The Bomb Girls

by Daisy Styles

  ‘You mean there’s a chance we could be blown up?’ Alice gasped.

  ‘Well, we’re not being conscripted to wrap toffees, are we, cock?’ the older woman chuckled.

  ‘How do we know which sections are safer than others?’ Emily asked.

  The older woman burst into loud raucous laughter.

  ‘You’ll know soon enough if you get blown up!’

  As they got nearer the desk, Emily muttered to Alice, ‘Maybe working on the land would be safer?’

  Alice shook her long silver-blonde hair as she indignantly replied, ‘I’m not signing up just to shovel cow shit!’

  After they’d signed on at the Labour Exchange Emily and Alice returned to Emily’s house with a copy of the local newspaper that they’d picked up from the paper shop.

  ‘They’re opening up the old Phoenix Mill as a munitions factory,’ Emily told her mum as she poured the girls a cup of tea.

  ‘That owd place on’t moors,’ mused Mrs Yates. ‘It’s been closed for years.’

  ‘It’ll soon be open by the looks of things,’ Alice said as she gratefully took the offered tea. ‘They’re moving munitions factories out of the cities, away from the bombing, and locating them in secret locations like sleepy old Pendle.’

  ‘It says here,’ said Emily, tapping the newspaper, ‘that the government’s sending girls from the London arsenal up here next month.’

  ‘London girls, fancy!’ exclaimed Mrs Yates.

  Emily’s wide blue eyes peered over the top of the paper.

  ‘Can you believe it? There’ll be living accommodation right next to the factory.’

  ‘They’ll never get hostels built that fast,’ scoffed Mrs Yates.

  Emily threw down the paper and accepted her tea.

  ‘The Phoenix will open on time, Mam, no danger,’ she said. ‘The lads working the Howitzer guns on the front line are running out of ammo. Mr Churchill urgently needs shells and bombs and he doesn’t care who makes ’em!’

  ‘If you’re right, I reckon you local lasses will be first at the Phoenix,’ said Mrs Yates.

  Emily and Alice looked at each other and grimaced.

  ‘First on the bomb line,’ said Alice with a little shiver. ‘That’s scary!’

  CHAPTER 3

  Elsie

  A hundred and fifty miles away in Gateshead, Elsie Hogan sat riveted beside the wireless set in the cramped back kitchen where she’d just served up mashed potatoes and fried meatless sausages to her whingeing stepsisters.

  ‘YUK!’ squawked the ungrateful girls as they stabbed at the grey sausages that had more bounce than a tennis ball.

  ‘Is this the best you can do?’ Elsie’s stepmother asked. When she got no reply she raised her voice. ‘Turn off that damn radio, girl, and listen to what I’m saying.’

  Elsie jumped in fright and quickly turned off the radio.

  ‘Sorry, Mam,’ she stammered humbly.

  ‘She’s our mam not yours,’ sneered Ivy, the elder of the two girls.

  Elsie corrected herself.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Hogan, I tried mi best. It’s the rationing allowance, like.’

  ‘You’d best try harder next time,’ her stepmother grumbled. ‘Your dad would have them so-called sausages on the wall if you served them up to him.’

  Aye … and he’d have me in a stranglehold halfway up the wall alongside them, Elsie thought knowingly.

  Nobody knew her dad’s temper better than her. He never laid a hand on his new wife or her peevish girls; her stepmother would have killed him if he so much as even thought of it. But Mr Hogan spared his only daughter nothing. If anything went wrong, from a bad day at work to bad news on the radio, she’d get a belt or kick to ease his filthy mood. He’d been bad enough when her own mam was alive but once she’d died and he’d remarried there was no hope for Elsie, who the entire household treated as their unpaid servant. Elsie longed to get away but where could she go? She had no other living relations, no money, and she was hardly allowed out apart from going to the shops to pick up their meagre war rations. Her life was a round of endless misery and fear, but the radio news she’d just heard inspired her with a rush of hope. Grabbing her shopping basket and a coat, she headed for the back door.

  ‘I’m just popping out to the shops before they close,’ she called behind her.

  ‘What about the washing-up?’ her stepmother yelled after her.

  ‘I’ll only be half an hour or so,’ came Elsie’s breathless reply as she closed the door behind her.

  Down at the local Labour Exchange, gripping her basket handle tightly, Elsie stared intently at the lady behind the desk, who felt sorry for the slip of a girl in front of her. She was barely five foot tall and a bag of bones. Lank brown hair framed a delicate heart-shaped face that would have been lovely if it hadn’t been so bruised and tired.

  ‘I heard the news just now,’ Elsie started nervously. ‘Mr Bevin asking lasses to register for war work.’

  The lady behind the desk nodded and smiled.

  ‘What did you have in mind, pet, farm work or filling shell cases?’

  ‘Will I have to go away?’ Elsie asked in a tight, tense voice.

  ‘If it’s a problem, pet, I’m sure we can find work for you locally.’

  ‘NO!’ Elsie almost shouted. ‘I want to get away from …’ She blushed and stopped short as heads turned in her direction. ‘Send me as far away as possible,’ she pleaded in a whisper.

  ‘Sign on the dotted line, pet,’ the lady said as she pushed a form and a pencil across the desk. ‘There’s some bonny munitions factories a wee way down south.’

  Elsie’s feet barely touched the ground as she walked away from the Labour Exchange.

  ‘I’m going away, I’m going away! Thank you, Mr Bevin; thank you, Mr Churchill; thank you, God!’ she chanted under her breath as she skipped towards her front door, where she stopped dead in her tracks. Taking a deep breath she pushed open the door. Next time she walked out of here, she thought to herself, she would either be in a coffin or carrying a suitcase.

  Mr Hogan got his daughter in a stranglehold and all but throttled her when she broke the news.

  ‘You’re going bloody nowhere!’ he roared. Slamming her slight frame against the kitchen wall, he hit Elsie repeatedly around the head until she saw stars.

  Terrified she’d lose consciousness, Elsie cried out: ‘Dad! Dad! It’s the law. Churchill wants women workers.’

  Mr Hogan stopped his hand mid-punch.

  ‘CHURCHILL!’ he bellowed. ‘What the ’ell’s he to do wi’ owt?’

  Not daring to open her mouth, Elsie cowered on the stone floor with blood trickling from her nose. Amazingly her stepmother had saved her from another swipe, not because she had an ounce of human kindness in her but just because she enjoyed showing off her knowledge to her slow, doltish husband.

  ‘Female conscription,’ she announced. ‘There’s not enough men left to work, apart from the likes of you,’ she added with a sneer. Mr Hogan always claimed he was exempt from active service because of his miner’s lungs but his wife knew he’d bribed somebody to fix his papers. ‘Lasses are being put to work; it’s good money, mind, anything up to four pound a week.’

  Mr Hogan’s bullish eyes all but rolled out of his head.

  ‘That’s bleedin’ more than I earn!’ he roared.

  Elsie slipped into the wash house where, as she wiped blood off her face, she strained her ears to listen to the conversation in the next room.

  ‘It’d be one less mouth to feed and she can send her earnings home every week,’ her stepmother said.

  Elsie nodded in agreement; she might get a few more slaps and kicks before she left home but she was leaving all right, that was the law. As she dabbed the last of the blood away, she smiled slowly to herself. What neither her father nor her stepmother knew was that she was never coming back!

  CHAPTER 4

  Agnes

  Sitting on the lower deck of a London bus with her long dar
k hair plaited tightly under a thick net and a thin coat pulled around her tall angular frame, Agnes scowled at the April shower that battered the bus bouncing over the rutted road to Greenwich. Exhausted after a twelve-hour shift supervising a line of Bomb Girls all aged under twenty, Agnes grimly pondered her options. She could stay in London and get blown up or she could move to Lancashire where she stood less of a chance of getting blown up. It was a lose/lose situation apart from the singular fact that by moving north she would be in the adjoining county to Esther.

  Just thinking of her little daughter brought tears to Agnes’s eyes. She’d been separated from her in the autumn of 1940, which was only six months ago but it already seemed like a lifetime. Even though her heart was breaking there’d been no choice but to let Esther go; evacuees were on the move up and down the land and a little girl suffering from polio was considered a priority case for a move out of London. Agnes had just about held it together as she was parted from hysterical Esther, who ripped at her clothes and clung onto her, screaming her little heart out.

  The nurses looking after the sick children on the train heading north to Penrith were kind, firm and determined. Esther’s nurse unwound the child’s little fingers from her mother’s grip, stopped her mouth with a jelly baby then slammed the carriage door on Agnes. The last sight she had of sobbing Esther was swallowed up by a thick cloud of smoke as the train pulled out of Euston station. Wiped out by grief, Agnes had all but fallen to the ground. She had no memory of how she got home but she would never forget the sight of the empty flat when she did return. There on the lino floor was Esther’s little dolly with one leg shorter than the other. Agnes had knitted it herself and used it as a tool to explain to Esther why one of her legs was strong and healthy whilst the other remained limp and twisted. Clutching the dolly, Agnes crumpled into an armchair where she finally allowed herself to cry until her chest hurt.

  She hadn’t seen Esther at Christmas time, though she had received a charming card and photograph of her daughter from the old couple in Keswick who looked after Esther when she wasn’t having treatment at the local cottage hospital. Her little girl looked taller and stronger, though the sight of her daughter’s leg strapped into an iron calliper shocked Agnes.

  All winter she’d tried to get a few days off from the Woolwich Arsenal where she worked but nobody was granted leave, especially a mature, trained supervisor on a vital bomb line. It was the Luftwaffe who’d eventually done Agnes a favour. Their nightly bombing of the Woolwich Arsenal had become a cause of huge national concern. If the arsenal should blow the blast could reach the West End, leaving a crater over half a mile long and untold casualties. It was essential that bomb plants and Bomb Girls were moved swiftly to places of safety outside London, places like Cardiff, Aberdeen, Poole, Glamorgan, Ellesmere Port and Lancashire. Agnes smiled as she dismounted from the bus swinging her gas mask.

  Lancashire, she thought to herself, the next county to Cumberland, that has to be a move for the better – only one county away from Esther.

  The foreman told Agnes that she’d be moved to Pendle by the beginning of May.

  ‘Could I take a few days off before, to visit Esther?’ Agnes enquired.

  The foreman shook his head.

  ‘Sorry, no dispensations for leave,’ he said with a guilty look.

  ‘You’ve been saying that since Esther left last year,’ Agnes said bitterly.

  ‘It’s your fault for being such a first-rate supervisor,’ he replied. ‘It was you who spotted that witless Vera wearing hair grips and earrings last week. One spark off them and the whole cordite line would have blown!’

  Agnes gave a grudging nod. Vera just couldn’t get it into her empty head that metal in a bomb factory was banned because of its sparking potential. It had taken Agnes some time to make Vera wear a turban; she said it flattened her permawave! Nobody argued with Agnes for long. Her dark brooding eyes behind her black bottle-top glasses and her determined jaw brooked no nonsense, and anyway the workers had big respect for their supervisor. It was common knowledge that her husband had been reported missing at the start of the war.

  Agnes would never forget that sunny, sultry morning, Sunday, 3 September 1939. Everybody knew war was coming: Hitler had unleashed air and ground forces across Poland in direct response to Neville Chamberlain’s ultimatum.

  Sitting side by side, she and Stan had listened to the fateful radio bulletin which announced to the world that Britain was at war with Germany.

  As he listened, Stan frowned and shook his head.

  ‘Hitler doesn’t give a bugger about Chamberlain when he’s got his eye on the whole of Europe.’

  Agnes gripped his hand.

  ‘What will we do?’ she said quietly so as not to upset baby Esther, sleeping in her crib.

  Stan stared at her with his honest brown eyes as he replied, ‘We’ll fight, that’s what we’ll do, Agnes. We have no choice, not if our little Esther’s going to grow up a free Englishwoman.’

  Without saying a word to Agnes, fearless, loyal Stan enlisted with the Royal Engineers within days of the outbreak of war.

  ‘I’ve joined the Sappers,’ he told his wife that night as he bathed his baby daughter in a tin bath in front of the fire.

  Agnes, stirring a mutton stew over a flaring gas ring, gasped in shock.

  ‘Why so soon?’

  ‘It has to be done, Agnes,’ Stan replied. ‘Hitler’s a maniac and he has to be stopped.’

  Within months of Stan’s first and only leave Esther fell ill with polio, shortly after which she was evacuated to Keswick in the Lake District. It was no wonder the workforce had a lot of time for Agnes, who never complained or invited sympathy; she just kept focused on her belief that one day Stan would come home, one day they would be a family again and one day her little girl would run unaided into her mother’s arms.

  As April warmed into May and blossom bloomed on stumps of trees that had missed the bombing raids, Agnes collected together the few things she’d need for her imminent move north. The cherished tin of family snaps, Stan’s call-up papers and Esther’s birth certificate, her ration book and overalls, the few clothes she had in her wardrobe and Esther’s little dolly. Looking around the half-empty flat, Agnes realized she’d be glad to get away from London, the Luftwaffe and the Woolwich Arsenal. She’d had enough. A new start far away, one with no memories, was what she needed and she was counting down the days to a new beginning.

  CHAPTER 5

  Lillian

  Lillian sang to the tune of ‘Little Brown Jug’ blasting out on the radio as she mixed hair colour in a glass dish.

  ‘With a bit of luck I’ll be dancing to this at Bradford Palais tonight,’ she said chattily to her customer, who was sitting staring woefully at her hair in the salon mirror.

  ‘God, I look ninety,’ she groaned.

  ‘You’ll be fine once I’ve got this lot on your roots!’ Lillian assured her.

  In between applications Lillian couldn’t help but admire herself in the salon mirror. She’d never have let her mousy roots show a three-inch re-growth like her client. As soon as she’d started in the hairdressing business she’d taken great trouble choosing exactly the same hair dye as her favourite film star, Olivia de Havilland. Lillian was proud of her long, dark, curling locks. They brought out the sultriness of her big brown eyes, especially when she wore the same-coloured, crimson-red lipstick as Olivia de Havilland, which accentuated her soft pouty mouth. Lillian’s figure was good too: thirty-four inches up and down, she had a teeny waist, fantastic legs and a sexy swing to her shapely hips.

  Lillian took great care of herself; she knew that her face and her body were her fortune and had decided early on in life that she was going to do ‘well’, whatever it cost. She knew she could do better than Reg, the randy landlord of her shop, but Reg was a man who could lay his hands on anything. In return for black-market knickers, nylons, cigarettes, gin and chocolates, plus a room upstairs rent-free, Lillian put up with Reg’
s fumbling wet kisses. They were a price worth paying, especially as he had a car and could drive her around the Bradford clubs where she entertained the boozy clientele.

  ‘It was a great night last week with that swing band up from Sheffield,’ Lillian enthused. ‘I could’ve sung till dawn.’

  ‘Regular little songbird, you are,’ chuckled her client.

  Seeing her scruffy younger sister approaching the shop door, Lillian swiftly lowered the noisy hairdryer over her client’s head and set it to full so that she wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on their conversation.

  ‘You look like you need a good wash,’ she said to her sister.

  ‘I haven’t got a fancy man to keep me,’ her sister cheekily retorted.

  ‘If it’s money you’re after, I’ve got none. I just paid Reg the rent.’

  ‘And there was I thinking you paid him by other means,’ her sister said slyly.

  Lillian rolled her eyes.

  ‘Tell me what you’ve come for and get lost.’

  ‘I’ve come to take you down to the Labour Exchange,’ her sister answered.

  ‘I’ve got a job! If you smarten yourself up they might find one for you cleaning the public lavatories.’

  The woman under the hairdryer yelped as the machine began to overheat.

  ‘Turn this bloody thing off, will you, Lillian?’ she called out.

  As soon as Lillian raised the hairdryer her sister addressed the woman, who was cautiously tapping her hot rollers.

  ‘I was just telling our Lillian about compulsory female conscription,’ she said with undisguised glee. ‘I said she might have to close down the shop and go and work in a munitions factory.’

  The last thing Lillian wanted was to give her gloating sister any satisfaction.

  ‘You’ve said what you came to say, now push off,’ she snapped.

  Edging towards the salon door, her sister said, ‘While I’m down there shall I tell them to send you a letter as you’re too busy to sign on in person?’