Bluebirds

by Margaret Mayhew

  Seventeen

  THE STATION WARRANT Officer at RAF Kirkton, near Dundee, happened to be looking out of a window as three girls walked by. He stared, and went on staring. They were dressed in RAF blue battle dress blouses and slacks and wore black berets on their heads. He had never seen anything like it. He opened the window and leaned out.

  ‘Ooh the ’ell are you lot?’

  They stopped dead. The one nearest to him, a pretty girl with short, curly hair, went scarlet.

  ‘We’re flight mechs, sir. We’ve just arrived.’

  He looked at them incredulously and clapped his hand to his forehead. ‘God ’elp us all!’ he said, and slammed the window shut.

  Winnie gulped. The other two, Irene and Phyllis, laughed. Irene tossed her head.

  ‘I’m not going to let them bother me. We’ve been sent here and they’ll just have to put up with us.’

  The Chief Technical Officer appeared as astonished as the SWO. He scratched his head as they stood before his desk.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you three. We’ve never had WAAF flight mechs here before.’

  They waited patiently while he went on scratching his head. At last, he made up his mind.

  ‘Well, I’ll give you a chance to prove yourselves. But if any of you aren’t up to scratch you’ll find yourselves sent back where you came from.’

  They were split up and sent to different places on the aerodrome.

  ‘Diluting us,’ Phyllis said scornfully. ‘Afraid we’ll contaminate them, or something.’

  Winnie was sent to a flight out at dispersal where she was greeted with more stares and consternation. Only one of the ground crew showed any friendliness. He came over, wiping his hands on a piece of oily rag and grinning broadly. His hair was carrot red and he wore his forage cap perched so far over on the side of his head that she couldn’t see how it stayed on.

  ‘What’re you doing here, love?’

  ‘I’m a flight mechanic,’ she told him. ‘Engines. I’ve just done the course and been sent here.’

  He whistled. ‘Blimey . . . what’s Chiefy going to think? He hates women.’

  When Flight Sergeant Jock McFarlane came out of his office he took just one look at her.

  ‘You can take yourself off, lassie. I’m not having you out here. I’m counting ten and I don’t want to see you when I’ve finished.’

  She could barely understand his Scottish accent and his ice-blue eyes terrified her. So did the sight of the three stripes and crown on his sleeve. But she stood her ground.

  ‘Squadron Leader Ryan said I was to come here, Flight.’

  He glared at her ferociously, fists on hips. ‘Och, he did, did he? Well, we’ll soon see about that, my girl.’

  He went away to see about it, but the squadron leader won the battle and she stayed. She was issued with men’s overalls so big that she had to tie them up round her waist with locking wire, and she was given the worst, the dirtiest and the most tedious jobs to do. She cleaned oil filters, scraping away painstakingly at the rubbery deposits before washing them in petrol; she polished the perspex on the cockpits; she refuelled the aircraft tanks from the bowsers, clambering out on the wing in the wind and getting cold petrol all over her hands; she drained oil from engine sumps and on blustery days the oil spattered her face and hair; she held tools for the men and fetched and carried for them, shutting her ears to their bad language.

  ‘Sorry, Winn,’ they’d say. ‘Forgot you was there . . .’

  Because she was so doggedly willing they soon gave up resenting her. Before long they began to tease her instead. Bob, a corporal fitter and one of the oldest of the gang, sent her off to the stores.

  ‘Go and ask them for three size seven sky hooks and a long rest.’

  She was puzzled. ‘What are those?’

  He looked impatient: sarcastic. ‘Thought you said you’d done your training. You don’t mean to tell me you’ve never learned about sky hooks and long rests? You’ve heard of a spanner, I suppose?’

  ‘’Course I have.’

  ‘Just wondered. Off you go, then, and be quick about it.’

  She pedalled away round the peri track on her bike. It was more than a mile to the stores and raining hard. By the time she arrived she was soaking wet. When she asked for the tools the stores sergeant looked at her hard.

  ‘You tryin’ to be funny, or somethin’?’

  ‘No, Sarge.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as sky ’ooks. Or a long rest either – ’cept on leave, an’ you won’t be ’avin’ that yet. Long rest, see? Someone’s been ’avin’ you on. Takin’ the mickey. You want to get yer number dry.’

  When she cycled back to dispersal they were all laughing, even Ginger the carrot-haired one, who had once asked her to fetch him a left-handed screwdriver.

  When the NAAFI van came round she would fetch them their char and wads.

  ‘NAAFI’s up!’ they’d shout. ‘Winn, be a love . . .’

  She took it all in good part and kept well out of Chiefy’s way. His cold eye was often upon her, she knew that, watching and waiting for any excuse to be rid of her.

  ‘Shift yourself, woman,’ he’d say. ‘Out of my way!’

  Everything she was given to do she did well, no matter how menial or dull the task. And she did it better, she guessed, than any of the men ever did. At Chiefy’s bellow of Two Six! she was always there at once to help push or pull or lift, whatever was needed. Hands raw and red from petrol, ingrained with grease, the fingernails black-rimmed and ragged, and with her face streaked with dirt, she worked with a will and as hard, or harder, than any of them.

  At first they wouldn’t let her tail-squat when the aircraft were being ground-tested, saying it was no job for a woman. She watched them lying across the tailplane, keeping it down with their weight, and could see nothing very difficult or dangerous about it. Her chance to find out what it was like finally came when there was a flap on and everyone else was busy. The erk who was going on with her chivalrously gave her the starboard side where he told her there would be less blast from the propeller.

  ‘You’ve got to keep down flat, see, so’s the slipstream goes over you. Keep yer ’ead well down an’ yer eyes shut, ’cos of the stones an’ stuff blowin’ about. An’ ’ang on tight, for God’s sake.’ He eyed her doubtfully. ‘I just ’ope you’re ’eavy enough.’

  She positioned herself as he had shown her, facing aft across the Hurricane’s tailplane, and lay with her feet off the ground, gripping the fin with her right hand and the leading edge with her left. She shut her eyes tight. The Merlin engine started up with its ch-ch-ch clatter and exploded into a roar. The roar increased steadily until it hurt her ears and the prop blast felt so strong she thought it would sweep her clean away. Her hair was blowing all over the place and a hail of small stones spattered her back and legs. She screwed her eyes tighter shut as the fitter in the cockpit took the engine up as far as the gate, testing for mag drop and boost, and wished she could shut her ears. The smell of exhaust gas was choking her and the tailplane was juddering and jumping beneath her as it tried to lift off from the ground. She clung on to it desperately. Then suddenly the fitter throttled back, the revs died and he switched off. The prop blades windmilled to a stop.

  She slid off the tail, her ears still singing, weak at the knees. The airman put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘Thought we was both takin’ to the air fer a minute there . . . You want to eat up yer porridge before next time.’

  From a distance she watched the pilots – young men at the final stage of their training before they went operational. She saw them going to and fro from the crew room, parachute harnesses clinking and clanking, and she envied them as they climbed into their aircraft and taxied out to take off and climb away into the sky. One or two were nervous, she thought. It showed in the way they walked and moved, in the way they lit their cigarettes with hands that trembled just a little, and laughed j
ust a bit too loudly. Once, she was allowed to help strap one of them in.

  ‘The woman’s touch,’ Chiefy said caustically. ‘Mebbe it’ll remind the laddie of his mother and calm his puir wee nerves.’

  The pilot looked very young. He had very smooth, pink cheeks like a schoolboy. Not more than nineteen, Winnie thought, feeling as maternal as Chiefy had intended, with her twenty-one years.

  As he climbed up onto the Hurricane ahead of her his foot slipped on the wing. He corrected his balance quickly but there was a tinge of red in his face as he lowered himself into the cockpit. She hopped up after him and stood on the wing-root to help him with his harness straps, handing them over his shoulders from the back for him to fasten in front. She noticed how his hands shook as he did so, and the small beads of sweat on his forehead.

  She gave the windscreen an extra little polish with the rag tucked in her string belt and smiled at him encouragingly. ‘All right now, sir?’

  He nodded and tried to smile too, but his face looked stiff with flight. He shouldn’t be doing this if it scares him so much, she thought. Really he shouldn’t. She dropped back onto the ground and went to stand ready to pull the chock away on one side. Titch, the mechanic at the trolly acc, was waiting patiently for his signal. It was some time coming from the cockpit and he caught Winnie’s eye and raised his own heavenwards. When the Hurricane had started up at last, he nipped smartly under the wing to pull the lead from the socket. Winnie waited for her signal from the pilot and then moved forward to pull the rope, dragging the chock clear of the fighter’s wheel. She watched the Hurry as it moved off and went on watching it anxiously as it turned to begin the take-off run. It seemed a long time before the wheels left the ground and it wobbled unsteadily into the sky.

  Titch sniffed. ‘Bloody awful pilot, that one.’ He dragged the trolly acc off in disgust.

  Later on, she saw the Hurricane return. It made an awkward approach, one wing dipped, and to her eyes it was too high up and going too fast for the landing. On touchdown it bounced hard several times and slewed round sharply. One of the undercarriage legs collapsed and the port wingtip buckled as it scraped along the ground. Then the nose tipped forward, crumpling the propeller blades like the petals of a flower. Her ground crew watched in grim silence.

  The WAAF quarters were in a damp and dismal house on the edge of the aerodrome. It had stood empty for many years and the boiler, a Victorian monster in the cellar, seldom heated the bathwater above lukewarm, and then only in the middle of the day. In the mornings it was stone cold. There was nowhere to dry their wet clothes. Winnie tried laying her battledress trousers under her biscuits at night but in the morning they were still damp. The three flight mechanics shared a room together.

  ‘Just as well,’ Phyllis pointed out. ‘The way those others hold their noses when we’re around.’

  They reeked of oil and petrol. The smell clung to their skin, their hair and their clothes and the water was never hot enough to wash it away properly, or get rid of the grime from their hands. The five inches of tepid bathwater that they were allowed made little difference. In the Airwomen’s Mess the other WAAFS edged pointedly away from them and went to sit elsewhere. A group of admin clerks complained to the officer when she came round the tables.

  ‘Do we have to have them in here, ma’am? They’re so dirty!’

  To their delight and gratitude the section officer responded coldly. ‘Most certainly you do. And I would remind you all that flight mechanics are classified as Group Two, whereas you yourselves are only Group Four. Your work may be cleaner but it is nowhere near as skilled.’

  Irene smirked into her meat pie. ‘Little do they know that there’s nothing skilled about what we do. We’re just blooming dogsbodies.’

  She spent most of her time cleaning and polishing cockpit perspex. ‘They won’t let me touch much else. I scrape off bits of dead birds and squashed flies all day long . . . Then I sweep out the hangar.’

  Phyllis passed her days removing split pins from magnetos and, because she was a big girl, tail-squatting. ‘I don’t know what we did all that training for,’ she would say morosely. ‘Honest, I don’t.’

  Sometimes, though, Ginger let Winnie help him on the engines, when Flight Sergeant McFarlane wasn’t looking.

  ‘Here Winn, you can have a go at this. Your ’ands are small-like so you’ll reach it better’n me.’

  She’d undo a screw or tighten a nut or get at some awkward part of the engine. Ginger watched her.

  ‘It’s a right shame Chiefy won’t let you do more, Winnie. You’re that quick with it.’

  During a spell of cold, wet weather when there was little flying, Ginger gathered up some firewood and made a brazier out of an old tin can. They lit it in a small dugout shelter near the dispersal huts and he brewed up cocoa and condensed milk and water in an old saucepan over the fire for the two of them. One day he brought some bread, too, and a lump of margarine which he produced from his overall pocket.

  ‘Nicked it from the cookhouse this morning. We’ll make us some toast.’

  Outside, the Scottish rain drifted across the aerodrome in grey sheets, but inside the shelter they were dry and quite warm. Ginger took his screwdriver out of his belt, stuck a piece of bread on it and held it over the fire. When it had toasted on both sides he spread it with margarine for her.

  ‘There you are, love. A feast fit for a queen.’

  He never talked much about himself and she didn’t like to ask questions. All she knew was that he came from a village in North Yorkshire and had left home at fourteen to earn his own living. After working in a factory and then a garage he had ended up in the RAF and trained, like herself, as a flight mechanic on engines. Soon after she had first arrived he had asked her about the wedding ring she wore.

  ‘Got a husband, then?’

  ‘He died last February.’

  He had clicked his tongue in sympathy. ‘RAF, was he? Active service?’

  ‘No, he was ill. He couldn’t ever join up.’

  ‘Poor bloke. He must’ve been bloody choked about that.’

  She had been touched that he had understood how Ken had felt.

  The toast tasted smoky but good. Ginger poured her out some more cocoa and she curled her hands round the tin mug.

  ‘Have you ever wished you were a pilot, Ginger?’

  He shook his head. ‘Not me. I like workin’ on engines best. That’s what I like. Feet on the ground.’

  ‘I feel sorry for the pilots when they’re nervous.’

  ‘Nothin’ to what they’ll feel like when they go operational. Sooner them than me, that’s what I say.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d be nervous – not for the flyin’ part, I mean. Have you ever been up in a ’plane, Ginger?’

  ‘Been up on test flights when I was with bombers, before this.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  He screwed up his freckled face. ‘Don’t rightly know how to describe it. It’s noisy, for a start. An’ you go up and down all the time, so it feels unsteady. You can see everythin’ for miles down below, if it’s clear and everythin’s little – like toys. Funny sort of feeling, really . . . seein’ it from a long way off an’ not bein’ part of it any more. Can’t say I cared for it. We went right through some clouds once and that was just like a whole lot of cotton wool. Bumped all over the place, she did, the Wimpey.’

  She said wistfully: ‘I wish I could go up.’

  ‘You want to get one of the instructors to take you in a trainer. Why don’t you ask them?’

  But she didn’t think she’d ever have the nerve. Instructors seemed like gods to her. They had never even spoken to her, scarcely glanced in her direction.

  She munched her smoky toast and drank some more of the cocoa. ‘Do you think we’ll win the war, Ginger?’

  ‘’Course we will. Mind you, back in ’40 I wasn’t quite so sure for a bit, but now we’ve got the Yanks in it too we’ll be all right.’

  ‘They’re b
uildin’ a big bomber station near where I live in Suffolk – the Americans.’

  ‘You’ll want to watch out for them when you go on leave then. From what I hear they’ll be after all the girls.’

  ‘I’ve never seen an American – except at the pictures.’

  ‘You will. Bound to. So just you remember what I said and watch out.’

  Winnie drained her mug. ‘What’re you goin’ to do when the war’s over, Ginger?’

  He had the answer ready to that one. ‘Run my own garage, that’s what and make a pile of brass. An’ you can ’ave a job in it any time you like, love.’

  ‘Chiefy wouldn’t give me a job anywhere. He jumped down my throat again this morning. I don’t know what I’d done wrong.’

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice of him, Winnie. ’is bark’s worse than ’is bite. ’e can’t ’elp this thing ’e’s got against women. The wife ran off with a sailor, or somethin’, so now ’e ’ates them all. Bit stupid, I reckon. I mean, women are all different, aren’t they? Same as blokes are all different.’

  He fished in his pocket, pulled out a packet of Woodbines and shook it dolefully. ‘Only one left. Swop me some more of your fag coupons for sweet ones?’

  ‘’Course I will.’

  ‘Thanks, love.’ Ginger lit the last cigarette and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. ‘I keep tellin’ you, you want to go and see Chiefy an’ ’ave it out. Stand up for yourself, like. Tell ’im straight out you want to do proper jobs, like you was trained for, same as the rest of us. He’s no right to keep you down. From what I’ve seen, you’d be just as good as any of us, ’cept for liftin’ the ’eavy stuff.’

  ‘Thanks, Ginger.’

  He grinned at her. ‘I’m only tellin’ the truth, love. That’s all.’

  Somehow she found the courage to go and see the Flight Sergeant. He looked up from some forms.

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I want to do some proper work on the engines, please, Flight. Like I’ve been trained to do. Will you let me try at least? Give me a chance to show you that I can do it?’

  He stared at her for a moment with his cold blue eyes; she met them bravely. There was silence in the office while they looked at each other. Then he threw down his pencil.