The only jobs on the gun-site that girls weren’t allowed to perform were actually loading and firing the guns, thanks to a Royal Proclamation which expressly forbade women from combat roles – so that was where the men of the battery came in.
Aside from the technical training, the ack-ack girls spent hours every day on aircraft recognition, learning to distinguish between the tiny silhouettes of dozens of different German planes. Each night, Jessie and Elsie Acres swotted up for the next day’s lessons together, testing each other over their embroidery.
And while their brains were getting a workout, their bodies were subjected to the rigours of the military as well. There was daily drill practice, and physical training sessions at the crack of dawn each morning.
The men and women at the camp exercised together, which wasn’t always easy – at five foot one and just seven stone, there was little chance of Jessie successfully performing the ‘wheelbarrow’ with a male partner she could barely lift off the ground.
The PT instructor was a prim and pretty corporal by the name of Birchett, who was perhaps a little too fond of her airs and graces. Her favourite expression was ‘Over and up, girls!’ and she delivered it in shrill, clipped tones which always inspired giggles.
One day, when Corporal Birchett arrived for training, Jessie couldn’t help herself. ‘Over and up, girls!’ she shouted, in a pitch-perfect impersonation. Her ear for music had made her an excellent mimic, and the parade ground was soon ringing with peals of laughter.
But Corporal Birchett was not amused by Jessie’s performance. ‘Private Ward!’ she shouted, her usual unflappable demeanour wavering a little. ‘Go and see the orderly sergeant at once.’
As dressings down went, Jessie’s was not exactly a harsh one. The orderly sergeant, Molly Norris, was a rather cuddly woman whose quiet, gentle demeanour had earned her the nickname ‘Aunt Molly’.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she said, doing her best to suppress a little smile as Jessie explained what she had done. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to put you on cookhouse duties for the rest of the morning, won’t I?’
Jessie soon found herself hunched over a large metal sink, doing the dishes for a camp of 300 people. Without any washing-up liquid this was no mean feat, but for Jessie – who had grown up as her mother’s domestic dogsbody – the punishment was pretty easy to bear. In any case, she reasoned, it was worth it just to escape the dreaded early morning PT session.
After a few weeks, Jessie learned that the men and women of 518 mixed battery were being split into four sections – A, B, C and D – which would take turns operating the guns once the unit was fully operational. She and Elsie Acres, the blonde girl who slept in the next bunk, were excited to discover they had both been put in ‘C’ Section, which meant they would be working together. Even better, the two girls had both been chosen for the height-and-range finder, the strange bulky piece of equipment they had seen outside the classroom on their first day. It was considered one of the most elite jobs on the gun-site. ‘There’ll be no smoking or drinking for you,’ one of the instructors warned them. ‘You’ll need steady hands and quick reactions.’
But before the girls got down to the serious business of equipment training, which was to take place at a practice firing camp in Weybourne in Norfolk, there was some fun to be had first. The end of the theory course was traditionally celebrated with a concert in the NAAFI, performed by the members of the new battery. Word soon got out that Jessie played the piano, and when the others heard that she could accompany any song on request, without the need for sheet music, she suddenly found herself in demand.
Some of the performers were less tuneful than others, but a girl called Lillian almost brought the whole battery to tears with a beautiful rendition of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. The men, meanwhile, made them all cry with laughter, dressing up in drag and singing ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ in screeching falsetto voices. Not to be outdone, one of the girls attempted to black up with shoe polish for her own comedy number, only to regret it later when she discovered it took seven baths to get the sticky stuff off her face.
As Jessie looked around the NAAFI that evening, full to bursting with men and women tapping their feet and singing along to the songs she was playing, her heart swelled with happiness. Growing up under her mother’s roof might not have been easy, but in the Army she had found a new family – and one where her talents were appreciated.
For the next stage of ack-ack training, Jessie and the other girls travelled to the seaside town of Sheringham, where they were billeted at the Grand Hotel. But the building conspicuously failed to live up to its name – the rooms had been stripped of all furnishings apart from beds and a small wooden chest for each girl’s belongings, and although they had access to bathrooms with beautiful marble-topped sinks, they were rationed to five inches of bath water per week. To check that no one was exceeding the quota, officers would frequently barge in on them unannounced.
The gun-site itself was a few miles away at Weybourne – it was right on the coast, so that the shells could be fired out to sea. When the girls left the hotel at six in the morning and piled sleepily into the back of an Army lorry for their first day’s practical training, it was still dark outside. They had been issued with an extra thick one-piece denim uniform to wear on the gun-site, but as the chill winter air crept in through the canvas around the lorry they were still bitterly cold.
But all thoughts of physical comfort evaporated the moment the team arrived on the gun-site. Jessie gazed at the huge guns in the glint of the breaking dawn, feeling a thrill of excitement rush through her. There were four of them, lined up majestically on a raised platform, like great cannons pointing out to sea. Behind them she could make out the height-and-range finder and the predictor – as well as a large, dome-shaped object called a kinetheodolite, which was used to record practice firings so that trainees could review how they had done.
On the order of their commanding officer, Captain Rait, the mixed group of ack-ack personnel took their stations. There were five men to each gun, six girls gathered around the predictor, and two spotters. Jessie and Elsie Acres took up their positions on the height-and-range finder, looking through a pair of eyepieces on one side of the long metal tube. Opposite them stood a young woman called Jean, who was their reader. When they signalled to her that a target was locked in, she would call out the distance displayed on a little dial in front of her.
High up in the sky, Jessie could see the target approaching – a small British plane towing a long red-and-white sleeve. Surely that can’t be too hard to hit, she thought, as she watched it glide along in a perfect straight line.
When the aircraft came within range, one of the spotters called out its bearing, and Captain Rait shouted ‘Engage!’ Jessie and Elsie rotated the height-and-range finder until they could see the plane through their little eyepieces, and began furiously adjusting their instruments until the images were perfectly lined up.
‘Read!’ Jessie shouted, as soon as she could see the plane clearly.
‘Read!’ Elsie echoed moments later.
Jean read off the height of the plane, and the predictor girls began combining it with their own data. As they studied the dials of the giant box, it rotated to follow the plane through the sky. Then one of them shouted, ‘Fuse one-eight!’
‘Set!’ called out the men, as the shells were loaded into the guns.
When all four were ready, Captain Rait bellowed, ‘Fire!’ The whole procedure had taken place in a matter of seconds.
The noise that followed the captain’s command was indescribable, louder than anything Jessie could ever have imagined. She felt the wind rush against her face, and her nostrils filled with the smell of cordite. Moments after the sound of the guns firing came a loud clanging noise as the metal shell cases fell onto the concrete.
Looking up at the sky above her, Jessie saw four puffs of black smoke were the shells had exploded. She gazed at the little plane, still dr
agging the red-and-white sleeve behind it. There was no sign that they had made any impact.
Through her ringing ears, Jessie could hear Captain Rait call, ‘Stand down.’ Feeling rather shaken, she followed the others into a little hut, where the kinetheodolite images were being processed.
‘Predictors – you were at fault this time,’ a stern gunnery instructor told the group, pointing out how a tiny error in one of their readings had caused the guns to miss their target. The predictor girls listened sheepishly, feeling they had let everyone down.
But as ‘C’ Section practised firing over and over again that day, each time it was someone else’s turn to be in the instructor’s bad books. By the time the sun set and Jessie and her colleagues piled onto the lorry to head back to the Grand Hotel, the girls were hoarse from shouting out their readings, and their hair stank of cordite. But after countless attempts, they still hadn’t so much as grazed the red-and-white sleeve.
Captain Rait had some reassuring words for his team, however. ‘It’s not all about scoring direct hits,’ he told them, as they trundled back to Sheringham. ‘As long as we come close enough to a Jerry plane to spook the pilot, he won’t be able to target his bombs accurately.’
Over the next few weeks, the exhausting routine on the gun-site was repeated day after day, and bit by bit Jessie and her colleagues improved – until finally, one afternoon, they managed to punch a hole right through the red-and-white sleeve. The thrill of success was indescribable, but it turned out to be short-lived – the rest of that day they were unable to repeat the great achievement, and however hard they trained, direct hits proved to be the exception rather than the rule.
As the girls of 518 mixed battery got to know each other better, they began to acquire affectionate nicknames. A girl with brilliant red hair became ‘Ginger’, while a tall girl was inevitably christened ‘Lofty’. Jessie’s diminutive height meant she was known around the camp as ‘Short-arse’, and Elsie Windsor’s quick temper saw her labelled ‘the Spitfire’. Two sisters called Thelma and Olga Twig, meanwhile, were simply called ‘Twig’ and ‘Twiglet’.
After the exhausting demands of practising on the gun-site, the evenings came as a welcome respite, and the men and women of the battery looked forward to letting their hair down in the NAAFI. Jessie’s piano playing had proved such a hit during the concert at Arborfield that now she found herself roped into joining a new band. Lilian Booth, who had so impressed at the concert, was their singer, while a handsome, fair-haired Scottish gunner called Stan played the trumpet.
Stan, as it happened, had recently initiated 518 battery’s first romance – and with none other than Elsie Windsor. As a corporal, Elsie had been commanding the ATS guard at the Grand Hotel one night, when a girl cried out suddenly, ‘There’s a man trying to break in!’
‘All right, you grab him and I’ll hit him round the head,’ Elsie had told her. But as she was preparing for action, in had walked Stan, asking innocently, ‘Is there any cocoa going?’
After that inauspicious introduction, Elsie and Stan had begun courting. Since they were in different sections, their time off didn’t always coincide, but by pooling their cigarette coupons they were able to bribe Stan’s sergeant to ensure that they could spend a bit of time together.
While Jessie was in Sheringham, she was able to arrange a date of her own. Jim was also stationed in Norfolk at the time, and they agreed that he would come and meet her in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. It was several months now since they had last seen each other, and when Jim first caught sight of Jessie in her ATS uniform, the look of shock on his face was unmistakable. Although he had been supportive of his fiancée joining the Army, actually seeing her in khaki threw him a little. ‘I’m … not sure the uniform suits you,’ he admitted, when Jessie asked what was on his mind.
‘Well, tough!’ she replied, with a laugh. ‘You’ll just have to get used to it.’ Then she added, gently, ‘Don’t worry, it’s still me underneath.’
Jessie and Jim spent a blissful day together, wandering along the sea front and exploring the little seaside town. After months of making do with just his letters, it felt wonderful to finally hold him again, and to hear the words ‘I love you’ spoken out loud. That evening Jessie returned to the Grand Hotel feeling like she was walking on air.
After a month at the practice camp, Jessie felt ready to put her skills to the test in a genuine raid. But before the men and women of 518 mixed battery departed for their first proper posting – a gun-site outside Sheffield – they were sent home to spend a weekend with their families.
Jessie and her friend Elsie Acres caught the same train from Leicester station, and as they settled down in one of the carriages they heard a couple of men coming along the corridor. ‘I wouldn’t go in there,’ one of them told the other as they passed the girls’ compartment. ‘It’s full of those bloody ATS tarts.’
For a moment, Jessie felt a little shocked, but when she and Elsie caught each other’s eye they both burst out laughing.
Back in Holbeach Bank, Jessie’s mother was as cold as ever, but her father couldn’t have been more pleased to see her, and he pestered her incessantly with questions about ack-ack. ‘Dad! You know I’m not allowed to tell you,’ she replied, doing her best to satisfy him with tales of life in the huts or the NAAFI instead.
Although it was nice to see her father, Jessie spent most of the weekend looking forward to getting back to her friends in the battery, and she arrived in Sheffield on Monday morning buzzing with excitement. ‘Well, here we are – the ATS tarts!’ she declared, when the girls all gathered for breakfast in the canteen. After Elsie Acres had explained the origin of the phrase, everyone soon began using it.
The camp had been built in a beautiful hilly area about four miles away from Sheffield city centre. It was a basic set-up, with just the guns and a few wooden accommodation huts that stood about 20 feet away. Although the battery had arrived there ready for action, to begin with the Germans seemed reluctant to send any targets their way. Several times Jessie and her friends were woken in the night by the alarm that indicated an imminent raid, but after an hour or more of shivering in the cold, the order was always given to stand down without any guns being fired.
The girls had plenty to keep them occupied, however. There were regular kit inspections and lectures on aircraft recognition, as well as an hour’s drill practice every day on the parade ground. And then there were the fatigues – a series of odd jobs that the girls were expected to perform around the camp when their section wasn’t needed at the gun-site. In the evenings, Jessie would check a board in the guardroom to find out her duties for the next day – which could be anything from peeling potatoes to cleaning out the latrines.
One of the least popular fatigues was guard duty, which meant sitting up at night in the sentry box and shouting, ‘Who goes there?’ at anyone coming or going in the dark. Jessie soon found that she was lucky to get a straight answer, particularly if there had been a dance that evening, and often her queries were met by such jokey responses as ‘Fred and Ginger’ or ‘Hitler and Mussolini’.
Most of the girls found guard duty tedious, and struggled to stay awake with no one to talk to, but Jessie rather enjoyed the quiet solitude. She whiled away the hours reciting poems she had learned at school in her head, or quietly humming her favourite songs.
One night, Jessie was fast asleep in her Nissen hut when the piercing call of the alert siren jolted her back to consciousness. She leapt out of bed and threw her greatcoat over her pyjamas, forcing her bare feet into her boots. Then she dashed out of the hut and ran to the gun park as fast as she could.
By the time she reached the height-and-range finder, Elsie and Jean were already in position, and something about the intense atmosphere at the gun park told her this was no false alarm. She cast her eyes up to the sky, watching the beams of the searchlights criss-crossing above her.
Suddenly she saw it – three little shining dots, flying in formation. As
they passed directly through the glare of the beams, they flashed silver for a second, and Jessie could make out the outlines of German aircraft.
‘Engage!’ Captain Rait bellowed, and the girls on the gun-site flew into action. Jessie and Elsie swivelled the height-and-range finder until they had the lead plane in their sights.
‘Read!’ Elsie shouted.
‘Read!’ Jessie yelled.
‘Seven-nine-hundred!’ Jean shouted, squinting at her little dial. At once, the predictor girls began working their magic, turning knobs and pulling on levers as the giant box rotated on its base. After what felt like an age, one of them called out, ‘Fuse two-four!’
Jessie watched anxiously as the shells were loaded into the guns. The moment they were ready, Captain Rait boomed ‘Fire!’
In the stillness of the night, the noise of the guns was like a thunderclap, but by now everyone was too used to it to flinch. As the shells burst thousands of feet above her head, Jessie stared at the lead German plane, hoping to spot some sign of damage. If the damned thing would only burst into flames it would be the most wonderful feeling in the world.
There was no dramatic explosion, no flaming fireball dropping from the heavens. But as Jessie peered at the little plane, silhouetted in the piercing beam of the searchlights, she saw it swerve slightly from the straight line it had been cutting through the night sky. That was it – they had forced the pilot to deviate from his course, and everyone knew what that meant. Without a clear 30-second run-up before he dropped his bombs, there was little chance that they would land on target.
The men and women of 518 mixed battery were far too professional to cheer or applaud, but silently everyone shared in the thrill of that moment. A few seconds later, the German planes passed out of the searchlight beams and disappeared back into the inky black. ‘Stand down, everyone,’ Captain Rait said soberly.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 7