Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys

by Mary Gibson

  ‘Did you know George offered to take Peggy back?’ May whispered.

  Granny Byron raised her eyes. ‘I’m not surprised. It’s Lord Byron in there, thinks he can turn up out the blue and put the world to rights. Frightened the life out of poor George he did, told him he’d end up tied to the bottom of a Thames barge if he didn’t do the right thing and give her back her home.’

  ‘It’s made her even worse. Now she thinks she’s got to go back to him!’

  ‘Well, that’s a load of old cods. She don’t have to do nothing she don’t want to.’ Her grandmother flicked the tea towel vigorously round the cup.

  If only, May thought, we were all so sure of ourselves as Granny Byron.

  But she said no more about it, deciding to make the most of her family being together this Christmas, simply glad to spend time with them until later that evening, when she decided she must make good her promise to Bill and visit his parents. Two rabbits and a chicken had made the journey with her from Moreton-in-Marsh and she retrieved them from the safe. The cold weather had kept them fresh, but they needed to be delivered today. Peggy looked as though her forced cheerfulness was beginning to slip, so May asked her to come too, and together they made their way through the blacked-out streets to St James’s Road. Moonlight bounced off the banked snow on either side of the road, and the white hoops round the trees helped to guide their way. When they arrived at the Gilbies, there was a party in full swing. May was greeted by Bill’s mum and dad as if she were already their daughter-in-law, and Peggy was enveloped in a warm embrace by Mrs Gilbie.

  ‘You two must be frozen. Here.’ Mr Gilbie handed them both a glass of sherry. ‘That’ll warm you up. Come and say hello to our Sammy and Albie. At least we’ve got two of our boys with us for Christmas.’

  Poor Mr Gilbie looked mortified as he saw May’s face fall. ‘Sorry, love, foot-in-mouth disease, me.’

  But it did May good to be around Bill’s family. It made him seem closer, especially when Mrs Gilbie took her aside and they compared notes from his letters.

  ‘My Sam’s of the opinion Bill will be going to the Far East, just from reading between the lines. Our Bill’s asked for some calamine lotion, and he’s not very good in the sun, so he’s heading for somewhere hot, we know that much.’

  It was such a small thing to hold on to, and even if it was wrong, it was comforting to picture him going towards somewhere. Now she could at least fix him in space and time. Mrs Gilbie asked after her mother and then looked over her shoulder at Peggy, who was laughing at a story Mr Gilbie was telling about Jack.

  ‘This business with George has really shook her. It’s none of my business, but I don’t think it’ll do her ’apporth o’ good.’

  ‘I agree, Mrs Gilbie, but she’s trying to think of the future.’

  ‘I’ve told her I don’t mind how long I have Pearl, she can work all the hours God sends to make up her money, and to be honest, I think it’ll be the best thing she can do. Keep herself busy.’

  May nodded, wishing with all her heart that hard work was enough to ease the pain of Peggy’s broken heart.

  ‘What’s going to happen about Jack? Has anyone from Harry’s family been in touch?’

  ‘Only an old uncle in Camberwell, but he’s got no kids – he’d be no good looking after a toddler. Harry never talked about his wife’s family. I don’t think they ever got on. So, unless we hear otherwise, love, it looks like it’s down to us.’

  The woman smiled, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to take on the responsibility of another person’s child. But May had grown to expect nothing less from the couple, whose house and hearts always seemed open to all.

  *

  May hadn’t woken to a Christmas morning without a sense of loss since the first Christmas of the war, when their lives had seemed far removed from the conflict. Now it felt natural for her mind to fly straight to her brother Jack and Emmy’s family and all the countless neighbours they’d lost. But most of all this Christmas, her thoughts were with Bill, who she was determined would never be on that roll call. He might be absent but he would never be lost.

  Still, it was necessary to try for some festive feeling, for without it, what was the point of a Christmas at home? She might just as well have stayed on the gun site. Her father gave his customary toast to absent friends and they made a great fuss of Pearl’s first Christmas. They listened to the King’s Christmas broadcast on the wireless, and, when he talked about the family circle, May couldn’t help feeling part of a family much bigger than their own, whose losses were every bit as poignant.

  After Christmas May returned to camp. She left her mother and sister with their father, and could only hope that the New Year of 1943 would once again see them all living back together in Bermondsey for the first time in over two years. She saw the New Year in with her pals and lifted a glass at midnight to Bill, knowing that he would be doing the same, if only in his thoughts. But her hopes for her rebuilt home life were shattered when, after the long respite from attacks, an air raid shook the Surrey Docks. Peggy wrote that the thunder reached all the way to Southwark Park Road, and that the shock waves had travelled along the river so their house shook. It was all their mother needed to shatter her newfound courage, and the next day Mrs Lloyd packed up her bags and took the train back to Moreton-in-Marsh.

  *

  For May, the year was lived through letters, the things that seemed most real to her. Bill’s letters came in bunches, five or six at a time, and then weeks of nothing. Sometimes they crossed and she would have to painstakingly piece them together, like a puzzle that her life depended on. It seemed imperative that she get all the small events of his largely dull daily routine in their correct order. The letter which told her that he was safely on board the troopship made her feel woozy, as if she was the one getting used to the rise and fall of the deck beneath her feet. He couldn’t tell her much about the ship and nothing about its destination, the censor’s signature at the bottom of the letter a discreet reminder that they were not alone. But she knew he now slept in a hammock, slung around the side of the mess deck. He sometimes had no room at a table to write and so leaned on his kitbag. He said the food was much better on board than in Morecombe. He could buy fruit and as many cheap cigarettes as he liked. And though he’d been flung out into the wide world, it seemed to May that his world had shrunk rather than expanded. Bounded by endless grey seas, his letters were a record of small domestic details, interspersed with a refrain of melancholy longing for her, which he always tried to end on a cheerful note. I am missing you terribly, and wishing that we had married when we had the chance. But am making the best of it, at least I can write to you and I can imagine what you are doing… He asked her endless questions, knowing he would not receive answers for weeks or even months, never using place names, or the words ‘bombs’ or ‘guns’, for fear of alerting the censor. How are things with your mother, is she home yet? Are things bad at the base? Has your dad’s house seen any more trouble?, finishing off with I will just have to trust that all is well with you…

  How could she possibly reply, except in kind? With as much forced good cheer as she could muster, she shot off her letters into the dark, like shells from an ack-ack gun, and there was no black box of a predictor that could tell her when or if they would reach their target. But sometimes a letter would come back, and she would smile secretly to herself for she knew she’d scored a direct hit.

  My darling, he would write, how strange, that though we are so far apart, you should have been thinking about the very thing that I have!

  What did it matter if those letters were as rare as the nights when her team downed a Heinkel bomber; it meant that she and Bill were still somehow connected and it was the deepest joy she could find.

  28

  Absent

  March–June 1944

  Emmy burst through the hut door and slammed it shut behind her. May looked up from the service-dress jacket draped over her knees. It was
kit-cleaning night and she was working polish into the tunic buttons, buffering them to a shine.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ May asked.

  ‘I’m right cheesed off. The buggers have gone and cancelled all our soddin’ leave and I was due ten days!’

  May carried on polishing. ‘All leave? Are you sure?’ Emmy had a habit of exaggerating.

  Her friend dropped herself down on to May’s bed with such a jolt that she dropped her button brush. Immediately Emmy scrabbled under the bed to retrieve it.

  ‘Dust under here, Corp! We won’t get no prizes for best-kept hut like this.’ She handed May the brush. ‘That’s not like you.’

  The truth was that May’s normal obsession with smartness had waned a little over the past year. The war had been going on far too long and she was desperate for it to be over. As the Luftwaffe stretched itself thin across the world’s battlefields there had been fewer bombing raids, and the battery was as slick and well trained as it was ever going to be. With radar, their night-time successes had been phenomenal, and though the war was by no means over, she was beginning to relax in the hope that there was simply no more that the Germans could throw at her home. Sometimes she allowed herself to imagine it ended, with Bill back home, and a chance to finally begin their life. All those dreams that had faded from technicolour to grey, perhaps they could be revived again.

  ‘I’m not kiddin’ you, May. Sarge told me. All leave cancelled, in-fuckin-definitely!’ Emmy bashed the iron bedstead and May dropped the button brush again.

  ‘Oh, for gawd’s sake, Em.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  May gave up on her buttons. ‘I tell you what, though, Em. If that’s right, then it might mean it’s finally happening... what we’ve been waiting for.’

  ‘The invasion?’

  May nodded. ‘And if it is, we shouldn’t complain because once that happens, we might see the end of it… Just think, Em, what if it’s over this year?’

  May felt a tremor of excitement and she could see that she’d caught Emmy’s imagination too. ‘Oh, I’d love to see me brothers home safe… and your Bill. No more food queues, no more clothes’ rationing. No more raids…’

  ‘No more worrying, no more missing people…’

  Emmy smiled fondly. ‘Ahh, you poor thing, you’re still as love struck, ain’t you? He’ll come back.’

  And when news about the cancelled leave got round to the rest of the girls they all agreed with May: it must mean the final push into Europe was imminent. But not long after, when a US army camp sprouted almost overnight in fields surrounding the gun site, they were certain of it. Lines of tents appeared and though well camouflaged under acres of netting, it was obvious that jeeps and tanks were massing. The other arrivals, which went some way to make up for Emmy’s loss of leave, were the attendant GIs, who flocked into Barkingside and Ilford dance halls like exotic geese, laying the golden eggs of nylons, chocolates and cigarettes. Before the month was out Emmy had nabbed one of her own, Chester from Milwaukee.

  It was frustrating not to be able to go home to London, to know something so huge was about to happen and not be able to share it with her family. She had always counted herself lucky with this posting, for at least when the trains were running well, she could be back in Bermondsey in a couple of hours. But now she felt as cut off as if she were back in Wales. On her last leave in Bermondsey, a few weeks before the clampdown, she’d seen for herself evidence of the invasion plans coming together, when a mysterious pall of smoke had appeared in the sky over the borough. It certainly wasn’t from bombs or fires, for there’d been no raids. It had seemingly materialized out of the air itself, spewing into the sky above London Bridge and forming a persistent low hanging cloud all along the river. Her father had hinted that it was connected with his unusually long work days at the docks, though all he would say was that there had been a lot of ‘extra’ activity going on which had nothing to do with unloading tea chests. He was too much a stickler about careless talk to put it plainly, but May had read between the lines. He’d put his hand on the side of his nose and said, ‘I think that smoke is friendly, if you see what I mean!’ And then she was certain that the dark pall was a British conjuring trick, smoke and mirrors to hide the construction of the rumoured Mulberry harbours being built at the docks from the Luftwaffe spy planes.

  One night in June Emmy came back from a dance in tears. Chester from Milwaukee had stood her up and the girls duly administered their tea and sympathy. But the next day May discovered the reason for Chester’s desertion. She had a couple of hours off and decided to cycle up to the forest, intending to visit the fairy ring. As the tree line came into view, she passed the site of a temporary US army camp, but the fields, where rows of tents had been, were now full of empty brown square patches. She stopped: there were no ablution tents, no generators, no soldiers in evidence at all. There were no loud American voices, calling drill; instead only a blackbird’s song broke the silence. The whole army camp had simply disappeared overnight and along with it all the jeeps and tanks. She got on her bike and was speeding towards Hainault Forest when she felt the tarmac begin to shake, and a deep rumbling noise caused her to brake and come skidding to a halt. Bearing down upon her was a thunderous convoy of tanks. She hopped off her bike and scooted on to the verge just as the behemoths rolled by. She felt puny beside them, but their power was palpable and filled her with hope. She couldn’t tell how long she waited and watched, as the jeeps and armoured vehicles paraded in front of her, but the line seemed unending. From one open-top jeep a GI waved, then gave her the thumbs-up. Another even threw her a packet of cigarettes, which she plucked from the air, eliciting a whoop from the young soldier. She wondered if Chester was in the convoy, hoping she might catch a glimpse of him and be able to tell Emmy.

  When finally all that was left of their presence was the dust rising from the edge of the road, she set off again. And in the peace of the circular clearing, beneath the freshly greened beech tree, she sent her thoughts to Bill. She knew that he was able to get news reports where he was, but she wanted him to know now, so in a ritual she’d confessed to no one, she sat in the clearing and whispered.

  ‘It’ll be over soon, darling. I’ve seen our invasion force leaving. They won’t need me on the guns, they won’t need you over there… We’ll be together this Christmas, I promise.’ Then she took pen and writing paper out from her saddlebag, and began to write him only the things that the censor would allow, which included neither disappearing US army tanks, nor smoke and mirrors over the Thames, nor indefinite cancelled leave.

  *

  After the jubilation of the D-Day landings had subsided, it seemed May had been right. They began to get used to the idea of the turning tide. Their talk was of nothing but what would happen to the battery now, and May wondered if they would even be needed in the ATS. Perhaps she would go back to Garner’s, or what was left of it, and make shoe leather for the boys tramping all over Normandy. But then reports began to filter through that there would be reprisals for the invasion, and that a weapon which needed no eyes to steer it, no pilot to put himself in danger, and which travelled at four hundred miles an hour was coming their way.

  She heard the first one, long before she saw it. Nothing like the undulating pulse of a plane engine, more like the grating cough of a motorcycle. Then she spotted it, caught in the darting searchlights that sliced the night sky, a small black torpedo shape, with a jet of flame spewing from its rear. She’d never been so frightened, not even in the Blitz. This eyeless, inhuman assailant looked like something from a Flash Gordon film. But as the searchlights foundered, and she and her team struggled to keep up with the readings being fed into the predictor, it dawned upon her. This weapon was flawed: its very inhumanity made it vulnerable. And later, after her team had been relieved and they came back to the NAAFI, trembling with fatigue and stinking of cordite, she explained to her teammates why they must not be afraid.

  ‘It’s our dream come true!
I’m telling you, we can beat it!’ she said, so excited she forgot to blow on the, for once, steaming cocoa and scalded her tongue.

  ‘Tell that to the hundred that got away tonight!’ Bee said, before she groaned and put her head on the table. ‘Your optimism sometimes makes me tired, Corp.’

  ‘No, listen, it stands to reason. These things are set to go at a constant speed, a constant height and on a constant target. Once we’ve got those fed in, we can’t help but hit them!’

  Once this had sunk in, it was as if a smile migrated round the table. Finally, all their training meant something. Now May understood why she had chosen the predictor for her speciality. It ran in her blood, for what else did Granny Byron do, when she read the leaves, but predict where in space and time a person would have to be in order to rendezvous with their fate? Now she felt she could harness all her grandmother’s second sight and roll it into science. She would use it, just like any other instrument or weapon, in her efforts to defend her home. For the doodlebugs’ set target was somewhere dear to her heart – they were being aimed at Tower Bridge. All of them, heading straight for Bermondsey. But first, a good few had to pass over Essex, and May was one homing pigeon who wasn’t going to rest while she had a chance of knocking every last one of those merciless birds of prey out of the sky.

  These were nights when May barely slept. Not since the height of the Blitz had she felt such purpose and camaraderie. Then one night, as they were tracking a doodlebug at two thousand feet, May heard the silence, deep and destructive, which always preceded their explosion. It was a sure sign that the doodlebug had run out of fuel and would even now be dropping like a stone. She couldn’t understand why her team and the girls on the height finder weren’t all diving for the shelter. The silence was ear-splitting; it would be scant seconds before the thing landed. She shouted a warning: ‘Shelter!’ And four pairs of eyes stared at her in incomprehension. ‘Shelter!’ she bawled again, then not waiting for them, she threw herself under the lea of the sandbags, quickly followed by the others. They had barely time to wedge themselves in before the blast hit them. These pilotless bombs would always explode above ground, sending shock waves across hundreds of yards, demolishing everything in their path, so that although the bags protected them from the full force of the blast, May and her team were upended like skittles in a bowling alley. She felt herself thrown over the concrete wall of the gun emplacement, rolling and bouncing till at last she came to rest on her back with a pain like liquid fire tearing through her arm. Screams and shouts reached her and then, through a lurid wall of flame, she saw the barrel of their gun come spinning through the air, as though it were light as matchwood. It seemed to be heading straight for her, but before it pounded into the place where her head was, a pair of hands grasped her ankles and she felt herself dragged out of its path.