her family and could be just as irritating. She said a quick mental ‘good morning’ to her own family and filed out of the hut, swishing her egg-smeared irons through the soapy water in the tank by the door, readying them for the next meal. She joined the throng and went into the corridor to get her jacket, hat and gloves to go onto the parade ground for the endless marching up and down that was square-bashing.
Chapter 6
‘MULLINS!’
Lily closed her eyes in capitulation.
‘ACW Mullins, your buttons aren’t polished.’
Well, what difference is that going to make to the war, Lily thought. Is Hitler going to be blinded by the brightness of my buttons and wave the white flag?
‘I’m sorry, Sir, I did try but . . . ’
‘See me in my office at 0900 hours tomorrow and I want to see my face in those buttons and shoes.’
The waiting row of girls craned their heads towards Lily in a united gesture of sympathy as she mentally put her hair rollers back in the drawer for another week.
By teatime, Lily’s feet were aching, her neck hurt and she was feeling particularly sorry for herself. She had caught up with her writing and folded each letter into its envelope – one to her parents, one to Hannah and Ros, and another to Danny. Now she finally got on with the task she had been putting off all day – polishing those darned buttons. Lily sat on her bed with resignation and started rubbing them with Duraglit, using the ingenious button stick to keep the uniform away from the pad. She heard the door close quietly and Amy came in, looking pale and shrunken. Amy reminded Lily of the puppy her neighbours had bought just before war broke out. Those doleful eyes had the same look; scared, but hoping for affection. The group’s concerted effort to bring Amy out of herself was slow progress and Lily, taking in the drooped shoulders, doubted whether today was a day for girly banter. Even so, she tried.
‘Hi Amy. You’d think it was the end of the world that my buttons are a bit dull. Don’t tell me you’ve been caught as well.’
Amy sat on her bed three down from Lily and slumped. Tears began to fall.
Lily, with her jacket still in her hands, got up and went over to her, putting her arm around the sobbing girl.
‘What is it?’
There was no reply, just shudders from the girl’s tiny frame.
‘Come on, tell me.’
Amy pushed over a telegram she was clutching in her right hand.
Mother died at 5 a.m STOP Dad with her STOP A relief after all she has suffered STOP Funeral Thursday if you can get leave STOP Alf
Lily held Amy until the sobs subsided.
‘It was the Blitz,’ Amy finally said. She was on Red Cross Duty on 14th November two years ago. Her legs were shot off and she’s been in hospital ever since.’
Lily thought back to the Manchester Evening News headlines about the Coventry bombings and remembered how everyone had been shaken by the reports. The calculated attack was aimed at destroying the factories and infrastructure, concentrating on causing maximum damage to roofs to allow bombs to fall through more easily. It had seemed such a vicious, calculated raid, even to the point that water mains were targeted so that the fires couldn’t be put out. She remembered her dad’s pale face as he had put the kettle on the range that day, throwing down the first editions on the table in disgust.
‘This is the nastiest war we’ve ever had,’ he had said to his wife and family as they huddled around the fire having their cup of tea. No one has ever targeted civilians like this before. This isn’t war, it’s annihilati
on.’
Amy’s grief suddenly gave way to a bitter anger that seemed out of place in this timid girl.
‘She was helping people. Out there in the dark, being bombed but still helping people. She was such a lovely mum, always at the door waiting for us to come in from school, wanting to know how our day had been. The last two years, she’s just been lying in that hospital, unable to move, but even so, she’s tried to be cheerful, telling Dad what to do and giving me advice on how to cook shin beef. It must have been an infection. They always said that would be the danger. But it’s not that that’s killed her, it’s the Germans . . . it’s . . . that man.’
Lily hugged her tighter, letting the distraught girl’s tears fall on the newly-polished buttons of her jacket. They sat like that for ages until the rest of the group bustled in and Amy slunk away towards the ablutions block. Lily stared uselessly at the retreating figure.
*
Saturday night was a cold one, but the group had been given a pass for a rare night out – all except for Lily, who had been put on gate duty. Amy sat huddled up on her bunk. She had hardly spoken since she had received the telegram. Proffered mugs of hot chocolate from the stove in the corner were taken by a pale hand that shook slightly with only a wan smile. Even Marion tried to interest her in a new magazine she had received.
Shaking their heads, the girls turned back to the task in hand – a welcome night out. They all spent an hour getting ready, Lily sitting cross-legged with her skirt hitched up, watching on enviously as she waited to go on duty. It reminded her of days with Hannah and Ros, as they got ready for the Boys’ Brigade dances. The chatter was the same, she thought, taking in the sisterly banter, swapping of hairspray and turning the unattractive Lisle stockings inside out to make them smoother. Ros was working in a munitions factory now and Hannah had joined the land army. Lily wondered what they were doing tonight. She hoped they were going to a dance.