Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Jessie had learned Christina Rossetti’s poem at school, and had always thought it was rather beautiful. But now, as she sat alone in the dark and the words tumbled around in her head, she was beginning to feel she truly understood it.
One of the battery’s officers, Second Subaltern Torla Tidman, was more sensitive than most and, aware that a recently bereaved woman might appreciate a bit of extra privacy, she began sending Jessie off on her bicycle to perform various errands away from the camp. ‘There’s no need to hurry back,’ she told her kindly.
One day while Jessie was out on one of Lieutenant Tidman’s chores, she got talking to a local shipyard worker called Jim, who lived with his family in a little bungalow a couple of fields away from the gun park. When he heard that the ack-ack girls were running out of Silvo to polish their buttons with, he offered to get some for Jessie.
A few days later, she received a note at the camp, telling her to come and collect the package. When she arrived at the little house, Jim and his wife Hetty insisted she come in for a cup of tea. Their two boys gazed in fascination at the young woman in her smart khaki uniform, while Jim went off to fetch the tin of polish.
‘It’s very kind of you to get this for us,’ Jessie told him when he returned.
‘Oh well, we’ve got to do our bit for you girls on the guns, haven’t we?’ Jim replied. ‘But there is one thing you can do for us in return. Next time you’re about to fire one of them things, give us a bit of warning, will you?’
Despite herself, Jessie couldn’t help laughing. ‘You want to listen out for the word “Engage!”’ she told Jim. ‘Once you hear that, the next thing’s going to be “Fire!”’
Jessie spent the rest of the evening in Jim and Hetty’s little kitchen, answering all their questions about life in the ATS. Somehow their cosy bungalow seemed cocooned from the harsh world outside. She felt safe there, and soon she was visiting the couple whenever she had an afternoon off.
Back at the camp, the other girls had been begging Jessie to come and play the piano like she used to, and after a few weeks she finally relented. Perhaps, she thought, it would help everyone else forget their worries, even if she couldn’t forget hers. She didn’t want to carry on being the grief-stricken widow, bringing down everyone around her. She would just have to learn to put on a mask, she told herself – the face of someone who was coping, who could talk and sing and laugh along with her old friends, even if inside she felt nothing.
Before long, Jessie was back at the piano every night, taking requests from the noisy crowd in the NAAFI. She learned to fake the enjoyment she had once felt at the sound of music, and nobody seemed to be any the wiser. But try as she might to convince the other girls that she was back to her old self, there was one tune she just couldn’t play any more – ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
By now, 518 mixed battery had started using radar, and a group of girls had been brought in who knew all about the strange equipment that had been set up around the camp. The new arrivals kept to themselves and never spoke about their work to anyone else, something which lent them quite an air of mystery. Jessie got the feeling that they saw themselves as a cut above the ordinary ack-ack girls, and the impression was reinforced by the fact that they were exempted from fatigues such as guard duty and peeling potatoes in the cookhouse.
The new radar equipment required regular maintenance, and groups of male technicians from the REME – Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers – were soon seen around the camp as well, helping to calibrate the machines. One day, Jessie had been put to work raking some cut grass, when a lorry carrying half a dozen radar specialists drove past. A young man with curly dark hair shouted out in a thick Scottish accent, ‘Yer making a right mess of that, yer know.’
‘Mind your own business!’ Jessie retorted.
But to her surprise, when she went into the NAAFI for a cup of tea a few hours later, the dark-haired young man came and sat down opposite her, cradling a pint of beer. ‘Did ye get yer raking done, then?’ he asked, taking a swig of his drink.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Jessie replied.
‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ he told her. ‘Must have taken you a while, I imagine.’ He was soon chattering away in his melodic Scottish brogue, telling Jessie all about his work in the REME and asking her questions about the camp. His group were to be stationed there for the next few weeks, he told her, and although they would be sleeping in their lorry, they were going to have to share most of the camp’s facilities, including the canteen. ‘Wherever we go, I always make sure to get friendly with the cooks as soon as possible,’ he told Jessie. ‘That way, if there’s anything left over, I’ll be the one to get it.’
Jessie looked at the young man, with his handsome face and sparkling greenish-brown eyes. She could imagine that his job travelling from camp to camp suited him very well, and his confident, easy manner probably won over the ack-ack girls wherever he went.
But his charms were wasted on Jessie – her heart was soldered shut. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, finishing her cup of tea. ‘Nice meeting you.’
‘Aye, maybe see you again,’ he said. Then he was off to find someone else to chat to.
A few days later, when ‘C’ Section had the evening off, Elsie Acres suggested to Jessie that they should go to a dance in Barton upon Humber together. Instinctively, she wanted to decline – the pleasure she used to get from dancing had all but disappeared. But her friend was insistent. ‘Oh go on, Jessie,’ she said. ‘It’ll do you good. And if you don’t come, who will I go with?’
‘All right then,’ Jessie replied, remembering the decision she had taken not to bring other people down.
It was a good three-mile walk to Barton, and the girls took a route along a railway track. When they arrived at the little hall, Jessie saw a crowd made up of equal parts uniforms and civilian clothes.
As she entered the room, one of the uniformed men turned around and she recognised the cheeky Scottish lad she had talked to in the NAAFI. As soon as he saw her, he made his way over and asked her to dance.
The number was a foxtrot, and the young man, whose name turned out to be Donald Macbeth – ‘Mac’ to his friends – was an excellent dancer. But as she let herself be guided around the room by him Jessie felt totally detached from the experience, as if she was looking down on herself from above. It was a feeling that she had grown used to ever since Jim had died.
‘You know, I heard you were widowed,’ Mac said softly. ‘That must have been terrible.’
‘It could happen to anyone, and it happened to me,’ Jessie replied simply.
Although Mac was no older than she was, he too had already suffered his share of bereavement. When he was just 18, his mother had gone to bed with a headache and never woken up, having died of a massive brain haemorrhage in the night. Not long afterwards, Mac had volunteered for the Army.
But neither he nor Jessie had any desire to talk about their losses, and for the rest of the dance, and several more afterwards, he kept up a steady stream of light-hearted banter. Jessie just let it wash over her, smiling now and then when it seemed like an appropriate moment, but still feeling nothing inside.
After that night, whenever Mac saw Jessie in the NAAFI he would always stop and have a beer with h
er while she drank her tea. They soon discovered a shared interest in music – Mac was a violin player, and specialised in traditional Scottish reels. When he heard that Jessie was part of the camp band, he begged her to let him come and play with them.
For the next few weeks, while Mac and his team were stationed at Humberside, his fiddle became a key part of the musical ensemble in the NAAFI, alongside Jessie’s piano and Stan’s trumpet. The band played the same popular tunes that they always had, but now the evenings always seemed to end with everyone dancing the Gay Gordons.
When they weren’t performing, Jessie and Mac often danced together. As he laughed and joked she did her best to play along, never letting her carefully cultivated mask slip. But underneath it all she still felt she was living a lie.
After almost a year on Humberside, orders finally came for 518 mixed battery to move on. Jessie packed up her kitbag and boarded a lorry, filled with relief. After the horrors of the air raids and the pain of losing Jim, the camp had too many sad memories for her to regret leaving it.
To begin with, instead of being sent to a new gun-site, the battery was ordered to a practice camp in Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, where they would be able to hone their skills again without the threat of actual bombing raids. As in Sheringham, they were billeted in the town’s empty hotels, and Jessie couldn’t help recalling the time that Jim had arrived in the lobby of the Grand Hotel to meet her, and been shocked at the sight of his fiancée in her ATS uniform. He had always worried about her job in ack-ack being dangerous, and yet it was him they should have been worrying about all along.
The gun-site in Whitby was on top of the cliffs, facing directly out to sea, and every day the girls had to walk up 199 steps in order to reach it. The climb was exhausting, and often they would stop and rest on an old, flat stone to catch their breath.
One day, Jessie lingered a little longer than the others to admire the view. She had always loved the sea, and if the circumstances had been different she knew she would have enjoyed the posting in Whitby. It was the height of summer and the little town was bustling with holidaymakers. Down below she could see happy couples strolling hand-in-hand along the sea front, some of them with small children excitedly running ahead of them. Looking out to sea, Jessie was struck by the beauty of the place. Jim would have liked it here, she thought to herself.
But Jim was never going to be here, she realised a moment later. He was never going to see any of this. The two of them would not be walking along the beach together, they would have no children running ahead of them. He was gone – really, and truly, and for ever.
The realisation hit her with a physical force, making her gasp and then choke, as sobs rose up in her throat and the tears she had been holding in for so long finally came gushing out of her.
Alone on the cliff, staring out across the beautiful sea, Jessie cried and cried and cried, until at last she was left with nothing but a strange sense of calm.
11
Margery
Margery sat cross-legged on the deck of the Capetown Castle as it sailed on through the Mediterranean. The sun was beating down, but the fresh sea breeze meant that it never felt too overpowering. The only problem the WAAFs on the boat had encountered was that their new Airtex khaki shirts were easily penetrated by the rays, leaving little pin-pricks of sunburn dotted across their backs.
Other than that, the three-week voyage had been a dream. Margery was sharing a cabin with a sweet Scottish girl with curly brown hair called Elspeth, who for some reason seemed to rather look up to her. Since there was nothing much to see on the journey except endless, still waters, they passed their time on deck playing cards or dice from the ship’s games cupboard. Often they were joined by a stocky, middle-aged ex-RAF man called Bob, who was on his way to join the British Overseas Airways Company as a storeman. Clearly a little lonely, he was happy to find a couple of girls willing to listen to tales about his beloved wife back home.
Suddenly there was a shout of ‘We’re coming into port!’ and Margery leapt up from her chair, dropping the cards she was holding. Squinting into the sunlight, she could indeed see land in the far distance. A steward was passing and she ran over to him. ‘Excuse me – where are we?’ she asked.
‘Port Said,’ the man replied.
‘Oh,’ said Margery, baffled. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Egypt!’ he told her, with a chuckle, before carrying on along the deck.
Margery watched him go in disbelief. She had read about Egypt during her bible studies at Sunday school, but had always assumed that, like the Garden of Eden, it was just a made-up place. The thought that she was about to set foot in it was hard to grapple with.
Yet her first glimpse of this fabled land, as the boat came into harbour, was even more confusing. Looming over Port Said from the top of a hotel was a very familiar figure – even to a non-whisky-drinker: an enormous cut-out of the Johnnie Walker man, looking resplendent in his top hat and tails. Margery could only blink in astonishment.
The Allied victory in Egypt in November 1942, when General Montgomery’s forces finally overpowered those of the German commander Rommel, had proved a major turning point in the war, and all over England church bells had rung in celebration. Victory in the Middle East meant a supply route from Europe to Asia via the Suez Canal, as well as access to oil from Iran and Iraq. ‘This is not the end,’ Churchill had declared at a banquet in the City of London. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
But in Egypt itself, not everyone was so thrilled at the recent victory. Some Egyptians had been taken in by rumours spread by Axis agents, who claimed that Hitler was actually a Muslim whose intention was to liberate the country. For decades they had yearned for full independence from Britain, and the influx of over 100,000 Allied troops had not exactly changed their minds. Aside from the occasional bouts of loutish behaviour, carjacking and vandalism, even the well-behaved British soldiers had contributed to the suffering of the local people. Spending up to £3 million per month, the foreigners had pushed prices up by two-thirds – well beyond the means of the Egyptian working classes, who had seen no corresponding rise in their wages.
By the time Margery and her cohort of WAAFs arrived in Egypt, many of the British soldiers had already begun to leave the country. But there was still plenty of work to be done, especially when it came to maintenance and administration. Margery’s draft of girls was part of a 2,000-strong WAAF contingent arriving in the Middle East, most of them to take up clerical jobs. The Air Force had originally hoped to employ locals for this kind of work, and 700 girls, mostly Palestinians, had donned the ‘khaki drill’ overseas uniform. But still more womanpower was needed, and since conscription outside Britain was out of the question they had summoned the WAAFs from home to fill the gap.
When Margery and the other airwomen disembarked from their ship, they were marched to a nearby railway station and onto a white wooden train bound for Cairo. As it left the station, they were given their rations for the day – a hard-boiled egg and a bar of chocolate, which the girls were advised to break open and check for maggots. Purified water was distributed from what looked like a large petrol can. All in all, it was a stark contrast to the weeks of silver service on board the Capetown Castle.
The train journey took six hours, and once they had left Port Said, there seemed to be nothing on either side except sand, stretching as far as the eye could see. To Margery, it was hard to comprehend that so much of the stuff could exist in one place, and the more she stared, the more surreal she found it.
At one point the train slowed at a level crossing and three Arab women, dressed from head to toe in long, black robes, peered in at the WAAFs. Their faces were almost completely covered by their traditional veiled clothing, but their wide eyes revealed an undisguised fascination at the sight of the red-faced British girls with their bare arms and legs sticking out of their khaki uniforms. ‘Now we know what the animals in the zoo feel like
,’ Margery whispered to Elspeth. She felt quite relieved when the train sped up and continued on its way.
At Cairo the girls were transferred onto the back of some Air Force lorries – known locally as ‘gharries’, after the horse-drawn carts popular in the area – and set off on the half-hour drive to Almaza transit camp, where thousands of troops arriving in the Middle East were processed. Before dinner, they were taken to their billets to drop off their bags, and were shocked to discover that they would be sleeping in nothing more than large holes in the ground, two to a pitch, with a piece of canvas on top of them. Sleeping below ground level might make sense in the blazing Egyptian summer, but the primitive conditions came as quite a shock, especially after such a long journey.
While the girls waited at Almaza to find out where in Egypt they would be sent, their days were filled with lectures, medical checks and vaccinations. When Margery enquired what one of the many needles going into her arm was for, the medic replied, ‘Bubonic plague’. At first she thought he must be joking, but the look on his face was deadly serious.
In one lecture, the WAAFs were warned to be careful how they behaved around the locals. Their exposed flesh meant they could be mistaken for loose women, they were told, so to avoid any unwanted attention they were instructed to walk in a dignified manner at all times. Egyptian restaurants, meanwhile, were strictly off limits, since eating fruit and vegetables that had been washed in Nile water was a sure way to contract dysentery. So far, Margery thought, the fabled land of Egypt was sounding like a rather grim place.
Just when Margery and Elspeth were beginning to wonder what on earth they’d let themselves in for, their day was brightened by the arrival of Bob, the former RAF man they had met on the boat. He turned up at the camp gates in a staff car, along with another older chap, who was tall, thin and very bronzed.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 15