The Girls Who Went to War

by Duncan Barrett

  Eventually, a car pulled up and the two WAAFs bundled in. ‘I told you someone would come,’ Margery told Elspeth cheerily. But her friend had been shaken by the long wait in the desert, and struggled to enjoy the rest of the day.

  Although hitch-hiking through the desert necessarily brought with it certain dangers, taking the train wasn’t completely free of hazards either. Margery hated the walk between downtown Cairo and Babalouk station, through a large marketplace filled with meat carcasses and buzzing with flies. There was a short cut, but that involved cutting through dingy back alleys, and one shop in particular always sent a shiver down her spine. Outside was a statue of a giant black cat, with glassy eyes that seemed to follow her as she walked past.

  One night, Margery stayed out in Cairo on a late pass, before catching the last train back to Turah. But, exhausted from a long day in the city, she fell asleep on the way home, missed her stop and didn’t wake up until it had reached its final destination. By now it was well after midnight, but there were still trains going back in the other direction, so she hopped on the next one that came along.

  By the time she arrived back at Turah station, the gharry shuttle service to the camp had long since ceased, and as she looked around, Margery couldn’t see another soul.

  She knew better than to risk walking along the main road in the dark on her own, which would take her right past the East African encampment. But that meant there was only one option – to cut across the desert.

  The distance could only have been about a mile, but for Margery, striking out alone across the sand, it felt like the longest walk of her life. Far ahead she could see the faint light of the guardroom at the camp, but every so often, as the sand dunes dipped up and down, it would disappear from view, leaving her in perfect darkness.

  For the first time since she had arrived in Egypt, Margery felt genuinely terrified. Since childhood she had always had a horror of the dark, and although joining the WAAF had helped her get over many of her fears, now – all alone, in the pitch blackness of the desert – she could feel them gradually creeping back again.

  Margery’s eyes began to water, and the tears started streaming down her cheeks. But she wasn’t about to crumble now. Corporal Pott had come this far by facing her fears, not giving into them. She forced herself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, telling herself that if she only kept going long enough, she would eventually be home.

  At last, Margery came over the final rise in the sand, and saw the guardroom clearly lit up in front of her. She dashed the final hundred yards up to the gates, a great wave of relief washing over her as she passed through them.

  That night, despite the ordeal, Margery slept soundly in her bed. Walking home across the desert wasn’t an experience she would ever care to repeat, but it had proved one thing – when push came to shove, she had faced her greatest fear and overcome it.

  After a few months in her new posting, Margery had got to know Cairo like the back of her hand, but she was aware that there was more to Egypt than the capital city. Other girls at Turah had been raving about the trips they’d taken to see the tourist sites further down the Nile – the grand temples of Luxor and Hatshepsut, and the Valley of the Kings.

  The sites were several hundred miles away, but it was possible to see them in a weekend. Margery and Elspeth both had 48-hour passes coming up, so they went to Lady Tedder’s travel agency in Cairo and booked themselves onto a tour. That Friday after work they hitched into town and caught the sleeper train to Luxor, arriving on Saturday morning just in time to meet up with the rest of the tour group at their hotel.

  In the lobby, they found the others were already waiting for them. Aside from the two girls, there was a Polish officer called Sam, who was based at a camp not far from Turah, and two British Army men, Ted Abel and Charles Luck, both of whom worked in Pay Accounts. Ted had been with the Army Pay Corps in Cairo for some time, while ‘Lucky’ – as he insisted the girls call him – had only recently arrived in Egypt from Cyprus.

  The tour was led by an Egyptian man called Abdul Abudi, who informed the small group that they were exceptionally lucky themselves – normally he would take tours of around 20 people at a time, but as it was off-season theirs would be a much more intimate gathering. ‘Ordinarily, we travel by donkey,’ he told them, ‘but as there are just five of you, we can take a gharry instead.’

  For Margery, though, travelling around the ancient ruins in a lorry didn’t sound very exotic. ‘That doesn’t seem right,’ she objected. ‘I think we should do it properly, donkeys and all.’

  ‘If that is what madame wishes, then of course the donkeys it must be,’ Abdul Abudi said, with a little bow.

  Lucky laughed heartily, and caught Margery’s eye. ‘You know, something tells me you’re going to regret that decision,’ he told her.

  The tour began with a visit to the temple complex at Karnak, where Margery gazed in wonder at the rows of ram-headed sphinxes and the giant sandstone pillars of the Great Hypostyle Hall. This, she realised, was all that was left of the ancient civilisation that she had read about in her bible studies – a world that until recently she had believed was no more than a myth. It was strange to think that thousands of years before the Romans had even landed in Britain, the Egyptian people had been hard at work constructing such incredible monuments.

  After Karnak, the little group moved on to the Temple of Luxor, marvelling at the vast statue of the Egyptian Empire’s greatest pharaoh, Ramses II. Abdul Abudi did his best to talk them through the beautiful hieroglyphics on the walls of the temple, but Lucky seemed more interested in offering his own comical interpretations of the ancient carvings, and despite Abudi’s frequent attempts to check that the group was listening carefully, Margery went away having learned very little about the site. She was beginning to find the cheeky Englishman rather annoying.

  On the second day, the group took a felucca across the Nile to visit the Valley of the Kings, where they travelled from one tomb to another by donkey. It was baking hot, and as the bright sun beat down on them everyone was becoming exhausted. ‘Are you beginning to regret insisting we travel like this yet?’ Lucky asked Margery, as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’m glad we’re seeing things the traditional way. It’s much more fun than travelling around in a lorry.’

  ‘Yes, much more fun,’ Lucky echoed thoughtfully, drawing a little closer to her. Then he reached out and slapped her donkey hard on the behind.

  Before Margery knew it, the animal was racing forward, shooting ahead of the rest of the group. ‘Stop!’ she yelled, but the poor beast took no notice. Behind her, she could hear Lucky shouting something at it in Arabic, evidently egging it on.

  Margery held on for dear life, until the donkey finally ran out of energy and came to a stop, panting heavily under the shade of a palm tree. She clambered off the wretched animal and stood by its side as she tried to catch her own breath as well.

  It took a few minutes for the others to catch up with her, and when they did Lucky was at the head of the group. He dismounted and strode over towards Margery, laughing heartily. ‘That was quite a ride you had!’ he told her.

  ‘It certainly was,’ Margery replied, in as calm and composed a voice as she could manage. She had no intention of giving Lucky the satisfaction of knowing that he had riled her.

  But despite her best efforts her irritation must have been plain to see, because a frown began to work its way across Lucky’s normally cheerful face. ‘Oh, I am sorry, Margery,’ he said. ‘I was just having a bit of fun. I do hope I haven’t upset you.’

  Something about Lucky’s tone told Margery that the sentiment was genuine. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she told him, giving a little smile to show that there were no hard feelings.

  He smiled back, and reached out to touch her on the shoulder, but as his hand approached, Margery instinctively flinched.

  Lucky looked at her, and his flippant persona see
med totally absent for a moment. ‘You’ve had a bad experience with men, haven’t you?’ he asked.

  Margery was stunned by the question. ‘I don’t think so,’ she muttered awkwardly.

  But Lucky just shook his head and said, ‘You must have been hurt very badly.’

  To Margery’s relief, the rest of the group was approaching. She hopped back on her donkey, taking care not to meet Lucky’s eyes, and they all set off together to see the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

  15

  Kathleen

  Since she had started as an armourer at HMS Hornbill, Kathleen had lost track of the number of aircraft she had worked on. As well as the common Seafires, which stopped at the camp daily on their way to bases further afield, she had grown used to a whole roster of Fleet Air Arm planes. There were biplane bombers like the Swordfish and Albacore, as well as the more modern Barracuda, fighters including the Firefly and the American Hellcat, and even amphibious craft such as the Walrus and Sea Otter.

  But although Kathleen had seen inside the cockpits of all of them, she had never been up in the air – until one day in the Armoury hut a young pilot offered to take her for a spin.

  Kathleen couldn’t believe her luck. ‘I’d love to,’ she told him, ‘only I mustn’t be found out.’

  ‘Well, as long as you stay down low and keep quiet, no one will know,’ he replied with a wink.

  Kathleen accompanied the pilot back to his plane, checking to see that no one was looking, and quickly scrambled up into the cockpit after him.

  ‘All right, keep your head down,’ he told her, as he pulled the glass roof of the Seafire closed over them. She crouched as low as she could, hoping that the top of her hat wasn’t visible to anyone on the ground. She could feel the plane slowly begin to move as the pilot manoeuvred it to one end of the runway. He turned to her and asked, ‘Are you ready?’

  Kathleen nodded enthusiastically, and they began to pick up speed. She felt the plane storming along the tarmac, every tiny bump on the ground shuddering through her bones. It got faster and faster, and the juddering felt more and more alarming until, suddenly, there was a feeling of lightness, and she realised the nose of the plane was beginning to tilt upwards. A few seconds later, they were soaring into the sky.

  ‘All right, you can sit up now,’ the pilot told her. ‘No one can see you.’

  Gingerly, Kathleen straightened herself up and looked out of the little glass bubble. All around her was the brilliant blue of the sky, and down below she could make out the huts of the camp. Dozens of little navy-blue ants seemed to be scurrying this way and that, and it took her a moment to realise that they were her colleagues.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ the pilot shouted to Kathleen, as the plane began to level out.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she replied.

  There wasn’t much time to enjoy the scenery, however. The pilot knew that it could only be a brief flight, just long enough to check that all the equipment was in working order – anything longer might look suspicious to the people on the ground. So after a few minutes he began banking to the left, heading back in the direction of the runway. ‘You’d better get down again,’ he told Kathleen, as they began their descent.

  Once again, she squeezed herself as low down in the cockpit as she could. After a little while, she felt the sudden impact as the plane’s wheels made contact with the runway, and then it bumpily ground to a halt. ‘All right, out you get,’ the pilot told her, ‘before someone finds you in here.’ He slid open the lid of the cockpit and popped down the hatch, and Kathleen hastily clambered out onto the runway.

  ‘Thank you,’ she told him, as she turned to head back to the hut. ‘That was marvellous.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ the pilot replied, with another little wink. Kathleen watched as he readied the plane for take-off once again. A few minutes later, he was soaring through the skies, on his way to who-knew-where.

  As it happened, Kathleen herself had begun longing to fly the nest of HMS Hornbill. She had joined the WRNS hoping for foreign adventure, and while working on an airfield had its glamorous moments, in reality she was still spending most of her time in a field eight miles south of Oxford. By now Wrens were serving all over the globe, everywhere from New York to San Francisco, from Aden to Alexandria, and from Colombo to the Rock of Gibraltar. Fleet Air Arm bases had sprung up in plenty of exotic locations, including Mombasa, Nairobi, Bermuda and Sierra Leone.

  When Kathleen saw a notice calling for Wrens who were willing to accept a transfer to HMS Golden Hind, a naval base in Sydney, Australia, she put her name down immediately. The lucky 12 girls who were chosen would be embarking on a month-long voyage, with stopovers in New York, San Francisco and Cape Town. She crossed her fingers, hoping that the posting would come through, but when the names of the dozen successful applicants went up on the board, sadly Kathleen’s was not among them.

  Arnold’s battery, meanwhile, had been serving on the Continent since just after D-Day, and Kathleen worried constantly about his safety. Many of the men who served under him had been killed in the great Allied advance, among them his good friend ‘Ding Dong’, who was shot by a sniper in Holland. His friend John, the lad who had played the oboe on Christmas Day, had been wounded and was recovering in hospital. To Kathleen, the fact that Arnold himself had survived so long seemed nothing short of a miracle, and every hastily scribbled postcard she received to say he was still alive and well was a blessed relief.

  At least Kathleen had plenty of work to keep her busy at Hornbill. In addition to going through the ammunition of each plane that came in, she had been given another important responsibility. In the Armoury shed were the camp’s pyrotechnics, green and red flares which were used to signal planes coming in – the former to reassure the pilot that all was well on the ground, and the latter to abort an unsafe landing. ‘It’s very important that the pyros are kept at precisely the right temperature,’ the master gunner informed Kathleen. ‘Too low and they’ll stop working, but if they get too hot there’s a danger they’ll go off unexpectedly.’

  The temperature had to be checked every couple of hours, which was all right in the daytime when Kathleen was working in the Armoury hut anyway, but during the nights it meant a half-mile journey from her cabin at Pegasus. At two-hour intervals, Kathleen’s alarm clock would go off and she would stagger from her bed to the little bike she kept propped up outside the hut, then pedal along in the darkness with only a torch strapped to her handle bars to show the way in front of her. To make matters worse, the torch had been blackout-proofed with two strips of packing tape, so that only a tiny sliver of light shone out of it.

  Every time Kathleen set out she was convinced she would end up in a ditch by the side of the road, but somehow she always got to the pyros in time, and then back to her bed in one piece. Two hours later, the ritual would begin again, but she grew used to snatching what sleep she could in the intervals between her nocturnal excursions. With practice, she found she could make the trip there and back within 15 minutes – meaning that as long as she fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow, she could still get a pretty good night’s sleep.

  Since Kathleen’s friend Ginger had left Hornbill for service overseas, she had been spending more and more time with the girls in her cabin. She had even managed to persuade Penelope, the tall girl whose father was a banker, to try her hand at gardening, and between them they had dug out a little flower-bed by the side of the hut. Penelope had always struck Kathleen as too refined to be much use when it came to manual work, so she was surprised to find that her friend really threw herself into it, and once they had ‘borrowed’ a few cuttings from a nearby country estate, they had a pretty respectable flower-bed.

  In fact it turned out that gardening was the least of Penelope’s talents. Although she had grown up in a house full of servants, and had never had to wash her own clothes before, she proved to be a dab hand when it came to washing and ironing the girls’ blouses. Soon she and Kathleen had set up the
ir own little laundry business, scrubbing the seamen’s smelly shirts for sixpence a pop – until the captain found out about their scheme and had it shut down.

  Even when they weren’t coming up with activities to keep themselves busy, the girls at Hornbill were well provided for when it came to entertainment. In addition to the roster of dances and concerts, there were regular film screenings at the little cinema in the men’s camp, Argus. Most of the movies shown there were hand-me-downs from a nearby American camp, and some of them were rather risqué by British standards. One film included a scene in which girls in French knickers danced on a grand piano, which caused such a commotion among the Wrens and seamen present that the captain began personally screening all movies in advance to check they were suitable.

  Unfortunately, the films’ previous owners weren’t very conscientious about keeping the reels in the right boxes, so the story often played out in a random order. Every so often a great groan would go up from the audience as they realised they had jumped back to an earlier part of the movie, and the cowboy they had just seen shot dead was suddenly alive again. The walk back home afterwards was generally spent deep in conversation as the cinema-goers tried to piece the plot together.

  One night, Kathleen and her friends were watching a particularly ropey Western, which concerned a young cowboy who had got his boss’s daughter pregnant. At a pivotal moment in the plot, the girl’s father stepped out into the street with his pistols drawn and demanded angrily, ‘Now, which one of you sorry bastards is the father?’ It was a moment of high tension and the audience were on the edge of their seats, when suddenly the camp Tannoy blared out, ‘Seaman McKinley, please report to the main gate.’ The room erupted with hysterical hoots of laughter, and the red-faced sailor shuffled out of the room, doing his best to avoid making eye contact with any of his peers.