by Shirley Mann
*
Cranwell in Lincolnshire was a real airfield and Lily felt nervous as the train stopped at the camp’s own station. As the doors opened to disgorge the new batch of WAAFs, Lily paused for a minute to take it all in before being told to ‘Step lively!’ by an impatient warrant officer. Lily peered around her to see the airstrips and was gratified to find she could identify Oxfords, Masters, Tiger Moths, Blenheims and Spitfires, even through the camouflage. She watched the blue-uniformed figures bustling about importantly and felt very alone.
Lily followed the other girls towards the impressive college building where the orders were given out. Cranwell was currently closed as an operational station to provide a major training centre for pilots and there were cadets everywhere. Lily looked up to see a damaged roof above her. The girl in front was whispering to a group of newcomers that a Whitley plane had hit it in fog, killing three crew members.
The queue of girls huddled through the back door of the college and were marched through the long corridors past impressive pictures of men with moustaches and insignia into the dome in the centre, with scaffolding and tarpaulin covering where the plane had hit. Lily marvelled for a moment at the history and pomp and ceremony of the organisation she had now joined. She felt overawed by the grandeur and thought back to the simple life she had lived before in the suburbs of Manchester. Without the war, she would have gone on working at Liners until she married and then lived the same life as her mum, cooking, cleaning and looking after the menfolk and children. She might even have been married by now she realised with a jolt. She took a deep breath and encouraged herself to feel privileged that she had been given the chance to explore a bigger world. It was just a question of how she was going to get through it all. How she was supposed to cope with all these changes, losing track of friends who had become like sisters to her, and how she was going to make her mark on the world? It was all too overwhelming. It was such a big war and she was only a tiny part of it.
Administration took ages as usual, so it was late when Lily and her truckload of fellow WAAFs were finally taken to East Kirkby, a newly-opened station that was to supplement Scampton. Scampton was famous for ‘Operation Chastise’ a raid on dams in Möhne, Sorpe and Eder earlier that year. Lily, like everyone else, had heard about the bombs that destroyed the dams, causing huge damage to industrial buildings down in the valleys below. She had joined in as they all pored over the old atlas in the mess, searching for the areas that had been hit. Listening to the chatter on the truck, Lily heard whispers that Scampton had also recently sent Lancasters to North Africa from there. She suddenly remembered Danny and made a mental note to add him to her list of letters she had to write.
It was about seven o’clock at night when the new batch of WAAFs were assigned their huts at East Kirkby. She walked slowly down the aisle, noting the familiar round-bellied stove at one end, the black card stuck to the windows and the little piles of nightclothes on each of the mattresses on the bunks to denote they were occupied. She breathed deeply and dismissed the vision of her little bedroom at home, with flowered curtains and all her teddies from childhood propped up on the shelf above her dressing table. Even the tiny, cramped bedroom in Blackpool had seemed more welcoming than this.
‘This one’s yous,’ a dark-haired girl with a strong Glaswegian accent on the next bed said pointing at the bed on the left. Lily looked at her and her prepared smile froze. The girl had matted hair and filthy fingernails and was clutching the dog end of a cigarette.
‘I’m Gladys, everyone calls me Glad. Who’s you?’
‘Um, Lily’
‘Stow yer kit. There might be a wee bit of Ovaltine left. You’ve missed tea, if you can call that fucking shite tea. I wouldna feed it to the bleeding rats myself.’
Lily couldn’t think of a suitable reply, so she forced a smile and turned to unpack her kit bag.
Chapter 20
12th August, 1943
Dear Lily,
I am writing this perched on the tailgate of my transporter. I’ve got my cuppa so all’s right with the world. The summer went fast didn’t it? It’s already August and I haven’t done any fishing! We’ve moved on but, as you know, I can’t tell you where to, but we have moved across a sea! The heat isn’t as bad here but now we’ve got rain, by the bucket load. I’m trying to think of a summer in England with its gentle breezes and drizzle. I won’t complain about the British weather ever again. The terrain here is very different from where we’ve been before and we’re struggling to get to grips with it, but I’m finding the language simpler and, the women here are certainly easy on the eye! I got a newspaper yesterday, that was a real red-letter day. I found it on the side of the road. I guess one of the top brass had dropped it, but we all pored over it to see what was happening. It was several weeks old but it was still great to read about what’s been happening. We read that Churchill had spoken in the House of Commons saying we had to face the Germans in a stand-off fight somewhere. I hope that doesn’t mean here!
So, are you running the RAF yet? Some of the higher up brass here are getting a bit full of themselves and it seems a uniform can make you power-crazed. I hope you’re looking out for those kind of people . . . and avoiding them!
We keep coming across donkeys. They’re more at home on these tracks than we are with our great big vehicles but they look so out of place amidst all this huge artillery and give us a superior look as we trundle past them as if to say,’ this is our road, get out of our way’. They don’t half make a noise at night too. Still, it’s better than hearing planes I suppose! The powers that be are all getting their knickers in a twist about malaria and are making us take tablets every day and keep our arms and legs covered. They keep giving us mosquito-repellent, but that seems to have the opposite effect and attracts them in swarms.
Time to sign off, so TTFN
Keep safe,
Danny
Danny looked round at the landscape. Sicily was certainly prettier than the desert, despite the scars of the weeks of fighting that they had experienced. The trip across had been a struggle, with choppy seas and Danny had been glad of a strong stomach, although it had meant he was aware of the shelling from above, whereas Frank was oblivious and having retched into the sea for the whole journey, no longer cared whether he lived or died.
They had all been relieved that the fighting had not been as severe as they had expected but they had had a hard job finding their way round demolished bridges, road blocks and mines, thoughtfully left behind by the Germans. He had fallen in love with Sicily, its olive groves and its people who ran out into the streets to offer the soldiers wilting flowers, drinks and love as they followed their leaders in surrender. That was one of the problems, he and the other two Js admitted. The girls, too, were only too anxious to surrender and were happy to offer themselves as trophies of war to the good-looking young men who arrived on their shores ready to joke and remind them they were young – and hopefully give them some longed-for food.
Danny looked around the small town where they were billeted for the week while they carried on clearing the way forward. The houses were bombed-out but some had remnants of pink or white plaster and railings from front balconies. The street was speckled with an occasional faded red geranium, determinedly blasting through the dust that pervaded every street he travelled through. As a tank transporter driver, Danny’s convoy was always a day or two behind the action and he was becoming immune to the devastation that he had to drive through, but there were tiny specks of beauty in Sicily that shouted out at the convoy in belligerent defiance.
He scanned the empty streets. He was getting worried about his friend Pete, who had a sweetheart at home called Daisy. He had been lured into a local bar by a girl two hours earlier and had not been seen since. He knew how easy it was to be comforted by a comely girl who was willing. He had made a promise to himself at the beginning of the war that he was going to avoid the clinches that lasted one night, the romances that blossomed and
faded faster than those geraniums on the street but it was hard and, sometimes, particularly in the early days after the harsh deserts of Africa, he had had several close shaves. Danny groaned and toyed with the idea of denouncing his life as a monk.
Chapter 21
Lily had never met a prostitute before and Glad was a revelation. There were no secrets in the Gorbals and her hair-raising tales of her colourful life took Lily’s mind off her loneliness. Glad worked in the Domestic Group as an orderly and was regularly summonsed for VD and lice checks, far more than the other girls, but she was philosophical about it.
‘Good to keep a check on it and it’s better than having to queue at the bleedin’ doc’s. Hope they keep the lads’ peckers as clean,’ she winked at Lily, who had managed to perfect an interested but bland expression at these outrageous statements.
The work had proved to be more taxing than Lily could ever have imagined and the shifts were split into three every twenty-four hours, meaning that the WAAFs never seemed to be in the same place for long – or awake together to enjoy themselves as a group. Her crews flew Lancasters, great beasts of planes that cast huge shadows across the runway and roared like lions when fired up. The seven crewmen on each plane were young, fresh-faced and full of a false confidence. She recognised her brother’s tendency to swagger when under pressure and decided to treat them all like younger brothers.
‘Ooh, proper egg and bacon,’ Len, one of the rear gunners, sighed, signalling Lily to join them one morning. ‘I knew there was a reason why I signed up for the RAF.’
As a ground wireless operator, Lily was allowed to join the crews for breakfast, but rarely got away with sneaking a plate of the coveted bacon. She joined the table next to Len, tucked into her toast and tried not to seem envious. She looked around carefully at the young men before her, studying their faces. She had met them two days ago and was struggling to remember their names. The tall, blonde, thin one was called Freddie, she remembered. He was the wireless operator. His right temple was pounding and he seemed on edge. Next to him, the slightly balding Pete stretched out his hand for more bread. It was shaking but they all kept up a constant flow of banter, disguising their fears behind bravado. Lily smiled at them with a newly-found affection. She sat quietly, content to listen while they told unlikely tales of heroism. The truth was this crew had only been on local ops so far, on the look-out for interlopers, but today, judging by their nervousness, the briefing had probably revealed a longer flight which meant they were heading into enemy territory. Lily was learning fast how important secrecy was and the girls had talked about how the crews received their orders on flimsies – made of rice paper – so they could eat them if they had to ditch in enemy territory.
‘We’ll have that drink tonight, Lily, see you in The Bluebell,’ the captain, Dave, said his tea in hand. ‘I’ve left the coin so you can all have a drink on us.’ He did not need to explain that the tradition at The Bluebell was to leave a coin in the split in the ceiling beams to be used to buy a round if the crew did not return. Lily shivered but smiled back, nodding, trying to look as if his ‘generosity’ was as normal as buying a round at the Crown in Manchester.
An hour later, she shielded her eyes before the dawn sun and heard the roar of the engines – four per aircraft. The Lancasters made more noise than any of the other planes and it still gave her a mix of terror and excitement to see them start up. She watched them taxi down the runway, tensing as she imagined the seven young men cramped inside and went to take her station in the control tower. As a ground wireless operator, she was responsible for transmitting weather information, any diversion signals and recalls. She had to take notes on any communications from the planes, making sure they were immediately sent to Group for action. She was constantly passing messages and had to send information on ‘found wind’ so that they could all fly on the same course using the natural air currents to help them. She knew that experienced navigators ignored this information, preferring to make their own judgements up in the sky, but it was her job to make sure it was sent. The Morse could travel so much further than the radio signals or voice calls, so she took over from the telephone operators as soon as they were out of audio range. Imagining them across the Channel, she said a quick prayer for them all. She thought particularly of the crew she had had breakfast with that morning. The pilot, Dave, was older than her at twenty-two. He had a wife, Pat, and two children, John and Flo, and he had shown her photographs of them with pride.
Lily’s stomach turned over. This was real, not the pretend war she had been playing at in Blackpool. It was time to put the training to good use. She adjusted her headset, put her head down and concentrated. The noises of the Morse suddenly made even more sense when she knew it was Freddie’s hand on the other end of it. After an hour, she found she was beginning to recognise his touch. It was her and Freddie’s private world, at least she hoped it was. The possibility that her coded messages were being intercepted somehow made her more determined not to make any mistakes. She blocked out the constant chatter and signals that were being sent by the enemy to confuse them and thought for a moment about the band playing in her earphones at Blackpool. Now she understood how important it was to be able to home in on a crew’s frequency.
When it went quiet, Lily knew all the planes were in enemy territory. She had heard the expression ‘deafening silence’ but had not understood it until now. She could hear the ticking of the clock, or was it the beating of her heart? It seemed as if she was suspended in time and although she registered the hustle and bustle around her of other personnel dealing with aircraft, her own call sign 5FP was all she was focused on. Once that was tapped in by the crews, she had to hurriedly write down the information and pass it on. After a while, the WAAFs in the room were told to stand down and she knew the planes were all getting on with their jobs. Lily couldn’t think about what that meant for the people on the ground in the German towns, she just had to block that out and do her own job. Leaving her receiver on so she could hear any changes, she took off her headset at the same time as the WAAF next to her. They smiled at each other and Lily stood up and stretched.
‘That’s my first one out. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was.’
It was true, her shoulders ached and she realised how tense she had been.
‘That’s OK,’ the redhead told her, ‘you’ll soon get the hang of it. I’m Freda by the way. Freda from Stoke. That’s in the Midlands,’ she added unnecessarily. ‘Welcome to East Kirkby.’
Lily smiled the same automatic smile she had been using since she arrived. Blackpool had been her world for nine months. Alice, Viv, Marion even, had become her life, and to swap to being a new Lily overnight was too much for her to cope with. She felt bereft without Alice, in particular, and could not even think back to their last hug at Mrs Porter’s without filling up with tears. Alice, who by now was on her way to Scotland. Alice, who had cuffed her across the head affectionately when Lily had sobbed uncontrollably, saying, ‘You big ninny, you’ll survive and you know what that new song says . . . “We’ll meet again . . .” Now go and win that war. I’m off to Scotland where I’m going to meet lots of lovely pilots and teach all those Sassenachs how to speak with a lilt just like that gorgeous laddie, Scottie, taught me so that the locals can understand them.’
Alice had paused for a minute and then had shaken her head.
‘Shame I have to leave him behind but these dainty feet of mine can’t just dance to the tune of one man!’
Lily tried to ignore Freda’s chatter and like her neighbour, Mary, a quieter girl with short brown hair, only answered where necessary, giving some essential information about herself. Freda had been at Blackpool a year before Lily and seemed to have spent time in all the old haunts that Lily knew so well. She felt a pain in her stomach at the memory. While Freda wittered on, telling Lily all about her conquests both in Blackpool and East Kirkby, they all kept alert, listening for their station’s call sign. They spent the day knittin
g and writing letters and there was a quiet hum from the endless chatter.
‘Did you hear about the great fun we had with a pigeon last week?’ Freda, who talked so fast that her words merged, had a captive audience. ’You know the pigeons are sent with the planes, ready to be released with up-to-date coordinates if the crew have to crash land?’ She looked at Lily to make sure, as a newcomer, that she understood the significance of the pigeons.
Lily nodded distractedly.
Freda warmed to her subject.
‘Well, one turned up in the fireplace in the mess, poor thing. It was exhausted. It must have flown miles. Good job the fire wasn’t lit. About four of us managed to catch it but it was me that got the paper off its foot, even though I got covered in soot.’