Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  Naturally, I didn’t like the idea of leaving home one little bit. I don’t think anyone in that situation liked the idea of it, if you had a decent home. It was bad enough the boys being called up. We were all so close at home, especially me and Chink. Before war started, we had our own little arrangement when I went out at night, because our parents were quite strict with me. Dad wouldn’t let me be out after 9pm, so Chink would say: ‘It’s ok, Dad, Maisie and I are going out together; we won’t be back until 10.’ Then Chink and I would stroll to the top of our road – and go our separate ways. We’d meet up again at 10 to walk back down the road together. I was always going dancing; I had no idea where my brother went.

  When I think about it all now, leaving your family and going wherever you had to go was a bit of a shock to the system. We went to Worcester by train, with Dad waving me off at Paddington station; there were a lot of other young girls like me being waved off by their families. I remember the train was also crowded with soldiers; everywhere you went on a train in those years, it was always packed with soldiers with their kitbags in the aisles.

  I sat myself down in a seat with my case on my lap and soon I got chatting to this very pretty girl sitting opposite me. Eileen Smart came from Rainham, also in Essex, so we had something in common. From that point on, Eileen and I stuck together like glue, two young women in a totally unfamiliar situation, no idea what lay ahead.

  After the long train ride, there was a bus waiting for us and finally we arrived where we’d be living: a house in Lansdowne Road, Worcester, the home of a Mr and Mrs Prosser. He was a policeman. They’d arranged with the authorities to rent out their spare bedroom to two munitions workers: board and lodging, they called it. We’d be paying the Prossers out of our wages.

  So there I was with Eileen, a stranger, in a strange house in a different part of the country. We’d be sharing a bed, Mrs Prosser said. I’d shared a bed at home with my sister; we had a double bed. But I didn’t really like the idea of sleeping in the same bed with a total stranger. There was no point in saying anything, you just had to get used to it. As it turned out, me and Eileen were working on the same shift at work. The house itself was a three-bedroom house, quite sturdy. Mrs Prosser worked in a factory nearby and they had a son who would go away a lot and come back. The general idea was that I’d be able to go home to Essex once a month. But in the end, what with work and the rent taking quite a big chunk out of my wages, I only wound up going home about three times all the time I lived there.

  The factory was in Blackpole, a train-ride away from where we were living. You had to wear an overall for the work and, of course, a hat, to keep your hair back. I was used to overalls from working as a shop assistant, but I hated the hat. The colour of your apron and your hat denoted whatever your shift was: blue, brown or green shift.

  What we did was work with little bullets made of thick brass. They had a hole at the top. I worked with a machine that went round and round all the time in a big plate of soapy water, which ran down the side all the time. As the machine went round, you had to take the bullets and push them into the holes set into the plate. That was the work, day in, day out, pushing the bullets into the holes in the plate. The machines were big, like great big mechanical hammers. They would bash the thick brass into a long shape to create finished brass bullet cases.

  But the actual filling of the bullets wasn’t done where we worked. Many years later I found out that they filled the cases at the big Swynnerton munitions complex in Staffordshire: at the time, though, you wouldn’t ask any questions about what it was you were doing. It was so noisy in that factory. You sat down to do the job and the girls all sat quite close together while we worked. But you couldn’t hear one another properly if you talked. You couldn’t hear the radio either, there was too much noise going on, what with the machines.

  Eileen and I got on very well, probably because we were both similar; we desperately wanted to be back in familiar surroundings with our families. The other girls were ok, there were a lot of girls from the North there and we were told – and I don’t know if this is true – that the bosses preferred the girls from the South because they were a bit sharper on the uptake about doing things, a bit more ‘with it’. Well, the managers seemed to think that.

  It was an all-female production line. The men came in to repair the machines if they broke down. And they’d clean the floors. But there weren’t that many men working there – they’d all been called up.

  I missed my family all the time. I hated the noisy factory and the night shifts, but I also had my boyfriend, George, to worry about. George was the same age as me. I’d met him in 1940, walking along Rainham Road. I was on my way to a dance and he just started chatting to me, a young uniformed soldier, taking his chances to chat up a girl.

  George had joined the Territorial Army just before war was declared, then he was sent to Woolwich for training. Then he was posted near us, to Hornchurch, as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. What I didn’t know that night we met was although he’d seemed very keen to accompany me to the dance, he wasn’t in the least bit taken with dancing – secretly, he was hoping that this nice young girl he’d taken a fancy to couldn’t dance. He only told me this many years later.

  But it didn’t matter. After that first dance we went out together for about six weeks until he was sent away up north. Then, we kept writing to each other. We wrote letters for about five years – I didn’t see George again until after the war. After I started working at the Worcester factory I got a letter from him to say he was out in the desert, miles from anywhere, in the Middle East. So when I wrote back I mentioned my munitions job, but it seemed silly to go on about how much I hated it, because neither of us could do anything about it. There was no point in complaining to each other, was there? We were both doing what we had to do – just like everyone we knew.

  It was a struggle for me, what with the shift work and the homesickness, those 18 months in Worcester. We did have entertainment every now and again, in the big canteen: live Worker’s Playtime or a singer. But I found the routine of the work very tiring. When I was on night shift, I’d go into the toilets, sit under the sink in the toilet, no pillow, nothing – and I’d fall asleep for 15 minutes or so. I couldn’t have slept for very long, how comfortable can it be, sleeping on a stone floor? And they weren’t like the toilets we have now. They were made for workers in a huge factory; big, stark industrial toilets is one way to describe them. But that’s an indication of how exhausted I was.

  Food was a bit of a problem too. At Mrs. Prosser’s house, you got something to take to work for lunch and a cooked evening meal, if you weren’t on night shift. I can still remember eating Mrs Prosser’s lunch in the big canteen at work: four tiny sandwiches, mostly cheese, she’d hand it to me in this OXO tin. I’d sit there in the canteen, almost as noisy as the factory floor, nibbling at Mrs Prosser’s sandwiches. All too often I wouldn’t even have the appetite to finish them.

  I couldn’t eat much of the food she gave us at home, either. The food in Mrs Prosser’s house was nothing like I was used to. It wasn’t her fault, really. There was a war on. People just had to make do with what there was at the time. My mum was a good cook, which made a huge difference, even if you couldn’t buy everything you wanted. But at Mrs Prosser’s, she never had much imagination with food, she was used to just cooking for the men, plonking it down for them and they’d just scoff it, without complaint.

  At her dining table you got mostly potatoes, overcooked greens, plus a little bit of meat or something off the rations. Plus rice pudding, there was always rice pudding afterwards. I have never eaten it since. One time, I wrote a long letter to my mum, pouring my heart out to her about the food, and she even wrote back with a nice recipe for Mrs Prosser. I handed it to her and she took it. ‘Oh thanks,’ were her only words. But the end result was just the same: more boiled-up food. I suppose it was edible. Just.

  The only girls in the factory that seemed to be really ok with i
t all were the ones who had come from a tough background: some of them made it quite obvious they actually liked being away from home, having their freedom, going where they liked on their days off. And, of course, having money to spend, which was a big deal for a lot of the girls. But I didn’t feel that way: I wanted home. Yet even my visits home weren’t very successful; the house seemed strange with everyone evacuated to Ilfracombe apart from Dad.

  One day, I was called into the main office. The doctor at the factory had examined me a few days before and because I had lost a lot of weight and looked poorly, a decision had been made.

  ‘You have to go home,’ they told me.

  I didn’t put up any argument, that’s for sure. They’d decided I just wasn’t healthy enough to carry on doing the work I’d been doing. In a way, it was quite heavy work. But oh, how pleased I was to get on that train heading back home! I told myself I didn’t mind where they sent me after that or what I did – as long as I’d still be living at home. Eileen was a bit upset that I was going, but as it turned out, she was fine. Another girl was sent to stay in the house and they got on well.

  Once home, I was sent to work in Crolleys Factory in Oxlow Lane, just down the road from Sterlings, where they made machine guns. [The Sterling Armaments Company manufactured the famous Sterling sub machine gun used by the British Army for over 50 years.] At Crolleys, I worked on machines that were making parachutes and portable nylon inflatable dinghies, which air crews could strap on, if necessary. In my section we were making the thin, aluminium masts that were folded up inside the dinghies. I was still doing war work, working the same kind of rotating shifts I’d worked on at Worcester, but here I could walk to work. And I earned good money. I’ve still got one of my paypackets: £3 12 s 6d for the week.

  My time at Crolleys was so much happier. A great crowd of girls there, always laughing and joking. Some of the cheekier girls would even put little notes inside the dinghies for the fighting men. They’d write silly things like: ‘I’ll be waiting when you come home’, or ‘My name’s Elsie’. We didn’t have phones at home then, otherwise I’m sure some of them would have put their phone numbers in too! I didn’t do that sort of thing; I was writing to George all the time.

  One Saturday, I’d just left work early because I was going to a wedding. George’s dad, who lived in Wood Green, North London, had phoned through to the factory to tell me they’d had a letter. George was still in Italy, but he was ill and in hospital. The manager at Crolleys took the call and sent a messenger boy out, trying to find me – they were really good to us girls working there. It was bad news: George had a burst ulcer. It had happened while he was on board a ship heading for the Second Front, but of course, he never got there. He’d been taken off the ship in Naples. As it turned out, he stayed in hospital until the end of the war.

  In 1944, Dagenham was still very much in the firing line. We’d had a hard time during the Blitz in 1940 because there were so many factories in the area. Now London and its suburbs were under renewed attack from the lethal V1 flying bombs, known as the buzzbombs or doodlebugs, and a bit later, the V2 rockets. That was terrible. Some people who’d been evacuated from our area and had returned home actually packed up and left again, back to the country. More upheaval. It was a nightmare.

  Dad used to get in before me of a night time. He’d be down in the air raid shelter in the garden. He’d have the tea ready for me – and we’d stay down there. Dad even put a hammock up in the shelter and we had what we called a ‘bed chair’ down there, an old wooden chair that could be made up into a bed. So I’d come home from Crolleys, go straight to the shelter and stay there all night. Then I’d go to work in the morning. That’s how it was for millions of us. It was hard to handle sometimes at the end, what with the air raids and the noise all the time. It seemed like it was never going to end.

  One night, in the shelter, I almost lost it. ‘I can’t bear this, Dad, I just can’t bear it,’ I told him. Then I started crying. The noise from the planes overhead, the bombs exploding, the horrendous clunking and rattling noises coming from the trains going down the railway line just behind our house were unbelievable that night. It was the worst I’d ever known it.

  ‘Don’t worry, Maisie,’ my dad said. ‘They’re pulling the guns up and down the railway because they’re going to use them to shoot at the planes.’

  That calmed me down a bit. I have no idea if it was true; I think he made up the first thing that came into his head, just to calm me down. But there were lighter moments. I was a bit dozy sometimes. One day, Dad said to me: ‘When you come home tomorrow, buy us some Edwards’ Desiccated Soup.’ That was a kind of soup cube people used then. But of course, I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I bought a Foster Clark’s cube and put it into the soup, telling him it was Edwards’, which shows you how daft I was because Edwards’ was dark brown when it was dissolved, whereas Foster Clark’s cube was bright orange!

  Of course I blithely insisted I’d done the right thing but it was the colour that gave me away. In the end, we had a row over it, the only time I ever remember arguing with my dad. How could he know? I wondered. But I still stood my ground and argued back.

  ‘You try leaving work on a Saturday and trudging round the shops looking for Edwards,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m just saying, Maisie, it’s not the right one,’ he kept saying.

  George used to write lovely letters and little poems while he was still away. Here’s one of the poems he wrote me from hospital, written on the back of a postcard I sent him with my photo:

  Good night and God bless you

  May Angels caress you

  And always watch over you for me.

  Both waking and sleeping

  My love’s in your keeping

  I pray in my arms you’ll soon be.

  In the end, George was taken home on an American cruise ship and I got a letter to say he’d arrived at Fazakerley Hospital in Liverpool. Then he was being transferred to a military hospital until he could come home. Years afterwards, he said he always kept a soft spot for the Liverpudlians, how the bus conductors wouldn’t take their fares when the men got on the bus in their blue hospital uniforms [the light blue overalls signified that they were uniformed troops, still in hospital].

  By the spring of 1945, the ending of the war seemed to happen quite suddenly. Everyone was coming home. The rest of the family got back from Ilfracombe, George was out of the hospital, and Chink had been released from the PoW camp: he’d made his own way back and walked hundreds of miles to get home.

  Amazingly, Chink and George wound up walking down the road to our house together! By sheer coincidence, they’d actually come home on the same train from Liverpool. It was so lovely, my sister Queenie ran up the road to greet Chink – and there was George! We hadn’t even had time to put out the bunting, it just happened.

  George didn’t waste his words. As soon as we’d hugged each other he said: ‘We’re getting married next Saturday, Maisie.’

  ‘George,’ I said. ‘We can’t do that!’

  ‘We can. It’s already sorted,’ said my husband-to-be.

  In the end, of course, it was me running round doing everything. You could get married by special licence without the banns being read so that’s what we did at Dagenham Old Church on 4 June 1945 – less than a month after VE Day. There were so many of us, all across the country, who’d waited and dreamed of this day. There was a queue at the church: l4 couples had decided to tie the knot, now it was all over!

  My son, David, was born in April 1946. We moved into rented rooms in Walthamstow at first, then once David arrived, we moved to a flat in Wood Green in North London. In the early fifties, we moved again, this time right into the heart of the City of London in Gracechurch Street. George had found a job working as a messenger for a City bank and wound up as a housekeeper for the bank. The job came with a flat and we lived there until George retired in the 1980s.

  George, my wartime sweetheart, died in 2007. We liv
ed for years in a little semi in Enfield but after he went, I wanted to move back to Essex, to Braintree which I’d remembered from years ago.

  To be honest, working in Worcester wasn’t bad in itself. The other girls were ok. All those years on, I think it was me. Just being away from home and everything I knew, I missed family, that’s what it was. I knew we had to do the munitions work, but I loved my home so much. And I have never been a big eater, so what with not liking the food at the place where I lived and pining for my family, I hardly ate anything. No wonder I was so skinny: I was pining for home.

  I wouldn’t have been alone in that, of course. So many of us were separated from our families, waiting for our sweethearts to come home – you can only imagine what it must have been like for the men, so far away, not knowing if they’d get home, if at all.

  A few years ago, my son David took me on a trip down memory lane to Worcester.

  ‘Shall we go to where you were lodging?’ he said. I pointed him in the direction of the street where the Prossers lived and he said, ‘Oh, Mum, I bet you can’t remember the house.’ But I did. We knocked on the door and a man opened it.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I was stationed here during the war.’

  The man said: ‘Well, a lot of girls were stationed here, but the only one I remember was called Maisie.’ I couldn’t believe it; nor could David. It was a bit upsetting, really. The man’s mother, Mrs Prosser, had died just the week before.

  He was around my age. He said to David: ‘I’ve never forgotten your mother because your mother and her friend were always putting facepacks on. And one day, I said something daft and made your mother laugh, and the facepack cracked and she chased me round the street!’ Oh, those facepacks! How we used to put them on and walk around with them. They set like concrete, so the last thing you ever wanted was a crack. To think we really did believe they’d make a difference.