Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

  At that Daisy dissolved in laughter and had to search through the make-up in her gas-mask container for a hankie to wipe her eyes, as Celia looked on disapprovingly. Then Eileen joined in, though she wasn’t sure if she was laughing at Winkie’s celebration dinner or Daisy’s giggling.

  ‘Oh, stop being so po-faced,’ Daisy said to Celia. ‘If you weren’t so close to your pigeons you’d laugh too.’

  ‘I just don’t see what’s so funny,’ Celia said primly, shrugging her shoulders, ‘though I can see by the two of you that I’m in a minority of one!’

  ‘It’s the picture of old Winkie sitting inside her cage at the top table being honoured, and she’s just a pigeon, she doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s going on!’ Daisy cried, dabbing at her eyes again.

  ‘Well, you don’t know that,’ Celia said defensively. ‘Pigeons are very clever, you know.’

  But by then neither Daisy nor Eileen could hear her above their own laughter.

  ‘We’re not finished yet!’ Daisy screeched.

  ‘Oh, surely we must be!’ Eileen giggled.

  Daisy shook her head helplessly. ‘Tell her about the hawk project!’

  This time Celia giggled too. ‘Well, our lot discovered that the Germans were using pigeons, too,’ she said.

  ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ Eileen responded.

  ‘And so our lot came up with this idea to train hawks to kill the German pigeons, only—’

  ‘How could the hawks tell the difference?’ Eileen interrupted, wide-eyed. ‘Between our pigeons and German pigeons, I mean?’

  ‘I was just coming to that,’ Celia protested, reaching for a hankie of her own. ‘That was the fatal flaw, you see, they couldn’t!’

  When the three girls got back to the hut later that night, Daisy’s good mood changed. Normally she collected her mail up at Admin, but, presumably as she hadn’t done so for a while, some kind person had picked up a letter and put it on her bed. She knew by the handwriting that it was from her Australian penpal in Orkney.

  When the correspondence had first started she had made her replies as boring as his own letters to Dotty, then she tried leaving her responses later and later, in the hope that he’d stop writing all together. Foreign servicemen often asked WAAFs to write to them, and even to write to their mothers to let them know how their boys were, so Frank Moran wasn’t unusual, except that usually in the normal way of things contact slowly but surely died out after a while, as both parties found their time eaten up with work and other pursuits.

  Not Frank, though. Frank stuck to it. He was in Shetland now, at a place called Sumburgh, which was as different from his beloved Dalby as anyone could imagine. With the Germans now in Norway they were just 180 miles from the northern-most part of the British Isles, so these tiny islands had been flooded with army, navy and RAF personnel; they now outnumbered the natives. There were few trees to be seen and little greenery, and even with so many service people about it was cold, lonely and remote.

  ‘The people are wonderful, though,’ Frank wrote. ‘God knows, we’ve disrupted their way of life more than we do anywhere else, but they can’t do enough for us. Every door is open to us. We’re like family, and though they’re on rations they’re always baking for us. One Shetland sailor came home on leave and found his home full of other sailors – his family were on first-name terms with them. He said it felt like he was the stranger; it was like being back aboard ship. We have dances in the town hall and concerts in the RAF gym. Service personnel come from all over in lorries. Gracie Fields has been here a couple of times, though I’ve never heard her – I’m told I might not be missing a lot!’

  And then it was back to Dalby. ‘I don’t know if I’ve told you, but we have about 3000 acres all told, mostly open tree-land and grass with a paddock of maybe 100 acres for growing crops. Our main income is from wool, so we grow some oats for feeding the sheep in winter and some lucerne to give them good summer forage. A lot of the work is fencing to keep the blighters in, making sure they’re healthy and checking the water supply – water’s really important. We have an underground bore a hundred feet down and a windmill to keep the sheep trough supplied and a horse and a couple of dogs for mustering.

  ‘Every couple of months we bring the sheep in for crutching (you don’t want to know!), drenching, branding, lamb-tailing and paddock rotation – if they stay on the same pasture they get worms. Six weeks off shearing we drench them to get rid of the lice. Lice are bad news: the sheep rub themselves against trees and fences to get rid of the itch and that affects their wool, and you have to keep an eye on blowfly that strike at the crotch and shoulder in the hot, wet weather. You have to shear the patches where the blowfly has laid and put on some oil to kill the maggots. And there’s always burrs and poisonous weeds like prickly pear to look out for. I used to hate it, couldn’t wait to get away from it and swore I’d never be back, but now I get sentimental thinking of blowflies! The house has a diesel-powered generator for electricity, a kerosene-fired fridge and a wood-burning stove for cooking. I’m going to build a new house when I get back, though, make it of cypress pine on two-foot stumps of hardwood like ironbark or spotted gum, they don’t rot in the ground like cypress. Galvanised iron for the roof, and I’ll have a phone in and a wireless, everybody will have them after the war.

  You can have anything you want, Daisy, furnish it how you like. You’ll be a long way from your family, but they can visit. You’ve never told me about your family. Have you got brothers and sister?’

  It was all getting too much, too involved. Even though she didn’t respond in kind he was getting under her skin to the extent that she found herself picturing Dalby, wondering what his mother and father looked like. And there was Dotty to consider, Dotty who thought she would be the one to find that out after the war, if he survived that was.

  And that was another thing. If he didn’t survive she didn’t want to know. She would hear from Dotty afterwards, but that would be one step removed, she didn’t want to be the one who heard first.

  She would have to tell him plainly not to write again, Daisy decided. She would use Dotty’s undying love for him as an excuse, though the real reason was that she didn’t want him or anyone else to fix themselves to her. So she wrote to him for the last time, telling him that she was far too busy to write, that she had nothing to write about other than work, that Dotty would be upset if she knew he was writing to her and she didn’t want Dotty to feel something had been going on behind her back all along, even if nothing had been, couldn’t and wouldn’t. Anyway, they didn’t know each other apart from that one brief meeting when they didn’t get on, so maybe he should stop now, and, for her part, there would be no more letters.

  There was nothing but the truth in what she said, but she still left it a couple of days before posting it, aware of some deep feeling of not wanting to hurt him and puzzled by it. When she had posted it, she felt bad in some indefinable way.

  Still, that was that. It was over. She wouldn’t think of him again. Until another letter arrived that didn’t refer to the one, the very last one, Daisy had written to him. She didn’t reply, and when yet another arrived she got Eileen to write on it ‘Transferred’ and posted it back to him.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘Because he’s the kind of guy you don’t want to let near you,’ Daisy said, looking at the envelope with distaste.

  ‘You mean he’s a Fly Boy?’ Eileen sniggered.

  ‘Exactly. I’m trying to keep you lot away from them, and here’s this guy I can’t shake off. I think I may have to kill him to get rid of him if this doesn’t work.’

  And so they posted Frank’s letter back to him, unopened, on the way out of the base.

  In June it was Edith’s birthday, and though she’d been posted to Station X, she wanted to celebrate with her old friends and see her Australian, of course, at Langar.

 
As many WAAFs as were off-duty made their way to a favourite pub. First of all they had a good gossip with Edith, who’d just had a letter from her cousin, who was working with barrage balloons in Birmingham.

  The Balloon Operators were a hardy lot, often billeted in isolated areas, hands raw from splicing metal cables, winching balloons up and down, releasing the cables that were attached to 120 lb concrete blocks, and throwing around 40 lb sandbags. The idea of using balloons was to force the German planes to fly above them to avoid their wings being sliced off by the wires, and once they were higher they were easier prey for British artillery and fighter planes. Unlike the girls on settled bases, Balloon Operators didn’t have prepared food provided, so each day’s meals depended on whoever was on cook duty actually being able to cook.

  The most frightening part of their duties, though, was standing sentry against intruders, two girls keeping vigil while the rest of the crew slept. Men on sentry duty had rifles for protection, but some higher authority had decided that WAAFs should have whistles and truncheons. Edith’s cousin was based in Birmingham and the week before two men had attacked and assaulted the two sentries. Luckily the noise had wakened the others, and, when they rushed to help, one of the men had attacked Edith’s cousin, choking her till she passed out. The police had arrived shortly afterwards and arrested the men, but the girls had been badly shaken and felt very vulnerable.

  ‘They’ve asked for rifles,’ Edith said, ‘but so far nothing.’

  ‘But they’ve got to give them rifles!’ Daisy cried.

  ‘I know, seems like common sense, doesn’t it?’ Edith replied, shrugging.

  Just then the conversation was interrupted by a great commotion involving Lady Groundhog’s nice skipper, the Canadian boy, Calli. He was drinking cider, under the impression that it was non-alcoholic, an impression his caring co-pilot, Bruiser, had given him. Calli had seen Eileen laughing at him and had first challenged her then asked her to marry him before passing out. As his crew tried to get him onto his feet with all the WAAFs cheering, Daisy found Bruiser looking up her skirt.

  ‘Avert your eyes, sunshine,’ she snarled. ‘What’s up there isn’t for the likes of you.’

  Then the crew slow-marched out of the pub, carrying the unconscious Calli aloft and humming the Death March, and all the others joined in. Someone grabbed flowers from a vase and placed them on his chest.

  ‘How can you let him get in that state when you know he doesn’t drink?’ Daisy asked Bruiser, who almost dropped his skipper in order to converse with her for the first time.

  ‘He’ll be fine,’ he replied, giving her his soppiest grin.

  ‘He’s on Ops tomorrow, though, doesn’t that worry you, you idiot?’

  Bruiser grinned as though she was addressing him with words of warm endearment. ‘But that’s when he’ll be fine,’ he said fondly, now looking down her blouse. ‘As soon as he gets a whiff of oxygen it’ll clear his hangover. It’s the best cure there is.’

  Daisy sighed deeply. ‘Avert your eyes again, or you’ll need more than oxygen as a cure.’

  ‘How can I help it?’ he asked. ‘I love you, you love me, you’re mine, and that gives me rights over where my eyes go.’

  Daisy shook her head in exasperation and wandered off.

  Daisy next saw Calli the following day, when he sat down at her table in the NAAFI and asked where he could find Eileen.

  Daisy looked at him as though he were an insect. A nice boy she might have thought him, but a Fly Boy he still was.

  ‘You can forget it, she didn’t take your silly proposal seriously,’ she replied, looking away from him as an indication of dismissal.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  ‘Why not what?’

  ‘Why didn’t she take my proposal seriously?’

  Daisy gave him one of her severest looks, but he didn’t flinch. ‘Look, sunshine,’ she said, ‘Eileen’s an innocent, a good girl. A really good girl, if you get my drift, and there’s a childhood sweetheart to consider, bastard that he is.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t matter now,’ Calli replied amiably. ‘And why is he a bastard?’

  ‘Because all childhood sweethearts are,’ Daisy snarled. ‘They get their hooks into some nice girl and hang around so that no one else can get near her – while he’s bedding everyone else’s girl – then they marry her and destroy her.’

  ‘And this childhood … ex-childhood sweetheart of Eileen’s, he’s like that?’

  ‘They all are,’ Daisy said quietly. ‘I’ll bet you’re a childhood sweetheart yourself.’

  ‘No,’ Calli chuckled back at her.

  ‘What? A good-looking boy like you and you don’t have some poor little deluded female waiting for you back in Canada?’ Daisy sneered.

  ‘No,’ Calli replied again, looking directly into her eyes. ‘For me there’s just Eileen.’

  Daisy looked at him for a moment, then she laughed. ‘Look, Fly Boy,’ she said firmly, ‘I’ll get her, but understand this – if you mess her about I’ll remove your balls with a fork. Is that clear?’

  Calli lifted a fork from the table and handed it to her. ‘If I mess her about, I’ll help you,’ he grinned.

  So Daisy fetched Eileen for him, against her instincts, it had to be said, and within minutes he and Eileen had disappeared to change into civvy clothes and had departed from the base in a borrowed sports car.

  Daisy had been thoroughly dazed. It was so unlike Eileen, and after all Daisy’s warnings, too. They tended to listen to her, at first at any rate, so it was hard to take in that Eileen had just upped and gone off with a Fly Boy like that. She felt she should protect Eileen; she had recognised her as someone like herself, that’s why they had become such good and close friends, the closest friend Daisy had ever had.

  She had been closer to Edith than Celia and Violet, and closer still to Dotty, but Eileen was a good degree closer than any of them had been. How long was it? Two short months, but life-changing seeds had been sown, and not just in one life, but in many.

  Daisy had her mind on other things, that was the point. It was just one of those times, so much to think about. Frank Moran was still writing to her and she was still ignoring him and having his letters sent back unopened. Edith had written to say her cousin and the two sentries who had been attacked had recovered well, but when the two men had been brought before the court, the judge, on hearing they were merchant seamen on Russian Convoy Duty, had admonished them and set them free without penalty. They were important, that was the message every WAAF took from that, far more important than some females playing with balloons, anyway. The WAAFs had asked for rifles to protect themselves like male sentries, the Daily Mirror even took up their case, but nothing happened. The girls were left with whistles and truncheons between them and rape and murder.

  Then, Daisy had another letter, this time from Dotty, something that was happening less and less. Daisy dreaded opening Dotty’s letters in case they contained a hurt accusation over the unwanted contact Frank still insisted on making with Daisy, but although this letter was painful, it wasn’t about the handsome Australian.

  ‘Daisy, darling, I have a favour to ask, and I’d like it passed to as many of the girls as possible. I know you’re terribly busy, but can you possibly spare the time to help? I know you’re such a good person and I’m imposing on our friendship, but I’m hoping you’ll agree.

  ‘We have a Corporal here at Princess Mary’s RAF Hospital, a male nurse who’s come up with a brilliant idea. As you know, being burned is the greatest fear of all aircrew, apart from dying, of course, because the pain is excruciating. Even if the patient lives, the disfigurement all too often makes normal life impossible. As burned hands heal they also contract into claws, and so more painful surgery is needed to release the fingers.

  ‘The answer is a strong but pliable frame to support the healing tissue without letting it contract, but there’s been no such thing, until our Corporal had his brainwave – WAAF cotton suspender belt
s! You know those two bones in the front panel? Well how many of us really need them? We just take them out and throw them away.

  ‘So I got to thinking and gave our Corporal a bundle I got from the girls down here, and he experimented, placing one bone at the wrist, and others inside each finger, fastened loosely at the top and then tied to the bone at the wrist. The result was that the fingers couldn’t curl up as they healed, because they weren’t strong enough to push against the suspender-belt bones. Then, as they became stronger and stayed straighter, pushing against them helped exercise the muscles too.

  ‘What I was thinking was that if we could get all the girls to help, we could get a box in every base to drop the bones into and then they could be sent here so that more frames can be made to treat burned airmen. Do you think you all could be bothered? I keep thinking of Frank. Spit pilots are more at risk from burns than others because they sit behind the fuel tank, so if they’re hit and go down the burning fuel comes into the cockpit, and sometimes there’s a problem with the hood. I don’t know if you know that.’

  Yes, thought Daisy, I think I’ve heard that somewhere before …

  That evening, another of the dreaded domestic nights, Daisy read out the letter – missing out the last part – and produced a box.

  ‘Right, everyone, if you’ve left your bones in, off with the suspender belts and out with the scissors!’ she ordered, and the girls removed the garments, giggling, and set to work.

  ‘I’m sure I saw a little pile of them somewhere,’ said a voice.

  ‘Remember where and get them,’ Daisy said.

  ‘How does she know we don’t need them?’ demanded a well-built WAAF.

  Daisy looked at her sternly. ‘Well, even if you do need them,’ she replied sweetly, ‘the lads need them more.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ replied the WAAF with a shrug.

  In a short time the letter was read out in every hut on the base and other letters were sent to other bases, though no one realised at the time that the anonymous Corporal had made a breakthrough in the treatment of burned hands, or that they were contributing to it, even if one or two waistlines would bulge slightly for the cause.