The Corps had been formed to upgrade the education of boys who hoped to join the Royal Air Force when they were called up at the age of seventeen. All the uniformed officers were themselves volunteers. Many of them had served in the Air Force during World War I; others were middle-aged school teachers, not yet called up.
Amongst young boys, to be in the Royal Air Force carried considerable prestige, so all of them strove to improve the mathematics and English which they had neglected during their school days. They learned the theory of flight and the mechanical makeup of the planes of the day. A considerable time was spent learning to recognise, under all conditions, the silhouettes of both the Allies' planes and those of the enemy; if the boys became aircrew, their lives could depend upon this acquired knowledge. They learned from flash cards, some of them cigarette cards, to recognise in an instant the make of a plane from any angle. To test their skill, they constantly played games with eachother or made up contests between teams. When finally they were called up, most of them could guarantee a perfect score.
Another skill many of them acquired, with much practice, was how to read and signal in Morse code.
So that they would be able to navigate a plane from the positions of the stars, they studied the basics of astronomy. On clear nights a lot of time was spent in the school yard, gazing at the heavens, which were much clearer in the blackout than they had been in peacetime. They made small telescopes out of cardboard cyUnders, and drew star maps. Small groups tried to lose themselves in the city, so that they could find their way home again by the stars. They had a lot of fun. It is saddening to recall that most of them were dead before the war ended.
A dentist voluntarily examined the boys' teeth and encouraged them to use a toothbrush and to have fillings attended to. Many of the youngsters had rotten teeth from poor diet or plain neglect; people did not usually go to the dentist unless toothache became unbearable.
Civilian doctors were extremely
hard-pressed, because all their younger colleagues had been called into the Forces. But one of them managed to find the time to help by examining the boys physically. He taught them to keep themselves clean and other simple rules to improve their health. I can remember the boys' skinny white chests glistening under the dim electric light, as they took off their shirts and jackets to have their heart and lungs Hst-ened to. There was not a fat boy amongst them.
The boys were issued with a uniform, which often did not fit very well. More than one mother whom I met was persuaded to unpick the garments and restitch them, so that they looked smarter. Then the boys would parade themselves before the local girls, like young cockerels in a barnyard.
Dressed in their uniforms, they drilled in the school yard, sometimes bumping into each other because in the long winter evenings it was almost too dark to see. They also went in a long ragged procession on route marches about the city. When it was too cold outside, they doffed their shirts and jackets, and did physical exer-cises inside. Many of them had never done such exercises in their Uves, and there was a lot of good-natured jostling and joking, as they fell off climbing ropes or balked at vaulting the old wooden horse in the gym. Perhaps, because they were instinctively aware that they must learn to bear pain, they endured their bumps and bruises very stoically.
I was painfully shy amongst these youngsters and their sober, middle-aged instructors. I do not remember opening my mouth there, except to say, "Yes, sir" or "No, sir". Yet I would have dearly loved, on evenings when I had not too many letters to type, to have asked if I might sit in on the mathematics and astronomy lessons. But I could not bring myself to own up to my own ignorance. I was surprised and touched when, absent with my usual dose of winter flu, the officers sent me a wonderful box of chocolates, which must have used up all their rations for at least a month. The box had a ribbon bow across one corner and a bright picture of an Elizabethan cottage. I shared the contents with the family. Then I pierced two holes in the lid, threaded themwith string and hung it up over the tiny, empty fireplace in the bedroom I shared with Fiona and Avril. It was the first ornament we had had in our room, and we all thought it was very pretty.
The officers were, of course, in close touch with their counterparts in the Royal Air Force, and so I heard at secondhand some of the gossip of the men who had fought the Battle of Britain and were now defending our cities, or going out to bomb German cities. According to the gossip, an alarming number of men lost their lives not from enemy action but from well-known faults in the construction or design of the aircraft they had to fly. No wonder RAF men referred to planes as crates. It was expensive to lose an aircraft's crew, but it was much more expensive to abandon the production or design of a particular aircraft, or to inspire the kind of people Fiona worked with in the aircraft factory to greater care in manufacture. So young men, in the prime of life, became expendable.
This realisation appalled me. I could accept that people died in wars, but notthat they should be sent to their deaths because of considerations of money.
Though moving to Moreton made it a Uttle more difficuh, I continued with the voluntary work at the Air Training Corps.
I was always a little heavy-hearted that I was assisting in sending the youngsters surging round me out to die unnecessarily. The idea weighed on me—and yet we had to have an Air Force. Perhaps these ideas increased my normal reserve, and, in consequence, I did not make a single new friend. I thought my plainness and dullness, as compared to Sylvia's sparkling personality and bright blondeness, were the causes. But looking back, I realise that the longer the war went on, the more sickened I became by the decimation of my generation, and I began to understand how my parents must have felt, when they remembered their friends lost unnecessarily in the ghastly trench warfare of the First World War. This attitude of mine was, I realised, not a popular one, and so I never spoke about it.
21
MORETON and Leasowe were famous for their market gardens. Huge crops of cabbage, kale, carrots, potatoes, onions and brussels sprouts had, for a century, been raised to feed the cities of Liverpool and Birkenhead. During the war, all this produce had to pass through the wholesale market, so that the cities were plentifully supplied. It was not difficult, however, to buy a single cabbage or a few potatoes straight from the field, if one knew the owner, and, as we became acquainted with our new neighbours, we sometimes did this, to augment what we could buy in the greengrocery shops.
Though, like many people of that period, we did not cook our vegetables very well, they did help to put the roses back into little Avril's cheeks. Edward was always pale, but he grew like a weed. Both of them trotted off each morning to thevillage school, a small stone building in the centre of the village.
The children in the school were quite as tough as those in the Toxteth school, in Liverpool, that they had attended. Since their numbers were small, however, they were better supervised, and in due course, Edward won a scholarship to Wallasey Grammar School. Avril, equally bright and with the same sticking power as Edward, did not win one. She certainly received no encouragement from her parents, and unless a girl was absolutely outstanding teachers tended to push the boys rather than the girls. In any case, girls were not supposed to be brainy—men did not like brainy women.
Tony continued his education at the Liverpool Institute. When he matriculated, he got a job in the Mercantile Marine Office in the old Customs House, to fill in time until he was seventeen and a quarter and would be called up. His hilarious stories of the seamen he met there often enlivened our evenings at home.
Living out at Moreton meant that it was difficult for me to visit several old friends,like the Spanish lady, who, long ago, had given me the Chariot, an ancient pram, in which I had trundled Baby Edward through Liverpool's depression-ridden streets. The pram was still with us in our first days at Moreton. As coal became scarce, we used it to carry our small ration from the railway depot to our home. Under such harsh treatment, it finally fell apart and was sold for scrap.
; At the Petroleum Board, our Uttle staff in the Wages and Personnel Department occasionally lost a member. The girl so like my childhood nanny married a farmer in the south of England and left to help him run the farm. Her place was taken by a quiet, grief-stricken young widow with ulcers. She had to eat frequently, to assuage the pain of the ulcers, and was rather unfeeHngly teased by some members of the staff. She soon left, and I hoped that she found more gentle and understanding companions elsewhere. Another girl, transferred to us, became pregnant with an illegitimate child. It was her second illegitimate child, and she was dismissed because of this; one child could be forgiven, but not two.About this time, our whole department was moved from the isolated building by the gate of the Herculaneum Dock, to the main office opposite the policeman's hut at the entrance to the Installation. We were now all in one big room. One of the men went upstairs to another department, and an elderly gentleman joined us. This man sat silently through the days of the war at a desk facing a wall, with his back to the rest of us, and I often wondered how he endured the wall and our noisy, vulgar gossip. I liked him very much, and sometimes when the room was otherwise empty, we would talk about the war together. Like Father, he had a map on which he would pinpoint our retreating front lines.
Because offices of management were now immediately above our heads, we were rather more prone to unexpected managerial invasions, despite the Purple Warning system. In consequence, it was our department which took the first blows of the Stocking War.
In June, 1941, all clothes were rationed, and with our usual ration books we were given a number of "points". The rationwas not generous—it took six months of these tiny coupons to buy a coat, and to be shabby became fashionable. Hats were replaced by head scarves and stockings by slacks. Before the war the wearing of slacks marked a woman as fast, and, though women doing men's jobs in factories had been encouraged to wear them, most women still regarded them as not quite nice.
Many people had at the beginning of the war a good wardrobe which could be mended or renovated, but our family had nothing to fall back upon, nor could we afford to buy with our coupons quality clothing which would last.
Very, very few women owned enough stockings to last for the duration, and it became apparent to all of us that we would rarely have enough clothing points to buy them. There was a brisk trade in clothing coupons at the rate of two shillings and sixpence per point, many of these coming from the rations of working men, who had ten points more than the ordinary citizen. But to buy these black market points would make stockings so expensive thatthey would be reserved for special occasions only.
Over several lunches, the girls in the office discussed the situation, and agreed that stockings were out.
We shaved our legs and went barelegged. Our skin looked horribly white, and all wrong with heavy shoes. So we experimented with painting the part that showed. Liquid makeup was the most effective. But cosmetics were expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain; it took nearly a bottle of liquid makeup to paint two legs. One girl swore by gravy browning, and even went as far as drawing a careful line up the backs of her legs with her eyebrow pencil, to give a resemblance to a stocking seam. But most mothers objected to losing their carefully hoarded gravy browning!
This problem was solved by enterprising firms who made up large bottles of what felt like tinted whitewash. It was difficult to get it on smoothly, but the general effect satisfied us, and we all went to work triumphantly, with painted legs. I was particularly thankful for this piece of entrepreneurship, because Mother, ashousewife, held my ration book and, consequently, the clothing coupons in it. I suspected I would be lucky if I ever saw one of them, and, indeed, this proved to be the case. No amount of cajoling would make her part with one.
"The children must come first," she told me loftily. But she herself never went outside the door without stockings. Throughout the war, I continued to buy second-hand clothing and shoes.
Bare, well-shaven, white legs called forth many ribald remarks from the male staff, and, sometimes, from men in the street. I remember a group of aged Chinese, waiting with me at a tram stop, being convulsed with giggles and pointing at my bare legs. Nobody had any sympathy for the cold that we suffered once the winter came. The skin of my legs was ruined forever by being constantly chapped.
Because the Installation Manager's secretary. Miss Hughes, wore strong, old-fashioned lisle stockings, she was still able to cover her legs. He was, therefore, unaware for some time that the younger females on his staff were stockingless. Itwas the man in the bowler hat who first told us loudly and coarsely to cover ourselves decently.
We bowed our heads and remained silent. What were we to do?
The next morning, two enterprising girls arrived neatly clad in slacks. The man in the bowler hat regarded this as an impertinent affront. The girls were subsequently sent for by the Installation Manager, who must have been informed of their impudence. They returned from the interview in tears. Either they dressed decently or they would be dismissed. Since they were young, dismissal implied that they would be either called up for the Forces or be transferred to another part of the country, possibly to a factory.
While they bemoaned the unreasonableness of the edict and wondered how they were going to tell their fathers that they faced dismissal, great waves of indignation rose up in me. This was the kind of unreasonable bullying that I had been subjected to all my life at home, and here it was again surfacing, in the workplace.
"We should all go to see him together," I said. "He must have some common senseand should be able to see the point, if it's explained carefully to him." I turned to the girls, and asked, "What did you say to him?"
The girls looked at me bewilderedly through watery eyes, and answered, "We didn't say anything!" They shrugged their shoulders slightly and looked helplessly round at us, and we all understood. People simply did not answer an employer back, if they wanted to keep their jobs.
The men in the offices thought it was tremendously funny, and came up with some more vulgar jokes about our naked legs. Behind my spectacles, behind my quiet mien, I was furious.
"Let's talk to Miss Hughes," I suggested, and the girls began to gather round me, as if I were their leader. This frightened me, and yet the situation was so difficult that I felt that we had to do something about it.
At lunch time, four of us asked the advice of Miss Hughes. Could she speak for us?
Middle-aged and with a pensionable job at stake, Miss Hughes was flustered. Shesuggested that we should buy thick stockings Hke her own.
"But they don't last that long, and they do cost coupons," I protested, painfully aware of Mother having my ration book in her handbag.
The other girls looked at each other, and I could read their agreement that bare legs were better than lisle stockings, even if one could afford them.
"Could we see the Manager?" I asked Miss Hughes. "Could you arrange it?"
"I'll speak to him," she promised bravely.
Written in stone, the edict came down once more. All ladies on the staff would in future wear stockings.
Those girls with brothers talked uneasily of begging a few of their coupons from them. "After all, men's clothes last a lot longer," they argued. This did not help me; Mother held all the family's coupons.
In company with two other girls, I went to Miss Hughes and told her that it was impossible for the girls to comply with the order.
I've already told him that," she said."But he can't see it—he said you should learn to darn."
"It looks as if every one of us will have to resign," I suggested, stammering with nerves.
"You can't do that," Miss Hughes responded, unexpectedly sharply. "You'll disrupt the whole Installation."
My stance hardened. "It won't be our fault," I retorted.
"Don't forget that you're frozen into your jobs. You can't move that easily."
"We can volunteer," responded one of my companions, overcoming her timidity at last.
"At l
east we'll get stockings in the ATS, even if they're awful, woolly ones," the other girl chimed in.
The first girl added, a little smugly, "As an officer in the Wrens, I'd get nice silky ones."
Lucky girl, I thought. She had been at a private girls' school until she was eighteen, and would stand a good chance of becoming an officer.
Miss Hughes turned a little more towards us on her swivel chair, and looked down at our pretty, neatly painted legs.She sighed, and said glumly, "I'll try again —but it's difficult to shift a York-shireman!"
We all smiled at each other, a secret society of women. Yorkshire was going to have to have his mind changed.
At lunch time, Miss Hughes announced that the Manager would see the female employees, for five minutes, the next morning at eleven o'clock. "You can't all go," she told us. "You won't be able to get into his office. There are too many of you."
A few of the older women and one or two of the younger ones refused to go. Most of them had had the foresight and the money to buy four or five dozen pairs of stockings when first the rumour of clothes rationing was circulating. Judging by the dresses they wore to the office, some of them had so great a variety of other clothing that they could have lasted through five or six years before having to buy anything but the more perishable stockings.
One of the younger, more desperate ones said, "If, say, five of us went, and Helen did the talking ..."
Helen was immediately petrified with fear. The reputation of our Yorkshire, Purple Warning, Manager was enough to strike fear into the heart of the toughest barge deckhand, never mind a crushed coward like me.
"I'm not very clever . . .'* I wavered.
"Oh, come on, Helen, you know how to put things nicely. I'll come and back you up—only, if I do the talking, I'll lose my temper, and that'll put us in the soup." This from one of my colleagues in the Wages Department, and she looked rather contemptuously round our nervous little group.
I smiled at her. And then something of the courage which had sustained me in Bootle came back to me. There, we had done nothing else but battle against the stupidities and the neglect of Government, the rapacity of business, or the cruelty or bigotry of individuals. Many times, when my sweet, over-worked colleague out there had been away, I had had to cope with all kinds of threats.
Lime Street at Two Page 14