The boys had decided to embrace the hot weather by giving the festive season a Wild West theme. They spent all their spare time remodelling the YMCA bar into the ‘Red Gulch Saloon’ and putting their cowboy costumes together. But Margery yearned for something more traditional, so she and a few other girls arranged for a Christmas tree to be put up in the camp chapel, which they decorated with oranges and sugared almonds.
As Margery was helping to festoon the tree, a thought came to her – maybe if she made stockings for the boys, it would remind them of Christmases at home and cheer them up a bit. She ran back to her hut and found a spare mosquito net, which she cut into stocking-shaped pieces. Then she sewed them up and filled them with fruits, nuts and sweets. On Christmas morning she woke early and nipped out of the women’s compound and over to the men’s billets, leaving the stockings outside their door.
A few hours later, when Margery ran into the lads in the NAAFI, she was surprised to see that they were looking glum. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked Doug. ‘Didn’t you like what Father Christmas brought you?’
‘Oh, Margery, it was a very kind gesture,’ he replied, ‘but I wish you hadn’t done it. The boys are more homesick now than ever!’
Margery felt terrible that her actions had only made the situation worse, but she soon had a chance to make amends. To cheer the boys up, Doug was planning a little party on their veranda that evening, and he asked her to bring some of the girls from her hut along, promising that he would get hold of a bottle of cherry brandy for them.
Margery’s hut-mates willingly accepted the invitation, but when evening came she found them dolling themselves up as if they were heading out somewhere fancy. She couldn’t believe they would make so much effort just for the boys at Kasfareet. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked one of them.
‘We got an invite from the Americans at Deversoir Air Base,’ the girl replied excitedly. ‘They’re bound to throw a better party than our lot, and they’re sending a truck to pick us up!’
Margery was sad that the other girls would be going elsewhere for the evening, although in a way she couldn’t blame them. The American party was bound to be more exciting than the little get-together Doug had planned. She just hoped he wouldn’t be too disappointed when she turned up on her own.
‘Sorry, but you’ll have to make do with just me,’ Margery told the boys when she arrived at their hut. ‘Everyone else has gone to see the Americans!’
Her friends groaned, but they seemed to take the news with good humour. ‘Those bleeding Yanks, stealing our women again!’ laughed Doug. ‘Well, it looks like this is all yours, Margery.’ He pulled out an enormous bottle of cherry brandy and began filling up an enamel mug for her.
‘Merry Christmas!’ she said, as she clinked his mug of imported Stella Artois.
It was certainly the most unusual Christmas Margery had ever spent, and not one she could ever have imagined back home in North Wallington. Here she was, drinking hard liquor as she watched the African sun go down – surrounded by men! Yet as she looked around at the sun-kissed faces of her new friends, she couldn’t have been happier.
Gradually, the alcohol began to take effect on the little group. One by one the boys more or less collapsed onto the floor and had to be carried inside the hut and put to bed. Margery, who had the brandy bottle all to herself, soon began to feel herself swaying. ‘Quick, catch her before she goes!’ someone shouted, and Doug grabbed her just in time to stop her keeling over.
He helped her back to the entrance to her compound, and she went straight to bed, giddy with the excitement of her first, glorious Egyptian Christmas.
12
Kathleen
As an auxiliary nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, Kathleen had found a role that suited her talents, but she still hadn’t quite given up on her dreams of joining the Navy. So when a letter arrived at her mother’s little house in Pembroke Road one morning bearing the stamp of the WRNS, she could barely contain her excitement. She hastily ripped open the envelope, scanning down the page until she had confirmed that it really did say what she hoped it did: finally, after many long months of waiting, they had found a place for her.
There was just one snag. Having failed the medical when she first applied to join the service, Kathleen would have to get her GP to assess her and confirm that she was in peak physical condition – as the service with the longest waiting list, the WRNS insisted that all new recruits were passed Grade I.
But when Kathleen stepped onto the scales at the doctor’s office, he shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid you’re still underweight,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have to put that down on the form.’
Kathleen looked crestfallen. ‘No, please don’t,’ she begged the doctor. ‘I really want to get in, and I think this is my last chance.’
The doctor thought for a moment. He was a good friend of Kathleen’s mother and didn’t want to disappoint her. Finally he said quietly, ‘Why don’t you put your shoes back on?’
Hastily, Kathleen slipped her feet into her shoes and stepped back onto the scales. She waited anxiously while the old man scrutinised the needle.
‘And your coat,’ he said after a few seconds.
Fully dressed, Kathleen weighed just enough to tip the needle over to a healthy weight. ‘Well, I suppose that means you’re in,’ the doctor said with a smile.
Kathleen soon received a railway warrant to travel to Mill Hill in North London. There she and several hundred other new recruits were rounded up and taken to a large modern building, shaped like an elongated ‘X’ and topped with a bright green copper roof. It had been designed for the Medical Research Council by the architect Maxwell Ayrton, best known for the nearby Wembley Stadium, but now it was the WRNS basic training depot. Like all shore establishments in the Navy, the facility was named after a ship, HMS Pembroke.
In fact, as she settled into her fortnight’s training in Mill Hill, Kathleen found that almost everything about life in the WRNS was built around the naval template. New recruits slept not in dormitories but in ‘cabins’, and their food was prepared in the ‘galley’. They learned to use ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ instead of left and right – and to say they were ‘going aloft’ rather than simply heading upstairs. Everything about the experience was distinctly nautical, even down to the particular method of saluting which the girls were taught – with the palm of the hand tilted slightly towards the face, a relic of the days when sailors on board ship didn’t want their superiors to see the tar on their hands.
In British military tradition, the Navy was known as ‘the Senior Service’, and the WRNS, whose history went back as far as the First World War, proudly saw itself as senior to the other women’s forces as well. Everyone knew that their numbers were much lower than the ATS and the WAAF, and this lent the girls an aura of exclusivity.
Certainly, the WRNS demanded a high standard of recruit. Sitting up in her bunk bed one evening, with a cup of thick Navy cocoa in her hand, Kathleen pored over the five-page booklet of regulations that she had been given on arrival. ‘Every member will on all occasions endeavour to uphold the honour of the WRNS,’ it told her, ‘and by the good order and regularity of her conduct prove herself worthy of the Service to which she belongs.’ There were special admonitions against engaging in ‘noisy or rowdy behaviour’ and ‘loitering’ in public, especially if there were men around.
Clearly, Wrens – whether officers or ordinary ‘ratings’, as the Navy referred to the lower ranks – were supposed to see themselves as a cut above other servicewomen. And judging from the clipped accents of many of the young women Kathleen trained alongside, there was certainly a fair proportion of upper-crust girls among their number. Many of them, in fact, seemed to already have connections in the Navy, and it wasn’t unusual to hear a shrill voice ring out, ‘Oh, you must be Cynthia! I think Daddy knows your uncle from the Admiralty.’
But despite the number of top-drawer recruits and the Navy’s air of self-importance, fo
r much of the training period Kathleen and her fellows were treated as little better than deckhands. In between bouts of ‘square bashing’ on the parade ground, lectures on the history of the Navy, and demonstrations of how to tie a dozen different seaman’s knots, the girls spent hours every day on their hands and knees, scrubbing and polishing floors that had looked pretty much perfect to begin with. Paving stones would be swabbed with water and carbolic soap, wooden floors buffed with shoe polish, and windows scrubbed until they gleamed. Since the girls were still in a probationary period, they wore not the smart navy blue uniform that so many of them had long admired, but a pair of faded denim overalls – and despite their pride at being chosen for the WRNS, they couldn’t help acknowledging that they looked more like skivvies than anything else.
By the end of a fortnight at Mill Hill, a number of girls had dropped out of the training. Kathleen, however, was enjoying herself. Having worked as a nursing auxiliary she was used to putting in long hours, and she still couldn’t quite believe her luck that she had finally made it into the service. When the time came to don her smart blue serge uniform for the first time, she did so filled with pride.
The next stage was the allocation of the girls to different trades, and again Kathleen found she was in luck. After a brief interview and some fairly straightforward aptitude tests, she was assigned not to the drudgery of the kitchens or the tedium of office work, but to train as an armourer in the Fleet Air Arm.
The FAA was the part of the Navy responsible for aircraft carriers, as well as the planes that were launched from them. This relatively new technology had already proved itself vital to the Allied forces, helping to defend shipping convoys and enabling them to attack targets out of range of the RAF.
As an armourer, Kathleen would be responsible for ensuring that the Fleet Air Arm’s complement of Seafire, Swordfish and Barracuda aircraft were equipped for combat. For training, she was sent to HMS Excellent, a gunnery school on Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour, where she spent a fortnight learning about different types of ammunition – tracers, armour-piercing bullets and more – and practising stripping, cleaning and reassembling machine-guns until she could do it wearing a blindfold. When she was fully trained, it was time for her to be sent to her first posting – an FAA base known as HMS Hornbill.
Kathleen had no idea where HMS Hornbill was, beyond the fact that it was somewhere west of London, but when she arrived at Paddington Station, laden down with her kitbag and satchel, plus a large tin box of armourer’s tools, a Railway Transport Officer directed her to the correct train. ‘You’ll have to run,’ he told her. ‘It’s about to depart, and the next one isn’t until this time tomorrow.’
The man took a couple of Kathleen’s bags and rushed her along the platform, just as the guard was raising a green flag in the air to signal the train to leave. Behind them a lanky, ginger-haired young sailor was running for the train too. ‘’Ere, wait for us, mate!’ he shouted, in a strong Cockney accent.
As Kathleen and the sailor reached the nearest carriage, a door was flung open, and several hands reached out to grab their bags and yank them up into the train. Kathleen fell onto the floor of the carriage and found herself surrounded by legs clad in naval officers’ trousers. Scrambling to her feet she was even more embarrassed to see that, judging by the amount of gold braid on the men’s uniforms, she and the young sailor had stumbled into a first-class carriage.
But there was no chance of them moving to a different carriage now since the train was packed to bursting. Two officers squeezed up and made a little room for Kathleen to sit down, but the poor ginger-haired sailor was squashed right up against the window, with his face pressed into the glass.
It was just as well that Kathleen was able to sit down, since she had no idea whether HMS Hornbill was half an hour or half a day’s journey away. When she finally plucked up the courage to ask the officers sitting next to her whether they knew where it was, they simply shook their heads.
‘I’m heading to Hornbill too,’ the red-headed sailor piped up when he heard Kathleen’s question. ‘But blow me if I know where it is!’
Kathleen and the young man, who introduced himself as Ginger, resorted to pulling down the window every time the train stopped, much to the annoyance of their fellow passengers, and shouting out, ‘Is this the right stop for Hornbill?’ But time after time they were met with blank stares from the people on the platform.
As the sun set and a bright moon slowly rose in the night sky, Kathleen began to wonder if they would ever arrive at their destination. When, some time after midnight, the train stopped at a little station called Culham and she posed her usual question to a guard holding a lantern, she was astonished to be answered in the affirmative. ‘This is it,’ he told her. ‘Get out, quick!’
Kathleen and Ginger were hurled off the train just as unceremoniously as they had boarded it, their bags and boxes clattering down onto the platform after them.
‘You’ll have to walk to the camp from here,’ the guard told them. ‘Left out of the gate, up that road, over the bridge and then it’s only about a quarter of a mile.’
‘We can’t walk that far carrying all this stuff!’ Kathleen protested.
‘Not my problem,’ the man retorted. ‘I’m off home now.’
‘Oh well,’ said Ginger cheerfully, swinging his kitbag onto his shoulder, ‘I reckon we’d better make a start.’
The two new arrivals set off into the night. Ginger was even more heavily laden than Kathleen, and they staggered slowly along the dark country roads like a pair of worn-out donkeys. By the time they reached the entrance to the base they were both exhausted from the physical effort.
‘Oh, you aren’t half going to cop it,’ a guard remarked with evident pleasure, when they finally made it to the gate. ‘You were meant to be here hours ago.’
‘Well, the train only just arrived!’ Kathleen said.
The guard called a lorry to take Ginger to the men’s camp, which was known as Argos, and Kathleen to the women’s camp, Pegasus. Soon they were trundling along through the darkness on a little dirt road.
A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped and Ginger jumped down to the ground. ‘Blimey, that were an adventure!’ he remarked cheerily.
Kathleen smiled.
‘Maybe I’ll see you again if there’s a dance on camp,’ he told her. ‘Save one for me, won’t yer?’
‘All right!’ she replied. ‘But I warn you, I’m not a very good dancer.’
‘That’s all right – I am!’ he said with a grin, as he disappeared into the night.
By the time Kathleen finally arrived at Pegasus Camp, everyone there had gone to bed. A Wren officer gave her a cup of tea and showed her to a bunk in one of the Nissen huts, and after the arduous journey she collapsed gratefully onto her pillow.
The next morning, Kathleen was woken bright and early by the call of the bugle, relayed over the base’s Tannoy system. Bleary eyed, she rose, dressed in her uniform and made her way back to the mess for breakfast. She had just finished a bowl of porridge when the Wren officer she had met the night before walked up to her. ‘Come with me, Wren Skin,’ the woman told her. ‘You’re under arrest.’
Kathleen was astounded. She had only just woken up! How could she have done something wrong already?
‘Come on,’ the Wren officer said, leading her back outside, where a lorry was waiting for them.
As they drove through the camp, Kathleen recognised the route she had taken the night before, only now – in the daylight – she could see where she was going. Heading back in the direction of Argos Camp, she passed by an area of thick woodland, and off to the left she could make out a large airfield, with three runways in a triangular formation. That must be where she would be working, she thought – assuming she was allowed to work after all.
At Argos, Kathleen was taken into a building where the captain of HMS Hornbill had his office. As she sat outside waiting to see him, she was met by a familiar face. ‘Gin
ger! You’re here as well,’ she exclaimed, as the red-haired young man was led in. Someone had obviously decided he was a flight risk since his feet had been shackled together.
‘The captain will see you now,’ a stern-looking sergeant told Kathleen. Nervously she stood and made her way into the office.
Seated behind a large wooden desk was a smart, middle-aged man, clean shaven and with neatly parted grey hair. In his youth, Kathleen imagined, the captain might have been rather dashing, but now he had a distinctly fatherly air.
Kathleen approached the desk, and the captain looked up from the papers in front of him. ‘Wren Skin?’ he asked her wearily.
‘Yes, sir,’ Kathleen replied, giving an enthusiastic salute.
The man smiled. ‘I see you’re a newcomer,’ he remarked. ‘So tell me, how is it you have managed to arrive more than three hours late for your very first assignment?’
Kathleen met the captain’s gaze. ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but it wasn’t my fault,’ she began, launching into a blow-by-blow account of her journey the previous day. ‘I’d never even heard of HMS Hornbill,’ she told him, ‘and nor had anyone else on the train.’
By the time she had got to the man with the lantern at Culham station and the arduous trek she and Ginger had made from there to the front gate, Kathleen thought she saw a slight twinkle in the captain’s eye. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’ll let you off this time. But I want you to remember one thing.’ He leaned forward a little. ‘Naval time is always one minute before.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Kathleen replied, gratefully.
‘All right then, dismissed,’ he said, waving his hand for her to go.
Kathleen left the office and returned to the lobby outside, where Ginger was still waiting in chains. From inside she heard the captain shout, ‘You can send in Seaman Ferguson now.’
‘Wish me luck,’ Ginger whispered with a wink, as he hobbled in for his own dressing down.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 17