by Shirley Mann
She looked to make sure the girls were all impressed.
‘They sent out the rescue and found the crew just off the coast thanks to me . . . and the pigeon. We had to clean it up and then we sneakily released it so it wouldn’t have to spend any more time being cooped up in a Lanc. We had to pretend it had died so that no one suspected anything. So, we had a very good funeral for it, complete with a shoe box. It’s ‘buried’ just under the control tower windows. Just think, in years to come, some archaeologist could find the empty box and wonder why on earth it was buried. It’s so funny!’
Triumphant, she finally drew breath and sat back waiting to make sure she had everyone’s attention but just then her Morse started to buzz and she had to turn away.
‘Here we go, let’s pray they’re all in one piece.’
Lily glanced down at the runway where the emergency tenders were lined up, hoping not to be needed. She tried to concentrate on her own headphones.
There was no chat in the room for ages as Freda and some of the other girls responded to crews who were approaching the other side of the Channel. All that could be heard was the relentless tap, tap, tap. Lily looked at her finger poised over the Morse key, twitching, waiting to be used, waiting for the right call sign.
Annie, a girl from Swansea, was listening intently. Her dark hair fell over her eyes and her shoulders were tense. She was on ‘Darky’ watch. Her job was to deal with lost pilots who needed an emergency landing place. It was often the most boring shift, but tonight, tension was in the air. Everyone sensed the op had been a major one. She had to give vital life-saving information to men who had never landed at East Kirkby before and had no knowledge of the sort of country they were in. The machine cranked into life and Annie whirled round to tune in. The crew she was communicating with would be in desperate need of help. Her shift was nearly over but she was too absorbed in what she was doing to glance at the clock above them. Her shoulders were hunched over in despair as she tapped and tapped with determination. Freda nudged Lily. For the first time, she recognised the body language of a wireless operator who knew the situation was beyond hope. Lily imagined someone’s son, brother or husband frantically trying to stop their plane from crashing. She gulped. Annie’s finger was white as she tried to get a response but, defeated, she sent off her report in the hope a plane would be sent to look for the crew at the last co-ordinates. She sat back and stared into space waiting for the next call.
The rest of the girls put their heads down, in unison, suddenly mesmerised by their frequencies. Lily’s headset remained deafeningly quiet. She felt alone, despite knowing that there was a full team around the building trying to bring the planes in safely. Then the messages started coming in thick and fast and Lily had to respond to several planes searching for that familiar runway. As the planes approached, the radio operators were giving instructions to circle above at 500 feet until the runway was clear of the previous plane. One by one, the ones that had made it back landed. Some, she knew would be damaged and the crew injured. Her heart was thumping and she was sure Mary could hear it above the tapping of the Morse. She looked up and caught Mary’s eye and they tried to smile at each other.
‘First time?’
Lily nodded.
‘Keep calm, we just do our job.’
Then Mary suddenly turned towards her Morse set, concentrating to hear a faint buzz. Her face was tense and she was sending Morse at a slow, steady rate. A little while later, they all heard the sickening thump of a fuselage pancaking onto the runway. The girls looked up in horror to see a badly-damaged Lancaster burst into flames at the perimeter of the airfield. Trying desperately to ignore the commotion that broke out below, they went back to their jobs.
The blackboard on the other side of the glass between them and the telephone operators was filling up. Some had ‘landed’ next to them, some had a line through them. Then there was only one gap left on the board. F for Foxtrot.
*
Their shift had ended and all the girls except Lily moved towards the ‘out’ door. The ‘in’ door would remain closed until the new shift came in so that they did not meet and breach security, but Lily did not move. She looked through the glass at the officer in charge for permission to stay and received a curt nod in response. The next shift came in, silently, and took their places. The girl who was due to take over from Lily sat at the spare set in the corner.
‘Come on Freddie,’ Lily inwardly urged.
The control room on the other side of the glass was a hive of activity with people hurriedly doing their jobs. They were busy organising the ambulances and fire crews as well as the maintenance staff to the array of planes below. The flames of the crashed plane lit up the evening sky and the fire brigade had moved onto other aircraft, leaving it to burn like a funeral pyre. She looked at the blackboard with the alphabetical list of planes and code letters for crews. The blank column next to Dave’s flight’s codename somehow looked bigger than all the others.
Lily’s mouth was dry. She felt sick. She watched the ambulances screech off the runway to take the injured to the hospital and prayed harder than she had ever prayed in her life. Dave’s children’s happy faces photographed at the seaside flashed before her eyes and she blinked to send them back to the beach and those innocent days before all this began.
She pressed her headset to her ears, straining to hear every sign but all she could hear was the thumping of her heart.
‘Not my first one,’ she pleaded with God.
Chapter 22
Lily became mesmerised by the ticking of the red second hand on the clock and she started to synchronise it with the drumming of her redundant fingers on the desk. She tried to concentrate on something else and thought back to a walk on the hills behind Manchester she’d taken just before the war broke out. The person by her side had been Danny, carefree and laughing at her as she had struggled to keep her hair out of her eyes. She smiled wanly to herself. It had seemed such an innocent time and she longed with every fibre of her taut body for those times to come back. But it seemed an age ago and like another life. Where was he now, she wondered? Her hand was hovering above the dial, urging it to buzz, and she jumped with fright when she suddenly heard a slight noise. Was it a signal? She frowned and hunched over her set, tensing her whole body. Stop, listen, ignore the crackle, ignore the noise below, concentrate, she urged herself. Then she heard it – through the slush, her call sign followed by F for Foxtrot. She almost cried with relief. They weren’t mangled in a crash, ditched in the ocean or burnt to a cinder, they were on their way back, but they communicated they were in trouble and their instruments were down, leaving them navigationally blind. She turned to give the information to the WAAF behind her who rushed it through to Control but then looked in bewilderment at the set in front of her. ‘What now?’ her mind went blank.
‘Pull yourself together, Mullins,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘Just do your job, get them back to the coast, then let the others worry about the rest.’
She tried to remember the training she had been given in a warm room in Blackpool and started to respond, slowly and deliberately. The signal came stronger now and she was able to get a fix on it. She repeatedly communicated the station’s call sign to the Lancaster, watching the empty skies out of the window in between staring determinedly at the set. She imagined Pete searching wildly for Lincoln Cathedral and thanked God there was no fog. She scanned the skies.
At last she saw it! The Lancaster was in one piece, apart from some charring on the left wing. She willed it to land safely as it veered from left to right out of the clouds. It certainly was not a text book landing and the huge plane bumped its way along the runway, finally shuddering to a halt in front of the control tower just as the blinds were pulled down for the blackout. The emergency services sprang into action. Lily signed off and grabbed her bag to race out of the door, leaving the next shift to deal with the aftermath.
Lily wasn’t allowed onto the runway but had to stand hel
plessly in the corridor, trying to peer through the crack in the door to watch the action outside. She saw stretcher bearers running towards the plane and her stomach leapt.
‘Please don’t let them be badly injured,’ she urged the heavens.
Finally, she gave up and headed towards the debriefing room. There were admin people scurrying backwards and forwards and she grabbed one of their arms as they hurried past.
‘Can you tell me about the final Lancaster crew that’s just come in, please?’
He looked at her panic-stricken face but questions were a scandalous breach of security. He went to move off down the corridor but then paused and turned back to smile at her reassuringly.
Lily had no option but to go to The Bluebell and wait.
There were quite a few WAAFs already there, including Freda. For once she was quiet and alone, gulping at the cider in front of her, but she spotted Lily and called her over. Mary had gone straight to the hut, she whispered conspiratorially, and Annie, who was a devout Welsh Methodist, had been seen going to the chapel to say a prayer for the crew from the ‘Darky’ call who had been lost in the sea. Freda, with more experience, seemed less affected than Lily by the day of drama and filled her in on the other girls. Annie was married to an army sergeant who was in France and Mary was too shy to enjoy herself much, she told Lily. Looking carefully at her, she added, ‘I’m hoping some of your new intake will be a bit more lively.’
Lily felt anything but lively and gave a very weak smile. Freda carried on, delighted to have a new audience. She told Lily how just a few nights before, Mary had been dancing with one rear gunner whose body had been prised out of the freezing compartment at the rear of one of the damaged Lancasters. Another, who had bought Freda a drink, was badly burned and had been taken to hospital for a seven-day saline bath. Freda recounted these tales like a shopping list. Lily gulped and went up to the bar to ask for a half of cider. She felt chilled and knew she was shaking. The two girls sat huddled together on the hard sofas but Lily found it difficult to show a great deal of interest in the constant stream of gossip that Freda was regaling her with. She looked down at her glass and thought of her brother, Don. Somewhere there would be a mother and father, sisters and brothers dreading that knock on the door that would come only too soon. Don was only fourteen but if the war went on another four years, he would be called up. She shivered.
After an hour or so, when Lily was really struggling to show any interest in Freda’s inconsequential chatter, a fellow WAAF came in and whispered quietly to them so the rest of the bar could not hear, ‘They’re out of debrief.’
They both looked towards the door. Two airmen came in. They belonged to the crew that Freda had had breakfast with that morning. She rushed up to greet them, giving them both a relieved hug. Lily realised Freda’s need to talk was a mask to disguise her anxiety. The barman had lined up some pints on the bar and silently handed two of them over to the airmen. The ritual in The Bluebell was alarmingly practised.
No one wanted to ask questions and the air crew didn’t volunteer any information. They just sat quietly nursing their drinks.
One by one, the crews came in, all of them subdued and not very talkative. Then Lily saw Freddie.
‘Freddie,’ she called. He nodded at her and touched her arm, grasping it slightly as she ran up to him. She took hold of it and guided him to the bar, getting him a pint. They went and sat down in a corner of the room. She didn’t speak, but knew he would talk when he was ready.
‘We got lost coming back,’ he said eventually, whispering so the others couldn’t hear. ‘We’d been hit by flak and our instruments were out. Pete’s in hospital. I think he’s going to be OK but his war’s over. Without the navigation equipment, we had to wing it back. We had to veer off the coast and come in from the north. We were worried we were going to run out of fuel, but Dave was amazing. God, that man can fly. He cut back on the throttle and managed to steer us in. We thought we were going to have to ditch near the coast but we made it. There are others who didn’t.’
Lily just pressed his arm and nodded. There was nothing she could say. They would be going out time and time again, facing fear and death. They would all deal with it in their own way. Some would become quieter, some louder.
Len came and joined them. He had a bandage on his head and looked grey. Then Paul, Bob and Arthur arrived, all looking grey and worn out, followed by Dave. He smiled at the little group and sat down.
‘You did well, Lily. You found us and saw us back. I can’t tell you how relieved we were to hear your messages. Thank you.’
Lily’s throat constricted and she looked down to hide the tears.
‘So, lads, a quiet night and then hopefully a twenty-four-hour pass tomorrow. Where shall we go? I’ve got some money to claim back from this beam.’ He reached up and triumphantly reclaimed his coin.
Plans towards normality helped them all to take a deep breath and they all started to chatter, putting the last twenty-four hours behind them, knowing this was just the beginning.
Lily took herself off after a while, leaving the men to recover. She was absolutely exhausted so undressed hurriedly, falling onto her bed. She glanced across and saw Mary huddled under her blanket. She started to toss and turn but then worried she would wake Mary so tried to keep still, blanking out the visions of burning metal that were in her head until she finally fell asleep.
With the next morning off duty, it was well into the day when Lily woke. She sat up with a start wondering what had woken her. She heard laughter and peered through the window to see two WAAFS perched on the fronts of bikes ridden by airmen, hanging on for dear life as they raced around the corner. She heard cheers and quickly dressed to go and watch. There was a large crowd who had gathered at the end of the huts and they were all shouting and yelling encouragement. Glad was there, in uniform, but with fag in hand, leaning against the hut casually.
‘They’re all letting off a bi’ o steam and quite right too. That was fuckin’ tough shite.’
Lily felt her shoulders drop and some of the tension of the last day or so started to drain away. She smiled at Glad.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Glad.’
Glad lived up to her name and despite her colourful background was proving to be a positive force in the hut. Her matter-of-fact attitude never seemed to fail her and she dealt with every situation with a calm pragmatism.
Both girls started to giggle and loudly cheered on the girl from their barracks who was on the bike in the lead.
*
The following day, Lily and Freda decided they had had enough of the aroma emanating from Glad’s bed and they plotted to grab her before she got dressed and deal out some good old-fashioned washing. East Kirkby was lucky to have a reasonable supply of water, so they got hold of some buckets of water from the showers and left them outside the hut. Then they went in as nonchalantly as they could and called to Glad, ‘Come on, Glad, come and see these new airmen who’ve just arrived.’
‘Show me the way,’ she said, her eyes brightening.
They took her outside and then Lily grabbed the first bucket and doused her in water. Freda grabbed the soap and started to scrub. Glad screamed and lashed out with her long fingernails. Lily stood in front of her, with her hands on her hips.
‘You’re a lovely wee Scottish lassie and I believe you’re an excellent orderly, but you are not going to survive this war if you don’t clean up a bit.’
‘Get your fuckin’ hands off me. I’ll see you in hell before I give in to yous all.’
The three of them got covered in soapsuds as she lashed out at them and suddenly, they all started to laugh. Glad fell onto the floor, giggling louder than the rest and rolled about clutching her sides with tears pouring down her cheeks.
Two girls called Phyllis and Marie ran up with fresh supplies of water and threw it over the girls.
‘There now,’ Lily said, with a satisfied nod of her head, ‘you look a lot better and certainly you smell
better.’ She sat back on her heels and grinned at the soaked Gladys in front of her. The water was dripping down her face and she spat it sideways out of her mouth.
‘That’s a shockin’ waste o’ water. You’ll be in terrible trouble for that, you know.’
There was a sound behind them. A corporal standing behind them with her arms folded. They all stood up quickly.
‘What exactly is going on?’
‘Um, we thought ACW Perkins could do with a bit of sprucing up,’ Lily said defiantly.
‘You’re risking a charge, ACW Mullins’
I’ll have that on my gravestone, Lily thought, resignedly.
‘But we’re under the protection of the flag,’ Phyllis said, pointing upwards to the Union Jack fluttering in the breeze.
The corporal frowned.
‘We’ll see about that’ and turned on her heels to walk away.
They all clustered around Phyllis.
‘Can we really get away with it because of the flag?’ Helen asked.
‘I don’t know, it just occurred to me. I saw somewhere that if something happens under the protection of the British flag then it is like a sanctuary.’
‘You may be safe from her but you’re not safe from me,’ Glad countered, grabbing the last of the water in the bucket and chucking it at Lily, who gasped as the cold liquid hit her face.
She started towards Glad but then stopped. ‘OK, that’s fair,’ she laughed. ‘But, now we’ve found out about the flag, it’ll be a weekly wash for you unless you do it yourself and next time, we’ll get Doris Billings to help us.’
Doris Billings was five foot ten and wrestled in her spare time. For once, Glad looked intimidated. ‘OK, OK, it just seem’d a fuckin’ shame to waste water on me, that’s all, when I’m bleedin’ gorgeous as I am.’
‘Not gorgeous when I have to sleep next to you,’ Lily retorted, and linking the dripping-wet girl’s arm, they headed back to the hut.
Chapter 23
Lily couldn’t believe that a prostitute from Glasgow had propelled her out of her depression. Glad was a breath of fresh air in a world of deaths, long shifts and rules and regulations and her unquestioning attitude to life was exactly what Lily needed. She was really struggling with the increasing number of airmen who swaggered around the camp one day and were gone the next. The others around Lily seemed to cope with it better than she did but she had never come across death before. Her grandparents had died before she was born and all her other relatives were in sterling good health. The Lily who had swirled around the Christmas tree at home just a year earlier seemed from another dimension and while other WAAFs seemed to be making the most of this war, Lily had been feeling very down and vulnerable and had not been able to snap out of it. She realised that Alice had provided her with a crutch that she had come to rely on but now she was on her own.