Bluebirds

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘Pumpkin time,’ he said.

  The bitter cold outside sobered her up instantly and brought her sharply down to earth. It was snowing again – big soft flakes that tickled her face – and there was an icy wind blowing from the river. Her teeth chattered as they waited for the car and all she could think of now was the long journey ahead in the dark and snow and the awful possibility of being back late. As they drove out of London she sat bolt upright in the passenger seat until, gradually, tiredness took over. Her eyes drooped and she leaned her head against the car window and fell fast asleep.

  When she awoke they were still travelling through the night and it seemed to her that it was snowing harder than ever. The wipers were sweeping back and forth across the screen and what little she could see of the road ahead was all white. She rubbed her stiff neck and checked on the petits fours, now rather squashed, in her raincoat pocket.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Still about ten miles or so to go,’ he answered shortly. ‘Sorry, but I’ve had to go slowly. The roads are pretty bad.’

  She tried to see her watch. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘About twenty to.’

  ‘God, I’m going to be late!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you in all right somehow.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she told him furiously, ‘but it’s me that’ll be doing jankers. Can’t you go any faster?’

  ‘Not if you want to get there at all.’

  As he spoke the Lagonda skated unnervingly on a patch of ice. Anne sat in grim silence. She was feeling slightly sick, either from the Steak Tartare, or the champagne, or from sheer panic – probably all three. If she were put on yet another charge she would be in serious trouble. She’d been on four in the last three weeks – for cutting across the hallowed, forbidden parade ground, for not wearing her beret out in the town (the snoopy service police were everywhere), for not folding her bedclothes exactly right and for answering Sergeant Beaty back. On the last time ASO Newman had been absolutely livid with her. You’re wasting everyone’s time with your silly behaviour, Cunningham, and that’s inexcusable when we’re all supposed to be doing our very best to help our country win this war. You should be ashamed of yourself.

  It was well past midnight by the time they turned down the road to the main gates and by then she was fuming with rage. Johnnie seemed maddeningly unconcerned.

  ‘I’ll get you in with me. I’ll promise them a couple of bottles of whisky and that’ll fix it.’

  ‘Supposing it doesn’t? I’ll get into worse trouble than I am already for being out with a bloody officer! You can drop me further round the side of the ’drome. There’s a place there where I can get in under the wire.’

  ‘Are you sure you can?’

  ‘I’ve done it before,’ she said coldly. ‘Several times. In and out, as a matter of fact.’ She heard him chuckle in the darkness. ‘There’s nothing to laugh about. If I get caught I’ll be doing jankers for weeks. And it’ll all be your fault.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Anne,’ he said. ‘Truly sorry. It was the damned snow . . . I swear it won’t happen again.’

  ‘It certainly won’t as I shan’t be coming out with you ever again.’

  He drove past the main gates and round the perimeter of the ’drome, following the high fence, and stopped the Lagonda where she told him. It was still snowing heavily and she peered through the side window, just able to make out the disused hut a short way inside the fence that marked the point where she and Pearl had managed to loosen the bottom edge of the wire. They had made use of it on a number of jaunts into town, so far without getting caught. The WAAF huts lay further beyond.

  Johnnie got out of the car with her but she turned and hissed at him.

  ‘Just go! If anyone sees the car they might come over.’

  ‘They won’t see it with the lights off and I’m not leaving until you’re safely under that wire.’

  She stumbled and fell in the ditch but shook him off angrily when he tried to help her up. It took her a while to find the loose section, digging along with her bare hands in a deep drift of snow until she could feel it, and because it was so deeply embedded she was obliged to accept his help in freeing it. He held it for her while she slithered underneath on her stomach and then replaced it after her and kicked the snow back.

  ‘Good luck, Anne . . .’

  She heard him call that softly but ignored it and made quickly for the cover of the disused hut a few yards away. His car started up again and turned round, slipping and sliding, before going back the way they had come. When the sound had died away she waited by the side of the hut wall, listening. The wind was making a faint moaning sound, eerie and bloodchilling, and the sky above her glittered icily. She was so cold now that she thought that she would freeze to death where she was standing if she didn’t move soon. But, just as she was about to make a dash across the open ground in the direction of the WAAF huts, she heard the trudge of footsteps in the distance and retreated hurriedly round behind the back. Her teeth were chattering so loudly that she was afraid whoever was patrolling the wire would surely hear them, and if they shone their torch down the side of the hut they would be bound to see her tracks in the snow. She clenched her teeth tightly and waited. The footsteps were passing the hut now and stopped suddenly. A torch beam was wandering about, probing the darkness. Anne held her breath, shut her eyes and prayed. Then the boots tramped on again, crunching away over the snow, and she let her breath out in a low whistling sigh of relief.

  She waited a few more minutes until she was quite sure that the coast was clear and then moved as fast as she dared across the snowy waste. With luck her tracks would be covered completely by morning. She tiptoed past Corporal White’s little room at the end of the hut. It was pitch black inside, the coke stoves cold and dead, the room quiet. She groped her way down the row of beds on her side, counting them carefully until she reached her own. Someone had made up her bedclothes and there was a lump beneath the blankets.

  Pearl stirred. ‘That you, love? Christ, I was worried about you. Shoved your bolster down so’s they might not notice you weren’t back . . . bloody lucky it worked. Where the hell’ve you been?’

  Anne told her in whispers as she undressed. There was a sleepy chortle and then a deep sigh.

  ‘Oh, you jammy sod, you!’

  ‘Any questions so far?’

  Nobody spoke. The RAF instructor looked at the group of girls gathered round the mock-up plotting table.

  ‘Come on, now. One of you must have something to ask. The men always do. Don’t tell me you lot know it all first go.’

  The girl standing next to Virginia raised her hand timidly. She had frizzy, permed hair and a worried expression.

  ‘I don’t think I quite understand . . . the numbers going across and down . . . I don’t quite see . . .’

  She stared down at the black and white map before her which showed south eastern England, the Channel, northern France and Belgium. It was divided into equal squares. Fighter Command Group boundaries were shown by dotted lines, the Sector boundaries by unbroken ones, and the fighter stations marked by red discs.

  ‘What don’t you see?’

  ‘How the numbers work.’ She lifted a puzzled face.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple. The numbers will give you the exact plot position on the map, just like I showed you. You will be given a four-figure grid reference through your headphones and you mark your plot accordingly, calculating it from these numbers – remember what I said? For example, if you were given 1-5-0-5 you would go across one and a half squares and up half a square.’ The instructor’s stick travelled across the map. ‘Is that clear?’

  The girl’s face was red and she looked as though she might burst into tears. ‘Not really.’

  He sighed. ‘Then I suppose we’d better go through it all again, from the beginning.’

  Virginia watched and listened, concentrating hard. She had understood how to plot using the grid
numbers easily enough, but that was only a part of it. The metal arrows for marking the plot position and direction were different colours – red, blue or yellow – and a colour-coded clock on the wall was divided into five-minute triangular segments painted in each of those three colours, in rotation. The instructor had explained the point of it. You had to be sure to use an arrow of whichever colour the clock’s hand was passing through. It was so that the age of the plot would be clear to the Operations Room Controller on the dais above. And to go with the arrows there were wooden blocks. You slotted plaques onto the blocks to show the height and strength of the aircraft, and whether they were hostile or friendly.

  Going patiently over old ground, the instructor made up another block and pushed it over the map’s surface to rest beside an arrow somewhere north of Eastbourne.

  ‘There you are. Thirty plus hostile aircraft at fifteen thousand feet, in that position and moving in that direction. All clear?’

  They nodded. He looked sceptical.

  ‘Well, we’d better see if it really is. We’ll take it in turns.’ He pointed to Virginia. ‘You first. Now, imagine you’ve just been given this information . . .’

  She listened to him carefully. Then she glanced at the coloured clock and picked up a red arrow. Following the grid numbers she had been given she placed the arrow on the map exactly over Tunbridge Wells, positioning it with the magnetic-tipped rod. Then she made up her block – H for hostile, 40+ for the number of aircraft, and 20 for the number of thousand feet – and pushed that over to stand beside her arrow.

  The instructor was lukewarm. ‘Not bad. But you were slow. Much too slow. You’re all going to have to be a lot quicker than that. Next one.’

  They had already learned from the table map that RAF Fighter Command was divided into Groups and the Groups into Sectors. Now they discovered more about how an Operations Room worked. Fighter Command Headquarters, the instructor told them, was like the nerve centre of a spider’s web that reached across the country, and information was passed up and down the strands. Messages and orders were sent to the Ops Rooms of fighter stations where the Controller-in-Charge directed his squadrons. He sat high up on a balcony or dais so that he could have an uninterrupted view of the plotting table.

  ‘He can see the whole situation spread out in front of him, at a glance. And your job is to give him the latest information fast and accurately.’

  Ops A sat next to the Controller and took down messages as they filtered through and Ops B sat on his other side, assisting. An Army officer was also present to keep the anti-aircraft batteries informed.

  ‘And this,’ the instructor continued, indicating a large blackboard on the wall, ‘is known as the tote board. As you can see it’s marked up to show the state of the squadrons – Airborne, Standing By, At Readiness or Available. The Controller has to be able to see all that as well as everything else.’

  They were told about the men of the Observer Corps who kept watch for enemy aircraft and sent in their information over field telephones, and they learned something of the chain of mysterious stations strung along the coastline which could somehow track aircraft by radio waves.

  And all the time the importance of secrecy was impressed upon them. Their instructor was blunt.

  ‘If I had my way you girls wouldn’t be doing this job. I never yet knew a woman who could keep a secret, so I hope you’re all going to prove me wrong. Just remember that what goes on in our Ops Rooms is something the enemy would give a great deal to know about. One silly, talkative girl could give it away. And people will want to know about it – your friends, your family . . . they’ll be curious about what you do. They may get angry and upset when you won’t tell them, or they may try to guess, draw you out, tease you about it . . . Whatever they do or say you must say absolutely nothing.’

  Virginia absorbed every word. During her first few days in the WAAF she had wondered how she was going to survive. She had not bargained for the bewildering strangeness of it all. She had been unprepared for the brusque ordering about, the rudeness and unfriendliness of some of the other recruits, the cold and discomfort and the total, embarrassing lack of privacy, and she had found it hard to remember all the peculiar rules and regulations. At night she had wept silently into her bolster pillow, believing that she had made a terrible mistake. She had wept at her own unhappiness and at the thought of her mother sitting alone in the flat, and she had wept again in the day when reprimanded for her clumsy attempts at drill and PT. They had been issued with a sort of uniform – gaberdine raincoats, ugly black berets, men’s shirts with stiff detachable collars and sad black ties. None of it seemed to fit her properly and it all made her feel even more ungainly. If it had not been for one thing that eventually happened, her misery would have been complete.

  From the moment she had placed that red arrow on the plotting table over Tunbridge Wells, and the wooden block alongside it, Virginia had felt quite differently. She had known then that she had done right. She had been right to leave home and Mother, and none of the other awful things mattered. She had been given an important job to do. Something worthwhile. And she knew that she could do it well.

  At the end of their training course they were asked to give a preference for the area where they would like to be sent. Thinking of her mother, Virginia specified the south-east. Later she was told that she was being posted to RAF Colston on the south coast of England.

  Six

  THE JOURNEY GOING home on leave to Suffolk was dreadful. Winnie sat squashed uncomfortably in the third class compartment with seven RAF airmen who teased her all the way to London. Because of a fresh fall of snow, the train was more than an hour late arriving at Victoria Station and then, as before, she got lost in the Underground and had to ask her way at least half a dozen times. Liverpool Street Station, when she finally reached it, was crowded with travellers and she was swept hither and thither like a piece of flotsam on swirling flood waters. The loudspeakers blared out announcements that she could neither make sense of nor hear properly above the hissing and belching of the steam engines. The train she had been supposed to catch had long since departed and the next one to Ipswich did not leave for more than two hours. She sat in the Ladies’ Waiting Room where it seemed to be even colder than it was outside. When she boarded the train at last, there were no empty seats left and she had to stand in the corridor with her suitcase wedged between her feet.

  As the train steamed slowly out of London, she watched the drab buildings slide by the window and read the big advertisement hoardings . . . Guinness Is Good For You . . . Virol, The Food For Health . . . There’ll Always be Mazawattee Tea . . . In a row of back gardens below, she saw lines of sooty washing and the raw humps of air raid shelters poking through the snow like new graves. Presently, the train gathered speed and the terraced houses gave way to semi-detached ones and wider streets and deeper snow. A cemetery flashed past, then a park with allotments and, as darkness was falling, the flat openness of Essex. There were stops and starts and long waits at stations and signals and, as she was drooping with weariness, Essex became Suffolk and the train drew into Ipswich. She queued patiently for the bus which ground its way through treacherous lanes and deposited her outside the Pig and Whistle in Elmbury. Then she walked the remaining two miles home through deep snow and drifts and stumbled up to the farmhouse door.

  Her family were sitting round the kitchen table having tea and the oil lamp lit their surprised faces as they all turned towards her. Her mother stopped in the act of cutting into the cake, the knife in mid-air.

  ‘Winnie! What’re you doin’ here? We weren’t expectin’ you.’

  She set down her suitcase. Her hands and feet were so cold she could scarcely feel them.

  ‘I wrote I was comin’, Mum. Didn’t you get my letter? They gave me leave.’

  ‘Well, we never know what’s happenin’ these days, what with the war and the weather. We didn’t think you’d get through, it’s been so bad . . . What’s that you�
�ve got on your head?’

  ‘My beret. It’s uniform.’

  ‘Funny lookin’ thing. Well, you’d better make haste and sit down then while the tea’s still hot.’

  Winnie took off her raincoat and beret and hung them up by the back door beside Gran’s old pattens. Her shoes and stockings were soaking wet but she was too tired to care. She sat down at her usual place at the table. Gran, guzzling from a plate held up to her chin, grunted something and Ruth and Laura stared at her round-eyed as though she were a stranger. Her father passed his plate down for a slice of cake and addressed her indirectly.

  ‘Lost two ewes last week. Six foot drifts. Ground’s like iron. Pond’s frozen solid. Can’t dig anythin’ up. Makes no end of work.’

  Nothing much had changed since she’d been away. Dad was grumbling just the same and everything looked just as it had always done. She looked round the room, at the big dresser with its rows of plates along the shelves and cups hanging on hooks, the oak settle along the wall, the ebony clock on the shelf up above the range and the pink lustreware plates each side of it: Thou God Seest Me and Prepare To Meet Thy God. The kettle was simmering over the fire and there was Gran’s chair with its patchwork cushion, and the picture of Ely Cathedral on the wall . . . It was all just the same.

  Her mother poured her tea. ‘You’re lookin’ pale, Winnie. Peaky. Don’t they feed you properly in that place?’

  ‘I’m all right, Mum. Just a bit cold, that’s all. It was a long journey.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look it.’ Her mother wiped the jam from Ruth’s face. ‘You never looked like that when you were here. What’s that shirt and tie you’re wearin’?’

  ‘It’s our uniform, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t seem proper to me – wearin’ men’s clothes like that.’

  ‘They’re not really. And I wear dungarees here, Mum.’

  ‘That’s different. You don’t look right at all in those things . . . and all pale like you are. I never did want you to go to that place.’