The Girls Who Went to War

by Duncan Barrett

  As she got on the second train, Jessie spotted a couple of girls she recognised from her medical in Grantham, and soon they had introduced themselves and were chatting away. One of them, Mary, was tall and slim, and carried herself with an air of quiet confidence. The other, Olive, was more cuddly-looking, with glasses and an infectious laugh.

  As they got to know each other, the girls talked about their reasons for joining the ATS. Olive, it turned out, had signed up after a love affair turned sour. ‘I just got so fed up that I had to leave!’ she told Jessie and Mary with a giggle.

  When they arrived at Leicester station, the girls were met by a railway transport officer, who pointed them in the direction of a fleet of ATS lorries. They clambered up over the tailgate of one of the vehicles, along with a group of other young women. They were all anxiously clutching little suitcases, with the same expression of bewilderment on their faces. They didn’t exactly look like an Army in waiting.

  When the girls finally arrived at the barracks it was well into the afternoon, and they were led into the canteen for a late lunch. Jessie went up to the counter to get her food, and was surprised to find a familiar face serving her. It was Peggy Hogg, a girl she remembered from school, who was now on permanent staff at the camp as an ATS orderly.

  ‘Fancy seeing you here, Peggy!’ Jessie exclaimed, as the girl slopped a portion of mashed potato onto her plate. ‘I didn’t know you were in the Army.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been here a year now,’ Peggy replied with a sigh.

  As Jessie returned to her seat, she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her old schoolmate. Wasn’t joining the ATS supposed to be about doing something important and exciting? Yet here was Peggy still at a training camp a year after she had signed up, with nothing more thrilling to do than doling out slop.

  When they had eaten, the new recruits were led to the stores to be issued with their kit. A woman took one look at Jessie’s diminutive form and declared, ‘Size one in everything, and if it’s still too big you can take it in yourself with your hussif.’

  The ‘hussif’ – or ‘housewife’ – was a sewing kit issued to every member of the services, and was just one of a bewildering array of items that Jessie soon found herself piling into a large Army kitbag. First there was the basic ATS uniform: shirt, skirt, tunic, tie and cap, along with stockings, suspender belt and bra – plus three pairs of voluminous khaki bloomers, which were known throughout the ATS as ‘passion killers’. Jessie found that two of hers were broadly speaking wearable, but the third for some reason stretched from above her bosom to below her knees.

  Next came two pairs of heavy lace-up shoes, plimsolls, a top and shorts for physical training, a field dressing, knife, fork, mug and spoon (collectively known as ‘irons’), towels, hairbrush, comb and toothbrush, plus special brushes and implements for polishing shoes and buttons.

  On top of all this, every girl was handed a gas mask, complete with a haversack to carry it in, and – last but by no means least – a supply of sanitary towels. The cost of providing these had been met by the generous Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors – and as a result they were known unofficially as ‘Nuffies’. Little did he know that in addition to their intended purpose, they were used by resourceful girls in uniform for everything from cleaning buttons to straining coffee grounds. Those with loops were even fashioned into makeshift eye-masks, popular with night-shift girls trying to catch 40 winks in the daytime.

  By the time they were all kitted out, the new recruits were ready to retire for the evening, but first they had to face the dreaded Free from Infection parade, or FFI. Lining up one by one, the girls were asked to pull their knickers down as the doctor inspected them for parasites and venereal disease, before their armpits were checked for lice, their hair gone through with a nit comb and their chests and backs examined for rashes. For the sorry few who failed the nit-comb test, the treatment offered a further humiliation: their hair was cut short and covered in a thick black paste made from coal tar, paraffin and cottonseed oil, before being wrapped up in a turban.

  Finally, once the FFI was over, Jessie and the other girls were issued with a pair of sheets each and led to the large wooden dormitory huts, each containing 30 hard iron beds, which were to be their home for the coming weeks. Each bed had a mattress made up of three separate square parts or ‘biscuits’, as well as an uncomfortable-looking straw bolster for a pillow, and three grey blankets for warmth.

  Jessie was disappointed to find that she wasn’t sharing a dorm with Olive or Mary, who were both in the next hut along. Instead, she was bunking with a group of strangers, who, judging by their accents, hailed from every inch of the country, from Lands End to John o’ Groats. The cacophony of different voices was quite something, but it was the Londoners who really stood out to Jessie. Whether cut-glass or Cockney, they all sounded so confident and loud, and beside them she felt like a bit of a country bumpkin.

  The next morning, Jessie packed up her civilian clothes in her suitcase so that the Army could post them home to her parents, and dressed in her new ATS uniform for the first time. Then she and the other girls in her hut grabbed a quick breakfast in the canteen before they were introduced to one of the staples of basic training: drill practice.

  The girls lined up on the parade ground as a red-faced male sergeant strode up and down in front of them. From the sour expression on his face, he obviously wasn’t too impressed with what he saw. ‘When I call “Attention!” I want you to bring your left foot in to your right,’ he announced. ‘Ready? Atten-shun!’

  Jessie instantly snapped to attention, her back as straight as a pole. Thanks to her father’s example, she had a pretty good idea of what military posture looked like.

  ‘As you were,’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Now, ri-i-ght turn!’

  Jessie pivoted 90 degrees to her right and sharply brought her feet back together. But, looking ahead of her, she could see some girls were facing the wrong way.

  ‘Don’t you know your right from your left?’ the sergeant shouted at them, exasperated. The confused girls giggled, and awkwardly shuffled round to face the front.

  ‘Now, when I say, “By the left, quick march,” you’re going to leave on the left foot with the right arm up,’ the man told them. ‘Forget what your mothers told you and make sure you open your legs.’

  There was barely time to take the information in before he bellowed, ‘By the le-e-ft, qui-i-ck MARCH!’

  The girls began moving forward as the sergeant bellowed, ‘Left! Right! Left! Right! Left! Right!’ Thanks to her dancing experience, Jessie found it easy to keep in time, and to make sure her arms were swinging alternately with her feet. But not all her colleagues were finding the training so straightforward. The basic marching movement was too much for some of them to grasp, and they were waddling forward with arms flailing out randomly.

  Their posture didn’t exactly match Jessie’s straight-backed bearing either. ‘Stop slouching, and keep your legs open,’ the sergeant bellowed at the group. ‘What are you, a bunch of pregnant virgins?’

  In the face of such a nonsensical insult, the new recruits struggled not to laugh.

  When they weren’t drilling, the girls spent much of their time at the training camp in lectures, scribbling down notes in little exercise books. There were talks on the history of the local regiment in Leicester, and on the basics of Army discipline. ‘You won’t be asked to do something, and you won’t be told to do it either,’ they were informed. ‘You’ll be ordered, and you’d better know the difference.’

  Among the many topics covered in the lectures was the uncomfortable subject of venereal disease, or ‘VD’. Many girls who had yet to learn the facts of life were shocked at being told about the virtues of ‘French letters’, and even the more worldly wise were horrified by the grisly photographs of syphilitic sores that flashed up on a giant screen in front of them. But for the ATS, sexually transmitted diseases were no laughing matter. National rates of gonorrhoea
and syphilis had more than doubled since the start of the war, and it was estimated that one out of every 200 ATS girls had already been infected.

  Of all the lectures that Jessie attended in her first week of training, the one that made the strongest impression on her was a talk about Anti-Aircraft Command. To begin with, the Royal Artillery’s ‘ack-ack’ gun-sites had been strictly male environments, but the drive to free up men for fighting roles abroad was seeing the formation of a number of mixed heavy gun batteries. The prime minister’s daughter, Mary Churchill, had been among the earliest ATS girls to join one of them.

  The Army was keen to boost recruitment among the current cohort of ATS trainees, and as the girls sat and listened, the speakers pressed home the importance of the guns in defending Britain’s cities against German bombers. ‘When you’re asked what job you’d like to do in the Army,’ they told the hut full of young women, ‘we want as many of you as possible to request ack-ack.’

  Jessie was very much taken with the idea of serving on the guns. She had joined the ATS keen to do something meaningful for the war effort, and helping to shoot down German planes sounded a lot more exciting than answering the telephone or working as a kitchen orderly like her old schoolmate Peggy. And the idea that, like Jim, she would be serving in the Royal Artillery appealed to her too. She decided then and there that when the time came, she would put her name down for ack-ack.

  After a week of daily drill, even the most uncoordinated recruits had begun to master the basics of marching, and were able to about-turn at a moment’s notice, salute to the side while still moving forwards, and halt without piling into each other. Now that she wasn’t the only girl capable of keeping in rhythm, Jessie was enjoying the regular practices more than ever. She might be petite, but she felt like a small cog in a very powerful machine, and the sound of a hundred feet hitting the ground together was exhilarating.

  Jessie was also growing used to the regimented nature of Army life, which infused every hour of her time at the training camp. In the mornings the girls had to dismantle – or ‘barrack’ – their bedclothes, stacking them up in perfect piles. Then they were subjected to kit inspections, in which each item had to be laid out in a prescribed pattern. At night, they had to polish their shoes and tunic buttons until they shone.

  Every moment of the day was accounted for – the girls were told when to wake up and when to go to sleep, even when to visit the communal washing facilities, or ‘ablutions’, where they were allowed to shower three times a week. The lack of privacy there was just part of the ATS way of life – a reminder that, like every item of kit, the girls’ bodies belonged to the Army.

  The one small touch of individuality they were allowed was a little shelf above each bed, where they could place a few personal items. Jessie had proudly displayed a photograph of Jim, and she saw that many of the other girls also had pictures of their sweethearts back home.

  Despite the busy training schedule, Jessie wrote to her fiancé every couple of days, but she was kept so busy that she barely had time to miss him. In the evenings the girls in her hut would stay up singing and chatting together until lights out at 10.30 p.m., and if they weren’t cleaning and polishing their uniforms while they did it, they were doing embroidery. There was a concession in the barracks that sold the patterns, and Jessie was working on a tablecloth.

  If the first part of ATS training was about instilling a respect for Army discipline, the second was for sorting the wheat from the chaff. The girls lined up in an exam hall to sit a series of intelligence and aptitude tests, with questions on general reasoning and mathematics. There they were asked to write an essay about their lives before they had signed up, to assess their spelling and grammar.

  When the written exams were out of the way, they were given eye checks to establish how far they could see, and a steady-hand test where they had to avoid setting off a buzzer. Then there were memory and visual recognition tests, in which cards showing various German planes were flashed in front of them and they had to try to remember which was which.

  By the time Jessie was led into a little room and asked what trade she would like to be considered for, her head was spinning, but she confidently proclaimed, ‘Ack-ack, please.’ A corporal made a note on a clipboard and sent her on her way.

  Finally, at the end of their time at the training camp, the girls all gathered to be assigned to their postings. As a corporal read their names off a list one by one, they waited anxiously to hear what their future in the Army would be. Some trades, such as cook, were so unpopular that girls had been known to go to extreme lengths to get out of them, as evidenced by the occasional dollop of mustard in the morning’s porridge.

  Since Jessie’s surname was Ward, she was one of the last to hear what role she had been assigned to. Mary and Olive had already been told they were going to an ack-ack training camp in Berkshire, and she crossed her fingers, hoping that she would be setting off with them.

  Finally, the corporal came to her name. ‘Private Ward,’ she called out. ‘Anti-aircraft.’

  At that moment, Jessie couldn’t have been happier. She was joining the artillery, and would soon be giving the Germans what for.

  2

  Margery

  When Margery Pott announced that she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, her family couldn’t help laughing. Surely, they thought, she must be pulling their legs – but the serious look on her face told them it was no joke.

  ‘Fancy Margery doing that!’ was all her sister Peggy could say, a remark that accurately captured the view of the whole family. It was, in fact, a view that Margery privately shared – she was the last person in the world who anyone would expect to join up.

  If anyone should be answering the call to war, it ought by rights to be Peggy. A tomboy three years older than Margery, she had always been the fighter of the family. When Margery was a little girl and her best friend Daisy had knocked her to the ground, it was Peggy who had rescued her, marching up and giving her attacker a good walloping.

  Growing up, Peggy had always been there to protect Margery, but she had also been a tough act to follow. She loved nothing better than cycling to the local forest and camping out overnight, and her favourite films were action-packed Westerns. Margery was too scared of insects and the dark to join her sister on her expeditions, and their mother didn’t let her go to the cinema in case the cowboy movies gave her nightmares.

  As the youngest of three daughters, Margery was the baby of the family, and Mrs Pott kept her wrapped in cotton wool, forbidding her to ride Peggy’s bike for fear that she would fall off and hurt herself. Little did she know that Peggy had already taken it upon herself to give her little sister lessons in secret.

  Mrs Pott had a lot on her plate, since she also had her husband’s failing health to worry about. His emphysema, which had prevented him from fighting in the last war, was only worsening thanks to the dust he inhaled in his job as a maltster, turning the roasted barley every day. Mrs Pott kept a spittoon for him to cough into each morning, and poor Mr Pott would hack and hack until he brought up large lumps of phlegm. But at least his employment meant that the family got to live in the maltster’s house, which meant they were the only ones in the little rural village of North Wallington to have running water.

  When Margery began secondary school, she felt more in her sister’s shadow than ever. ‘Oh, Peggy was ever so good at games,’ were the words that greeted her when she first arrived on the school playing field. Margery, who had never been particularly good at anything physical, felt her heart sink. In her academic lessons she always did well, but she was convinced she was nothing special.

  By the time Margery left school at 15, Peggy had already moved out to train as a nurse. But when she urged her little sister to follow suit, their mother was horrified, and soon Margery had been dissuaded. Instead, she took evening classes in accountancy and found herself a job close by, in the back office of the local baker’s.

  At Pyle & Son
Margery spent her days perched at a high desk, scribbling away in the accounts ledger. She was ruled over by the head clerk, a woman named Miss Pratt, who was always on the lookout for ink blotches. Miss Pratt quickly discovered Margery’s pliant nature and began adding to her list of official duties. Soon the poor girl was required to clean the offices each morning, light the fires, type up the menus for the bakery’s cafe and even wait tables, in addition to the bookkeeping she had been hired for.

  One day, when Peggy popped in to see Margery, she was furious to find her stacking up goods for the delivery round. ‘My sister is a ledger clerk,’ she fumed. ‘She shouldn’t be packing buns!’ But her outburst made no difference in the long run. When one of the horses escaped from its cart on the way back from the delivery round, it was Margery who was sent to catch it, and then to the chemist to fetch the ointment she was expected to rub into the animal’s sore knees.

  The unsatisfactory situation reached a new low one day, when Miss Pratt flew into a rage and called Margery a nincompoop for failing to fetch the dog’s dinner. Margery wasn’t normally one to stand up to authority, but even she could see it was time to leave.

  She got as far as the shop next door – a musty old draper’s called Dodge’s, where she took a job as a cashier instead.

  As Margery made her small stand against the tyrannical regime of Miss Pratt, the world was facing up to tyranny of a different kind. The first notable impact of the war on the quiet life of North Wallington was the sudden appearance of hundreds of sailors, when a naval training college, HMS Collingwood, opened up in nearby Fareham.

  Soon, there were more reminders of the drama unfolding beyond the village. In the evenings, the sky was all too often lit up by an eerie glow, as German bombers pounded Portsmouth and Gosport. One night, the operating theatre at Peggy’s hospital was hit, and the doctors and nurses had to form a line, passing buckets of water along in a desperate attempt to put out the fires.