‘Sorour,’ commanded a voice from the dining alcove.
‘Ma’am?’ I enquired.
‘You have forgotten the salt.’
Relieved at so petty a reproof I brought it. They finished the soup. I served the cabbage and potatoes.
‘Meat?’ asked one, appraising dubiously the insipid combination of green and white.
‘There wasn’t any Ma’am,’ I answered. They glanced eloquently at each other, looked with unspeakable disdain at their plates and then commenced poking with insulting fastidiousness at my dinner. I returned to the kitchen.
‘You may serve the port,’ ordered one as I collected the flatteringly empty plates.
‘Pardon, Ma’am?’
‘The port,’ she repeated.
‘Yes, Ma’am,’ I answered confidently. Port, I wondered and repeated the word until it lost its meaning. Port, port, port. What’s Port? I recalled the red sour-sweet liquid served during Holy Communion. Of course. Port wine. Amidst a sad and dusty collection of bottles I found one that held a similar coloured liquid. I poured two large tumblers full, put them on a rusty tin tray and walked carefully to the dining-room.
‘Port, Ma’am,’ I announced with dignity, whilst suppressing the impulse to giggle.
They stared at the tumblers and exercised their already well-exercised eyebrows. ‘Sorour. Those are not wine glasses.’
I returned along the well-beaten path to the kitchen, transferred, with moderate wastage, the liquid to more elegant glasses and tried again.
I watched them proudly as they sipped luxuriantly at the warm cosy-looking liquid. Suddenly, consternation shattered this idyllic scene and a fine spray of liquid burlesqued across the spotless linen tablecloth as one of the officers spat out the ‘Port’. The other, mouthing horribly, retired hurriedly to the bathroom. On further investigation the port transpired to be vinegar.
My tears helped to soothe their ruffled feathers and brought an uneasy armistice. Dire threats of ‘putting me on a charge’ subsided to more general recriminations. I retired to the servants’ bedroom. They washed their own dishes that night.
Fiasco followed fiasco for two interminable weeks before my orders arrived to report for recruit’s training. My two officers, haggard looking, wished me a vehement farewell as I entrained for discipline. I had, however, learned something of the peculiarities of service life. So, no doubt, had my late mistresses.
8
I reported to the Women’s Royal Auxiliary Air Force recruits’ training centre and was immediately absorbed into the slightly anarchic routine. Gaggles of highly individual females were to be seen entering the gates. A few weeks later, the processing completed, columns marched uniformly out again. I was canalized with moderate success. My service wardrobe was completed, thus eliminating the embarrassing necessity of appearing in a hybrid para-military pose. Also, at last, I received my service number from the orderly room clerk who, unaware of its significance, was surprised at my effusive thanks.
The barracks were solid two-storeyed edifices that served as an object lesson to the frivolously minded. Like guardians of Victorian sternness their stone floors, functional bathrooms and crisp no-nonsense beds cowed most of us to obedience more effectively than direct authority. Feminine giggles and squeals echoed hollowly in the long dormitory and reduced those responsible to self-conscious titters. A week or two was to pass before we could resist the silent intimidation of those walls, kick off our shoes and affix pinups to locker doors.
The next few days were spent in rooting out any lingering affection for anarchy or independence. We were numbered, ranked, and drilled until even our expressions became uniform. Lectures on the omniscience of ‘King’s Regulations’ and visits to the medical inspection room conveniently occupied any untoward spare time.
The final obstacle was the selection board who decided the future activities of those possessing special qualifications. Arming myself with my flying licence, log-book and correspondence from the Ministry including the letter that referred to my ‘obtaining a suitable position with the Waafs’ I presented myself to the board.
The interviewing room was sadistically long. Two unsmiling Waaf and three male officers appraised me stonily as I walked the miles from the door to the green baize table. I saluted awkwardly and stood to attention. I could feel my skirt trembling.
‘You may sit down,’ motioned the senior Waaf officer. I sat uneasily on the edge of the chair.
‘You are a pilot,’ accused one of the Waaf officers.
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘Have you your licence?’
I passed it across the desk.
‘You realize there are no flying posts in the Waaf?’ smugly interjected one of the men.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then why join the Waafs?’ he asked truculently.
What sort of boards had he passed, I wondered, to ask such a stupid question.
‘I love flying and the Waafs are closest to flying,’ I answered.
‘A negative approach,’ he commented, scribbling a note on his pad.
‘Tell us about your education,’ suggested the one with pince-nez, sitting on the extreme right. I half turned to him and told them. They appeared totally unimpressed. There was an uncomfortable silence. I looked longingly out of the window. The sun shone on a sparrow perkily hopping from bush to bush; faintly its twittering penetrated into the room. My mind soared to distant places; to surf and palm trees and sea shells resting on glistening sands; where ships called twice a year.
‘...prepared to volunteer for...’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, blushing at my insolence at begging the pardon of so august a committee.
‘We need some girls for a highly secret operation. Are you prepared to volunteer for this job without knowing what it is?’ repeated the chairman of the board. My mind soared again. This time to deeds of secret valour. Visions of Joan of Arc vied with those of Florence Nightingale. My tummy tightened with a vicarious thrill.
‘Yes, sir,’ I answered bravely, trying not to squeak.
The chairman glanced enquiringly at the others. Individually they stared at me then nodded to him.
‘Then it is decided. You will receive posting instructions in the normal manner. You are aware of the Official Secrets Act?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That is all. You may go. Good morning.’
I got up, wriggled my skirt down, swung an improved salute and marched bravely out, my head in the air.
Orders were posted the following day for the entire draft. All but a dozen, including myself, were posted to training establishments. The dozen were to report the following day for further instructions; packed and ready to leave. We did so agog with excitement and with rumours virile and ripe.
We were shepherded into a train that crawled, backtracked and stopped throughout most of the night. I never did achieve a journey during the war on those trains that snorted imperiously to their destinations. Invariably I travelled, dirty and dishevelled, on those with insignificant priority that jarred to a halt with infuriating resignation in the blacked-out countryside and waited, their passengers cocooned in stale air, in the eerie silence broken only by an occasional tired grunt of steam or the creaking of metal.
We arrived ‘somewhere in England’ in the early hours of the morning. Escorts were changed and after marching along winding lanes with the smell of ozone wafting freshly in the breeze and bringing animation to our jaded faces, we came to a backwater jetty, mysterious and silent except for the brackish water sucking hollowly against three rowing boats moored nearby. A firm ‘Quiet please’ hushed our excited whispers. I looked primly at my colleagues. They did not appear suitable material for heroines. I could not see myself.
We rowed silently for half an hour. The waning moon played hide and seek in the trees as we disembarked at a tiny jetty that creaked protestingly and swayed alarmingly at the unaccustomed weight. We marched again until, passing through massi
ve wrought-iron gates, the public lane gave way to the gentility of a gravelled drive and cultivated gardens. A blacked-out manor appeared, silhouetted eerily in the pale moonlight.
With our questions unanswered we were tumbled into bed.
9
During the following few days the sum total of our knowledge of our future activities was the negative one of at least knowing what we were not going to do or be. The manor was a training school hedged and shrouded in secrecy that provoked even greater curiosity. It was not until the last day of the course, three weeks later, that the successful trainees at last discovered the great secret. Those unsuccessful were given short shrift and departed still not knowing. An unhappy fate indeed for those women. Garish posters caricaturing large mouths and black Homburged spies despoiled elegant panelled walls and warned of security.
The introductory talk given by the Commanding Officer resembled a speech by the prosecution in Kafka’s Trial. ‘I’m sorry girls, I cannot tell you what I’m talking to you about. But you mustn’t talk about it either and that makes it easier for you.’
The large baronial hall was converted into a neat double row of cubicles that gave it the appearance of a beauty parlour. For three weeks we sat in pairs inside these mysterious blacked-out cubicles staring pop-eyed at a small screen illuminated with a wayward fluorescent green light that glowed eerily in the darkness and threw a deathly pallor on our faces. We fiddled and fussed with knobs, endeavouring to locate any green blobs of light that showed persistence or constancy among the bewildering variety of flashes and oscillating lines appearing on the screen. At the end of the working day we emerged from our cubicles eyes red-rimmed with strain and still echoing the elusive blobs. Every night the ‘Riot Act’ was solemnly read to us with dire warning against indiscreet talk.
The blobs of light were finally baptized as ‘echoes’. The addition of a compass scale on the locating control failed to hint to us the nature of our work. By the third week those of us still remaining on the course could give the compass bearing and approximate distance of any echo appearing on the screen. Not, we thought, a particularly commendable achievement.
The monotony of our training, the secrecy and confinement – we were not permitted outside the manor grounds – brought boredom and restlessness. I might have been a submariner for all the relationship this bore to flying. The hot-house atmosphere bred turgid romance, for which the darkened cubicles were exploited unmercifully. Predatory females became peculiarly anxious to improve their echo spotting and emerged sans visible eye-strain.
On the last day of the course we gathered in the lecture hall for the unveiling ceremony. The Commanding Officer commiserated with us and thanked us for our patience. Our work was, of course, Radar Interception. The echoes would be, in the future, enemy aircraft approaching the coasts of Britain. We left the lecture rooms happily; the boredom and restlessness gone. Our work was simple but vital. Women rarely ask for more.
Our farewell party lingered far into the night as cubicle-inspired romances jerked fitfully in the throes of rigor-mortis. I primly evaded the zero-hour attempts to storm my notorious unsusceptibility.
‘Come on, Jackie; have a drink.’
‘She thinks she’s too good for us.’
‘Just a little drink...’
‘She’s funny that way.’
‘If she doesn’t want to drink, why should she?’
‘It’s hot in here. Let’s...’
‘She’s a Brylcreem girl. Officers only.’
‘Let’s dance. You do dance?...’
I stayed until the last cigarette was extinguished, the last drink quaffed and joined the also-rans on the terrace. We sucked the crisp coolness of the night into our jaded lungs and listened to the trees snoring softly in the gentle breeze. My eyes were drawn to the sky. To the stars that twinkled with remote unapproachable beauty. I was melancholy at the sky’s infidelity as is a lover, discarded and miserable, who sees his ex-mistress continuing to smile and laugh with someone new. In those days of banishment I was comforted only by rain for, in my maudlin sentimentality, I imagined the sky to be weeping at my absence.
The next day we scattered to the coasts of Britain. Our destinations were various but identical. A small camp on high ground or on cliffs overlooking the shiftless seas. A lonely wooden hut nestling beneath and dwarfed by tall spindly masts towering with functional beauty into the skies. In these huts, isolated and stark, we grappled abstractedly with the enemy. Night and day we evoked evil spirits from the ether. Like spiritualists purging a malignant ectoplasm we hunted their echoes on our screens. Once spotted, their ethereal path was plotted, analysed and telephoned through to Central Control. Minutes later a new echo would appear on our screens as Royal Air Force fighters rose to intercept. With mounting tension and in silence broken only by the clipped voice of the plotter tell-taling Central Control the evasions of the enemy we would watch the silent drama unfolding on our screen. Sometimes the opposing echoes joined without equivocation in a perfect interception as the hunters found their foes. Or, slid past each other like strangers as the enemy skulked cleverly in the clouds. A violent volte-face of the enemy’s echo would bring a smile to our faces and a jibe to our tongues on the few occasions that he turned and fled for home.
Anxiously we appraised the results of our work until the two echoes joined in combat in a single oscillating blur that told of Tally-ho, twisting evasion, screaming engines, the shrill rat-a-tat-tat of machine-guns or the throatier bark of cannon. We watched the eloquent echo as fathers, brothers and lovers fought on the razor edge of life or death and were silent if the echo, after battle, moved steadily eastwards towards enemy territory leaving behind a dying echo that remained stationary for a few tragic seconds before fading, as the life it represented faded into oblivion.
10
On leaving the training school four other girls and myself were posted to a Radar station near Rye on the south coast of England. Our arrival caused considerable uplift in morale amongst the incommunicado male operators. The nearest town was seven miles away and shortage of trained personnel had virtually confined the men to camp. The air, for the first few days, was heavy with gallantries as claims were staked and counter-staked in the bid for feminine companionship. Initially, there being no suitable accommodation for Waafs in the camp, another Waaf and I were billeted with a bricklayer and his family.
We slipped easily into the unchanging routine of constant watch. Our period of duty was eight hours on and sixteen off with a team of four Waafs for each watch. One to operate the screen, one to fix the position of the echo and inform Central Control through a mouthpiece and earphones attached to the head, one to record events in a log and the fourth who acted as camp telephonist and tea-swindler. To relieve the eye-strain we alternated our duties every two hours. The hut, beneath the towering masts and situated for safety reasons 2 miles from the camp, was the first word in comfort. Completely blacked-out it creaked and groaned as the full fury of the biting wind struck from the English Channel. Inside we shivered in Balaclavas, greatcoats and scarves and interminably sipped stewed tea.
The girls were a sophisticated lot. Helen, with whom I was billeted, had come from New Zealand to study drama and had already obtained her L.R.A.M. which, she assured me, was a considerable achievement. She had remained in England to ‘do her bit’. She did that, and more. Vera was a film extra. Obviously. Her hippy walk, long flaxen hair (despite orders to cut it), scarlet nails and lips, caricatured the severity of the uniform and brought agonized frustration to the faces of the airmen as she prowled around the camp. She was in constant conflict with the Queen Bee over her hair and unofficial silk stockings but somehow managed to retain both and her freedom.
My billet introduced me to a way of life that depressed me by its monotonous indigence. Our hosts lived a pinched existence that seemed peculiarly contrived. Their income was balanced so precariously with their cost of living that an involuntary expenditure, no matter how trivial – a
broken cup to be replaced, shoes to be repaired – brought crisis. These crises though never sufficient to bring disaster, dripped at their happiness with the deadly monotony of ancient Chinese water torture. Our hostess, still young but once pretty, worked indefatigably and rarely complained. I felt guilty at adding to her burden until she told me that our rent was a ‘Godsend’. This was a way of life unimaginable in South Africa where servants permit a wife the luxury of enjoying life and retaining her looks and a shock to me who envisaged the English as aristocratic scions, languishing in vast manors whilst not hunting, shooting and fishing.
This dreariness, the unkempt hair and slack figure increased my determination not to marry and, as a concomitant of my religion, not to court. It was not a difficult decision for I had failed to find the key to men that had presumably, judging by their anecdotes, been discovered by my colleagues. At this time I had been kissed once and that not with conspicuous success.
11
During those long winter months it was an esoteric experience to see daylight. The normal cycle of day, night and time had vanished and was replaced by a regime dominated by the eight-hour watch. We rarely quarrelled. Always hungry and sleepy, our off-duty moments were spent in cat-naps or searching for food in Rye.
Helen, who shared my watch, felt it her duty to acquaint me with some of the facts of life. Her approach to the problem was basic and elementary and made me grateful for the gloom of the Radar hut that concealed my agonized blushes. Embarrassment and frank disbelief vitiated her endeavours:
‘But people don’t do that all the time?’
‘Of course they do!’
‘Even kings and queens?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you?’
‘Next question, please.’
Spitfire Girl Page 5