The man was tall and blond, a good six or seven years older than Kathleen. Now that she looked at him properly, she recognised him as one of the handsome young officers whose presence had brightened up her daily walks with the other nannies. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I work in Tenby as a nanny. My name’s Kathleen.’
‘Lieutenant Arnold Karlen, at your service,’ the man said, offering her his hand.
‘Kathleen, who is this young man?’ asked Mrs Skin, craning round to see what was going on. Kathleen introduced Arnold to her mother, and saw her look approvingly at his officer’s uniform. ‘Well, Merry Christmas lads,’ she said to the three soldiers. ‘Won’t you let us give you a cup of tea? We’re only a minute away from here.’
Kathleen was a little surprised at her mother inviting three strangers into their house, but with her only adult son away with the Air Force, Mrs Skin was keen to extend her hospitality to some other young men away from home at Christmas.
Soon the three soldiers had piled into the little house on Pembroke Street, and Mrs Skin was boiling the kettle. Kathleen went into the kitchen to help and saw that she was spreading a very generous amount of butter onto the young men’s slices of bread.
‘Mum, are you sure you can afford to give them that much of your week’s ration?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ her mother replied, hastily piling up the bread and adding some slices of Christmas cake to the tray as well.
The soldiers took the food gratefully, complimenting Mrs Skin on the cake. ‘So where are you boys staying?’ she asked them.
‘We’ve pitched our tents on a playing field at The Leys School,’ replied Arnold. Kathleen sensed that he was the leader of the little group. His friends, John and ‘Ding-Dong’ – Kathleen later learned that his surname was Bell – always seemed to wait for him to speak first, treating him with an air of respect.
‘A tent’s no place to be spending Christmas!’ Mrs Skin exclaimed. ‘Will you at least get a proper Christmas dinner?’
‘Oh, there’ll be a good dinner – especially for the men,’ Arnold replied with a laugh. ‘On Christmas Day us officers have to serve them, and I’m sure they’ll make the most of it!’
‘It must be so difficult being in charge of all those people,’ Kathleen remarked thoughtfully.
‘It certainly can be!’ Arnold replied. Before long, he had Mrs Skin, Kathleen and her awed little brother Lance laughing at his tales of life as a newly commissioned officer, and the trials and tribulations of trying to keep the rank and file in order. He was a natural storyteller, and as he spoke he seemed to hold the room in the palm of his hand. Kathleen, who was quite a performer herself, felt she had never met anyone quite so charming. She was utterly entranced, and she could see that her mother was too.
Before they knew it, an hour had passed and the men were due back at their campsite. ‘Well, thank you, Mrs Skin – this has been delightful,’ Arnold said, taking her hand. Then he turned and flashed a look at Kathleen, adding, ‘I hope we see each other again.’ Her heart leapt at his words.
‘Our door’s always open!’ Mrs Skin called after the three soldiers. When they had gone, she turned to Kathleen and exclaimed, ‘Well, what a lovely young man! I think he took quite a shine to you.’
Kathleen smiled. For the rest of the evening she could think of nothing but the handsome blond officer, and the following day, as she helped her mother prepare the Christmas lunch, her mind kept wandering back to all the little things he had said, how clever and funny he had been, and how unlike other men she had met. She had been on the odd date with boys her own age, but in comparison to Arnold they seemed like awkward, clumsy kids. He was a man of the world, the kind of man who could show you adventure and excitement, and she longed to see him again.
As it turned out, Kathleen’s wish was granted sooner than she could have hoped. On the afternoon of Christmas Day she was sitting by the fire with her mother and her brother Lance, when suddenly the front door opened a few centimetres and three soldiers’ caps came flying into the room, landing on the floor by their feet. Kathleen and her mother looked at each other in surprise.
‘It means, “May we come in?”’ a familiar voice called from behind the door.
‘Oh yes, of course!’ Mrs Skin cried, jumping up from her chair to welcome the three young soldiers back into the house.
‘We come bearing gifts!’ said Arnold, offering up an enormous parcel of food which he explained was left over from their Christmas dinner.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ said Mrs Skin, but after the meagre meal she had managed to scrape together that day the gift was more than welcome.
Soon everyone was tucking into the unexpected treats, while Arnold again regaled them with jokes and stories. His friend John had been in an orchestra before the war and had brought along his oboe and a tin whistle, and in between Arnold’s amusing tales he kept the little group entertained with music. The Skin family’s rather quiet Christmas had suddenly turned into quite the party. But for Kathleen, it was the moments when Arnold threw her a lingering look that felt most special.
Before the soldiers left, they mentioned a football match that was being held at the boys’ school the following afternoon, and Arnold asked if Kathleen would like to attend.
‘Oh, I’m sure she’d love to, wouldn’t you?’ Mrs Skin piped up, before her daughter even had a chance to reply.
Boxing Day was cold and frosty, and by the time Kathleen and the lads arrived at the football pitch she was already shivering. As they stood watching the game, Arnold silently took her hand and put it inside the pocket of his greatcoat. It was a small gesture, but it told her that she belonged to him now, and to Kathleen nothing had ever seemed so romantic.
When Kathleen returned to Tenby she was delighted to find that Arnold’s battery had been sent back to Saundersfoot for further training, and they began meeting on his nights off from the firing camp. They took walks together along the sea front or sat kissing on one of the little benches looking out to sea. They told each other all about their families and their childhoods, and Kathleen learned that Arnold’s father had come over from Switzerland to take a job as a top chef at a five-star restaurant in London. He had fallen in love with an English rose and had three boys by her, all of whom were now in the forces.
Arnold was just as charming and romantic as he had been in Cambridge, and when Kathleen was alone with him he made her feel like the centre of the universe. ‘You know, I think we’re meant for each other,’ he told her one evening, gazing at her with his piercing blue eyes.
Kathleen felt the same. She barely knew Arnold, yet she had no doubt in her mind that this was true love. Her every waking moment was filled with thoughts of him.
But Arnold’s battery was only in Saundersfoot for a short time, and soon they were posted to Scotland. ‘I’ll write to you all the time, my darling,’ he promised Kathleen. ‘Don’t forget me.’
Soon letters began arriving that were even more romantic than Arnold had been in person. He wrote that his heart yearned for Kathleen, that he longed to see her beautiful face again and stroke her lovely red hair. Kathleen treasured every missive, as if they were the most precious objects in the world.
Since she had first come to Tenby, Kathleen had felt as though the war was far away, but now she began to see signs of the horrors happening in the rest of the world. Strange things began washing up on the beach next to the house – sailors’ hats, foreign money and parts from naval and merchant vessels that had been sunk by German U-boats. One day she discovered a whole crate of oranges, which she and the other nannies shared among their children. Another time half a dozen boxes of toothbrushes appeared, and she took them down to the port authority in the town. She knew items of interest had to be reported, particularly if they had numbers on them that could be traced back to specific ships.
But one afternoon, a haul washed up that no one wanted to go near. Kathleen and the baby had just had lunch when she looked out of
the window to see a strange tangled mess sprawled along the beach. She went outside and began to walk down the stone steps to get a closer look, but as she got nearer she realised with a start that there were around 20 human bodies strewn across the sand, all in a state of partial decomposition.
Struggling to keep down her lunch, Kathleen ran back upstairs, put the baby in her pram and rushed to the port authority to report the gruesome discovery. That afternoon the corpses were wrapped up and discreetly taken away, but Kathleen was left sickened by what she had seen.
A few weeks later, Kathleen witnessed another sight that she was unable to forget. Thanks to its large docks and nearby oil refinery, Swansea was a prime target for the Luftwaffe, and on 19 February 1941 it was hit by a ferocious bombing campaign. Over three days, 800 high explosives and more than 35,000 incendiaries fell on the city, causing raging fires, destroying its ancient centre and killing and injuring hundreds of people.
The blaze could be seen for miles around, and as Kathleen stood watching it from Tenby she felt her heart fill with fury. She knew then and there that her days as a nanny were over. She had to get out and join the fight.
She had seen a newspaper advertisement calling on women to join up with one of the three armed forces. With her love of the sea, Kathleen was particularly attracted to the idea of the WRNS, and she hoped that joining the Navy might offer the chance to visit some of the exotic places she had read about as a child. It didn’t hurt that, of all the women’s forces, the WRNS had by far the most stylish uniform.
Kathleen wrote to the address given in the paper, and soon received some forms to fill in. A week later she was invited to attend an interview at her local recruiting office. There she was grilled by a man and woman dressed in the smart blue uniforms of naval officers. They asked her about her health, qualifications and any relevant experience she might have – as well as some rather surprising queries about boyfriends and personal hygiene.
Kathleen answered the string of questions as best she could, doing her best to impress upon her interviewers how desperate she was to do her bit for her country. There was no getting around the fact that the skills she had picked up nannying weren’t exactly transferable to anything she might be expected to do as a Wren, but her obvious enthusiasm must have won them over. ‘All right, we’ll try you out,’ the woman announced at last. Kathleen couldn’t have been more thrilled.
‘You’ll have to pass a medical exam,’ the Wren officer continued, ‘but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble there. If you’re used to running around after young children you must be reasonably fit.’
The medical was to take place at a local doctor’s surgery in Tenby, and Kathleen asked her employer if she could have a few hours’ off to attend. She knew that competition for the WRNS was tough, and the medical standards for entry were high – generally only those passed as Grade I were accepted.
Kathleen was in good shape and she performed well in the physical tests, bending down, spinning around and walking along a chalk line to prove that she did not easily get giddy, and assuring the doctor that she wasn’t prone to seasickness. By the end of the examination, she felt confident that she had passed, and eagerly awaited her results.
At last the doctor came out to see her. ‘Grade I,’ he told her approvingly, looking up from a clipboard he was holding.
Kathleen jumped up from her seat, smiling, but the man put his hand out to stop her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t pass you, though,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
‘You’re too thin,’ the doctor replied. ‘The minimum for the WRNS is six stone, and you’re a few pounds under. I’m sorry.’
He turned and walked away with his clipboard under his arm, leaving Kathleen utterly gobsmacked. She had passed all the fitness tests, she had proved her worth. Yet for the sake of a few pounds her dream of serving in the Navy had been thwarted.
Dejectedly, Kathleen returned home and began preparing the baby’s dinner, staring longingly out of the window at the sea.
4
Jessie
When Jessie wrote to tell Jim that she’d volunteered for Anti-Aircraft Command, he was concerned. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ he replied anxiously. The idea of his diminutive fiancée working on an enormous ack-ack gun, trying to shoot German planes out of the sky, sounded both absurd and distinctly dangerous.
Jessie wrote again, explaining that she wanted to do something tangible for the war effort – something that she could see was really making a difference. She hadn’t signed up for the Army just to be stuck behind a desk.
As it turned out, however, before Jessie was going to be allowed anywhere near a gun she first had to spend a whole month studying the theory behind her new trade. She and her friends Olive and Mary were soon on their way to Arborfield Camp, near Reading, for an intensive ack-ack training course.
Arborfield was a permanent Army camp, much bigger than the barracks at Leicester where the girls had done their basic training. When they arrived they were marched straight to the stores and issued with battle dress for their new roles in the field.
Jessie had never owned a pair of trousers before, and putting them on for the first time felt strange. But even more peculiar were the long johns the girls were given to wear during long cold nights on the gun-sites. Then there were thick woollen men’s socks that were far too big for Jessie’s size-three feet, and leather boots with gaiters that had to be polished every night. It was beginning to seem as if the Army really was turning the girls into men.
The girls were told they would be forming a new ack-ack battery known as 518, joining a regiment that already included three other mixed-sex batteries: 483, 484 and 485. They were to train alongside male gunners who were also fresh recruits – the Army made sure not to mix girls with seasoned soldiers, who they knew might be more prejudiced against the sexes working together.
But even so, some of the men at Arborfield had low expectations of the women. ‘You wait – there won’t be a girl in sight when the guns go off,’ one of them predicted, as they all sat down to dinner in the mess hall.
‘We’ll see,’ Jessie replied confidently. She had already come to realise that much of the male bravado around the camp was just that. Soon after arriving at Arborfield, the new recruits had been inoculated against tetanus and typhoid, lining up in alphabetical order with their hands on their hips while a medic worked his way along the line. Since Jessie’s surname was Ward she’d had plenty of time to watch as half a dozen men fainted at the sight of the needle, while the female recruits had barely batted an eyelid.
As Jessie got to know her fellow ack-ack girls she discovered that many of them had good reasons for wanting to shoot down German planes. That night, as they made up their beds in their Nissen hut, they shared the reasons they had volunteered for the guns. A small, sparky corporal called Elsie Windsor explained that she had been a parlourmaid in Coventry during the Baedeker raids. ‘I saw the planes going right over our house,’ she said, ‘and there was no sound of gunfire. I just couldn’t understand it. Why were we sitting there and taking it without putting up a fight?’
A Liverpudlian private called Lily, meanwhile, had been inspired to enlist after she was bombed out for the third time and her fiancé was taken prisoner by the Germans. But the saddest story of the night came from a girl called Gladys, who told the others about living through the terrible Hull Blitz. She and her family had been sitting round the fire one evening when their house had suffered a direct hit – the next thing Gladys knew, she was in the middle of the road, with her mother’s corpse draped across her legs and her baby nephew dead in her lap. ‘That’s why I’m doing this,’ she told the other girls bitterly. ‘For revenge.’
As the girls talked, Jessie noticed a pretty blonde private in the bunk next to her who was pulling at the thread in some embroidery. ‘That’s nice,’ Jessie told her. ‘I’ve been working on one too.’ She pulled out the tablecloth she’d started, and they compared notes.
/> After a bit of chat, the girl introduced herself as Elsie Acres. ‘So why did you join up?’ Jessie asked her. ‘Did you lose somebody too?’
‘My fiancé and my brother, both at Dunkirk,’ Elsie said sadly.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Jessie replied, feeling a little guilty. There she was with a fiancé lucky enough to have been rescued twice on the way back from France, while this poor girl had lost two people at once.
‘Well, there are plenty worse off than me,’ Elsie said thoughtfully, as she went back to her embroidery.
The next day the ack-ack course began in earnest, and the girls began wrapping their heads around the fundamentals of optics, magnetism, wind thrust and geometry. Although compared to boys their age they had generally been taught little mathematics at school, the instructors, who were used to classes of men, made no concessions. Jessie had always been top of her class, but even she found it a struggle to keep up.
Once they had got to grips with the theory, the girls learned about the different roles they would be performing on the gun-site, as well as the equipment they would have to use. On the lawn outside the classroom hut, Jessie had noticed a large metal device mounted on a rotating base. The height-and-range finder, as it was known, was an 18-foot-long horizontal cylinder, from which two eyepieces protruded like microscopes. The girls were told that the strange contraption was used to determine how far off an enemy plane was.
Then there was the Sperry predictor, a large black box covered in dials, knobs and levers, which, by rotating to follow the target, was capable of calculating the correct length of fuse so that a shell would explode as close to a plane as possible. Finally, less high-tech but no less important, were the Bar and Stroud binoculars used by the sharp-eyed girls selected to work as spotters. These required little instruction to use, but they had to learn about the optics all the same.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 6