The Bomb Girls' Secrets

by Daisy Styles

  ‘Oh, God! It really is a cowshed,’ she groaned.

  Kit, who simply adored her new home, pointed out its finer points.

  ‘It’s got a good roof, a dry floor – and it doesn’t smell of cow muck!’ she chuckled.

  Gladys was grateful to her new friends, who made her welcome and lifted her spirits, which had sunk to an all-time low on her journey over from Yorkshire.

  ‘I suppose I’ll get used to it,’ she said with a wistful sigh as she laid her suitcase on the narrow single bed in her room.

  ‘It’s a case of having to, sweetheart,’ Violet said as she hung Gladys’s smart coat on the back of the bedroom door. ‘We’re Bomb Girls now – our country needs us!’

  7. The Filling Shed

  Violet, Gladys and Kit had a fairly leisurely morning, unpacking and doing a bit of handwashing before their two o’clock shift began. After a plate of potato hash and pickled red cabbage in the canteen, where Workers’ Playtime virtually drowned out the steady buzz of female conversation, they made their way to the stores and picked up their white overalls, turbans and heavy rubber shoes. In the changing room they stripped off their jewellery and hair slides, then slipped into their new factory outfits.

  ‘These bloody boots are so heavy I can barely walk,’ Kit giggled as she stomped around the changing room like Frankenstein.

  ‘You’ll be glad of ’em,’ one of the girls changing shifts said. ‘The factory floor’s always kept wet, and the big doors to the dispatch department are wide open for the bombs on the overhead conveyor to shunt through. When a freezing cold wind blows in off the moors, it can take the frill off your drawers!’ she joked.

  Stuffing their hair into their turbans, the girls entered the filling shed, where they saw groups of women sitting around large tables. As the new girls stood uncertainly in the doorway, a tall handsome young man with cropped dark blond hair approached.

  ‘I’m Arthur Leadbetter, the factory’s safety manager,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the filling shed.’

  ‘He’s a bit of all right,’ Gladys muttered behind her hand.

  Violet hissed, ‘Shhh!’ as Arthur, who had fingers missing on both his left and right hands, pointed to trays of dark powder on the tables.

  ‘That mucky grey stuff is gunpowder. Your job is to blend it with your fingers, then pack it into metal fuses – these’ he said as he waved a fuse in the air. ‘Further down the production line the loaded fuses will be attached to a variety of bombs and explosives, which will be dispatched to air bases around the country before they’re flown out to the front line.’ All the time he talked Arthur’s gaze drifted to Violet, who even in her overalls looked lovely. ‘Each of you will be working with a tray of twenty-five fuses which, when filled, will be collected by Malc, the overseer. Any questions ask Ivy – she’s your supervisor,’ he said as he pointed out a stout middle-aged woman who beckoned to them.

  ‘Come and get yersels sat down,’ she said as she dug her hand into a tray of gunpowder. ‘It’s a bloody dirty job, but some poor bugger’s got to do it.’

  The new girls watched her smooth the gunpowder under her fingertips and tap it into one of the empty fuses; then, all fingers and thumbs, they tried to copy her. It was close, demanding work that was expected to be done at speed. Concentrating hard, Violet, Kit and Gladys filled the fuses, then stacked them in trays ready for collecting. When the whistle went for their shift break, they hurried to the bathroom to wash out the gunpowder from underneath their finger nails; then they enjoyed ten minutes in the canteen, where Kit and Violet immediately lit up a Woodbine each.

  ‘I feel like my eyes are crossing with concentrating so hard,’ Kit sighed as she covered her mouth to hide a huge yawn.

  Violet nodded as she exhaled a cloud of smoke. ‘I can hardly see straight after peering down so many narrow fuses.’

  Gladys appeared with a tray loaded with mugs of scalding hot tea and beef-paste sandwiches.

  ‘Grub’s up,’ she said as she set the tray down on the table.

  ‘Thanks, Glad,’ said Kit, who had an endearing habit of shortening everybody’s name. ‘Is it only me that’s hungry?’ she said as she wolfed down a sandwich and hungrily reached for another.

  ‘I’m hungry, but the smell of gunpowder makes me feel sick,’ Gladys replied as she played with her food.

  Violet smiled: it was good to see Kit eating well. The girl already had colour in her cheeks, and she looked less gaunt than when Violet had first met her in the cowshed.

  Arthur Leadbetter approached their table.

  ‘How did it go?’ he said, addressing the question directly to Violet, who nervously stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ she mumbled.

  Ignoring her friends, Arthur looked her straight in the eye. ‘That accent of yours suggests you’re not from these parts?’

  Violet blushed and shook her head; there was no way she was going to start up a conversation about where she came from with a total stranger. Scraping back her chair, she muttered, ‘Excuse me!’ and hurried into the ladies’ toilets.

  Standing at one of the sinks that ran in a line the length of the room, Violet looked at the give-away dent on her wedding finger. She’d thrown the ring out of the carriage window as the steam train pulled out of Coventry Station, but the mark of the ring was still there. Muttering under her breath, she rubbed her finger hard under the cold-water tap.

  ‘The past is dead and gone – nobody must ever know my secret.’

  Handsome as he was, Violet wished Arthur Leadbetter would not single her out – as far as she was concerned the less she had to do with men the better.

  Back in the canteen, Gladys was asking Ivy why Arthur had not joined up. ‘He looks strong and healthy enough,’ she remarked. ‘The forces are crying out for fit young men!’

  ‘He was with the Cheshires, working with explosives,’ Ivy said in a low voice. ‘He had a terrible accident during the Battle of Dunkirk, lost three of his fingers.’ She shook her head as she made sympathetic clucking noises. ‘After being declared unfit for war work he were sent up here. He’s the safety officer; he makes sure we don’t all go up with the bloody rockets we’re making!’ she cackled. ‘There’s no more decent a fella than Arthur Leadbetter. He could have any woman in’t factory if he set his mind to it, but he never puts a foot wrong. He’s a proper gent,’ she concluded.

  When Kit and Gladys returned to the filling shed, Violet was already sat at the table, filling fuses.

  ‘You shot off,’ Kit said with a smile.

  ‘I felt a bit sick,’ Violet explained.

  ‘Sick of Arthur Leadbetter?’ Gladys teased.

  ‘Sick of bloody men in general,’ Violet muttered under her breath.

  8. Gladys’s Secret

  Gladys desperately missed playing her alto sax, which she’d played every night in her bedroom at home. For her it wasn’t just a question of practising new numbers in readiness for the weekend shows with Jimmy Angelo; the saxophone was like a limb to Gladys, an extension of herself. It reflected her changing moods: it could be soft and seductive, loud and vampy, sad and lilting, wild and reckless, haunting and romantic. Without her music, Gladys felt incomplete and out of sync with herself, and soon she realized she was depressed, a feeling she’d never experienced in her life before. She knew the only person who would understand her mood was her brother, Les, so she wrote to him and he immediately wrote back, sending her a black-and-white photograph of himself in a smart Yorkshire Regiment uniform.

  ‘Play the damn thing, our Glad! You say you can’t play the sax in your digs for fear of upsetting your mates, who work long shifts, fair enough, but you’ve got the moors right outside your front door. Get yourself up yonder – you’ll be bothering nobody if you play on’t tops but the birds and the bees!’

  Gladys burst out laughing when she read Les’s funny, warm insightful letter. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She gazed proudly at his picture: he did look handsome, and so young and hopeful
.

  ‘God keep him,’ she prayed as she tucked the photograph in her pocket.

  The next day, after finishing an early-morning shift, she grabbed a spam sandwich in the canteen, then hurried back to the digs, where she pulled her music case out from under the bed. Opening the lid, she smiled at her precious sax lying in its navy-blue velvet bed.

  ‘Hi, stranger!’ she giggled. ‘We’re going for a walk!’

  Swinging the brass instrument in her hand, and wrapped up against the bitter cold, she skipped along the worn rabbit trails, passing shoots of bracken breaking through the cold earth. She walked for a good ten minutes before she stopped and looked around. Les was right: the only signs of life on the cold wind-swept moors were hopping rabbits and wheeling skylarks. Wetting her lips, she gave the instrument an experimental toot.

  ‘You’re out of practice, lady,’ she chuckled.

  Taking a deep breath, Gladys put her lips to the mouthpiece, and tapping her foot on the heather she launched into the Andrews Sisters’ ‘Beat Me, Daddy, Eight to the Bar’. As the music got louder and more complicated, Gladys moved her body to the rise and fall of the notes; and towards the end of the song she was dancing along to the sound of her beloved saxophone. Laughing joyfully, she flung herself down on the soft springy heather, where she lay until she got her breath back. Even though it was a chilly February day, she felt hot after her exertions, but slowly began to cool down as she gazed up at the cold, ice-blue sky dotted with scudding grey clouds.

  ‘That’s much, much better,’ she sighed contentedly.

  Dusting twigs and leaves off her skirt, she rose to her feet and swaying to the beat she played ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. Halfway through she stopped playing and, clicking her fingers, she sang solo as she had done with Jimmy Angelo’s band. Her young strong voice floated out across the moors. Then she returned to the sax to conclude the song with an ear-splitting finale. Feeling a thousand times happier, Gladys skipped back home to the cowshed with a radiant smile on her face.

  After carefully returning her instrument to its case under the bed, Gladys put the kettle on the wood-burner, which she stoked with logs so the house would be warm and welcoming when Kit and Violet returned.

  ‘Where did you rush off to?’ Violet asked as she flopped on to the old sofa.

  Gladys shrugged as she answered with a smile. ‘Oh, you know, out and about, shooting the breeze, as the Yanks say!’ she joked.

  Gladys’s secret might never have been discovered had Violet not run on to the moors in order to avoid Arthur Leadbetter’s advances. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the fella – who couldn’t like the handsome, young man whose priority was keeping the Bomb Girls safe in a very unsafe environment? But Ronnie had been irresistibly attractive at first, and look where that had got her! In order to avoid engaging with Arthur, Violet made a habit of leaving the factory as soon as her shift was over.

  One afternoon, restless and nervy after a bad dream about Ronnie, Violet could barely concentrate on her work. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Ronnie would do if he managed to track her down. If he ever found out that she’d tricked him, outfoxed him and lied to him, he would kill her. Regardless of the consequences – being arrested, possibly hanged – Ronnie’s temper would get the better of him and he’d strangle the life out of her. Arthur and her friends couldn’t help but notice Violet’s trembling hands and tear-filled eyes.

  ‘Are you all right, lovie?’ Gladys asked over their tea break.

  Violet shrugged as she tried to answer with a cheery smile, ‘That time of the month, you know.’

  Back in the filling shed, Arthur was getting anxious. ‘Don’t overfill the fuses,’ he warned when he saw her hands shaking as she worked. ‘Take a break if you’re not feeling well,’ he added in a low concerned voice.

  Violet ignored both his concern and his advice; instead she stayed on. But as soon as the hooter went for the end of her shift, she shot out of the building and ran up the hill to the safety of the cowshed. Once inside, too restless to sit down and worried that Arthur might take it into his head to follow her, she grabbed a coat, which she threw over her shoulders, then set off at a brisk pace over the moors. In the February sunshine, which had a sharp cold edge to it, she wandered along, criss-crossing paths, not really paying attention to where she was going. Swinging her arms and throwing back her shoulders, she quickened her pace, and, as she did so, felt the fear flow out of her. Oh, it felt good to be free!

  As the sun, a ball of brilliant, bright orange, started to slide over the western hills, Violet stopped dead in her tracks as she heard the sound of music sweeping across the moors. Clear as a bell, strong and melodic, it made her catch her breath in amazement.

  ‘Where’s it coming from?’ she said out loud as she hurried up the hill towards the source of the music.

  Violet’s jaw dropped when she saw Gladys on a grassy mound, surrounded by heather and sprouting fronds of green bracken, blowing on a saxophone!

  ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped as Gladys, totally unaware that she had an audience, played her heart out.

  When Gladys stopped for breath, Violet loudly applauded before walking towards her flabbergasted friend to say, ‘That was unbelievable, Glad!’

  Blushing and embarrassed, Gladys hugged the sax to her chest as she shyly asked, ‘What’re you doing here, Vi?’

  ‘I haven’t followed you, if that’s what you mean,’ Violet answered quickly. ‘I just fancied a walk, I was wandering around when I heard music, wonderful music,’ she added with a smile. ‘And I followed it to you.’

  Throwing an arm around her friend, she gave her a hug. ‘Why are you keeping all this wonderful talent a secret?’ she whispered.

  Gladys slumped to the ground; tugging at Violet’s hand, she pulled her down to sit beside her.

  ‘It’s only a secret here in Pendleton,’ she said. ‘At home in Leeds I played in a swing band. I loved it more than anything in the world,’ she finished sadly.

  ‘So WHY keep it a secret here? You’ve got a real gift – you should play for me and Kit!’ Violet suggested excitedly.

  ‘Oh, yeah, and keep you both awake all night blasting out “In the Mood”! Gladys joked.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Violet assured her. ‘Come on,’ she said as she pulled Gladys to her feet. ‘Let’s go and surprise Kit!’

  Back in the cowshed, Violet couldn’t help but notice that once Gladys started playing her sax the rippling melodies even seemed to chase away the habitual sadness from Kit’s dark eyes.

  ‘MORE! MORE!’ she cried as she clapped her hands like an excited child.

  Happy and relaxed, Gladys began regularly practising in the cowshed till late into the night, and Kit especially loved her wild boogie numbers. When she abandoned herself to dancing around the room with Violet, she suddenly felt young and elated; and, though it was a fleeting sensation, it always left her racked with guilt afterwards. How could she experience even the smallest joy when she wasn’t with her baby? But Gladys’s gentler numbers, serenades and love songs sent Kit drifting into a dream world where she was united with Billy and lived happily ever after, so all round the music was a real tonic for her.

  News of Gladys’s skills spread around the canteen, and it wasn’t long before she was standing on a metal table entertaining the Bomb Girls during breaks. It made a pleasant change from the heated conversations that had been stirred up amongst the workers about the rights and wrongs of area bombing that had been issued by RAF Bomber Command. Its directive, to allow legitimate bombing in civilian areas, divided the munitions girls.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Violet protested. ‘It makes us no better than the Germans during the Blitz; randomly killing innocent civilians has to be a sin in the eyes of God.’

  Kit, fresh off the boat from Éire, which had declared its neutrality at the beginning of the war, was a little baffled.

  ‘Will somebody be after telling me what the feck’s the problem here?’

  ‘
In the past there’s been an understanding about steering clear of bombing civilian areas, but, since the Germans don’t share that feeling, Churchill’s allowed Bomber Command, that’s the RAF,’ Gladys explained, ‘to legitimately bomb civilian areas in Germany.’

  ‘And who decides what’s legitimate and what’s not?’ Kit asked in all innocence.

  ‘That’s the burning question!’ Violet exclaimed. ‘Some think that what’s good enough for Jerry is good enough for us, whilst others say it’s not war but mass murder.’

  It was a relief to drown out the heated discussions with loud music. When the Bomb Girls heard their top war-time favourites, ‘Tuxedo Junction’ and ‘PEnnsylvania 6-5000’, they simply couldn’t sit still. Jumping to their feet, they spun and twirled around the canteen until the hooter sounded, calling them back to work.

  By popular demand, if she wasn’t on the night shift, Gladys played and entertained her co-workers every Friday lunchtime. It was sweet to watch her pals relax to her music; it made Gladys happy to see the fear and tension fall away from them. For a few precious minutes they could forget about the misery of war and rationing and briefly abandon themselves to the magic of her music.

  ‘Thanks, lovie,’ cried the women as they returned, a lot happier, to the cordite line or the dispatch sheds. ‘Your music brings a bit of joy and romance into our lives.’

  One evening in the digs, as they drank cocoa around the cosy wood-burner, the three friends talked about the future.

  ‘I just can’t imagine life without war,’ Gladys sighed.

  ‘You know,’ Kit confessed, ‘with Ireland being neutral, I have to say I was hardly aware of it till I arrived here. I couldn’t believe the terrible bomb damage in Manchester, and I hear things on the radio every day that frighten the bejesus out of me.’

  ‘There’s only one thing we can do, Kit, and that’s “Keep calm and carry on!” ’ Violet advised as she quoted the familiar wartime phrase.

  ‘Peace has to come one day,’ Gladys said wistfully. ‘Then what will we do when we’re not building bombs?’