On their make-and-mend afternoons, Kathleen and her friends generally headed into the nearby town of Abingdon, but one day she, Penelope and Ethel decided to set off on foot and explore the area beyond the far end of the camp instead. When they reached the gate, they were stopped by an unfamiliar guard. ‘Do you know where you’re going, girls?’ he asked them.
‘We just thought we’d have a wander down this way,’ Kathleen replied.
‘Well, make sure you’re back by five,’ the man warned her.
The girls went on their way, following a winding path away from the camp until they reached the Thames. It was a glorious late summer’s day and as the river flowed gently alongside the beautiful green fields, Kathleen could almost forget there was a war on.
The walk had left the girls feeling parched, and when they spotted a quaint old thatched pub nestled in a crook of the river, they felt irresistibly drawn towards it. ‘Ooh, let’s go and get a lemonade,’ said Kathleen, leading the way across a little bridge over the river. Outside the pub they found a couple of men sat at a table, their cheeks flushed red from the cider they were drinking. Above the entrance hung a large sign that read simply, ‘Come in!’
Kathleen and her friends knew a thing or two about following orders, and right now they needed no further encouragement. ‘Come on, then,’ said Kathleen, leading the others inside. She walked straight up to the bar and ordered a lemonade for each of them.
‘Sorry, luv, no can do,’ the barmaid replied. ‘We’re all out of lemonade today.’
‘Well, what other soft drinks do you have?’ Kathleen asked her.
‘We’re running a bit short,’ the woman told her, ‘what with the good weather and all. Right now, it’s cider or nothing.’
‘Three ciders it is, then,’ Kathleen replied. The girls hadn’t come out in search of alcohol, but at least it would help quench their thirst. A few minutes later, the three of them were sitting at a table in the garden outside, sipping from their glasses as they watched the river go by.
It was a blissful scene, and when the three glasses were drained, no one was in any mood to head home again. ‘Shall I get us another drink, then?’ Penelope asked, giving a little hiccup.
Once the glasses had been emptied for a second time, it seemed only right that Ethel should buy a third round. The girls continued to guzzle the warm fruity nectar, and Kathleen felt like she was in heaven. ‘This is the life, eh?’ she said to Penelope and Ethel, as the three of them clinked their glasses together.
It was only when the girls were finishing up their third round of drinks that Kathleen suddenly noticed the time. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock!’ she exclaimed.
Hastily, they swigged what was left in the bottom of their glasses and stood up from the little wooden table. But the moment they did, they were suddenly hit by a wave of dizziness. ‘Do you know what?’ Penelope declared, as she swayed from side to side. ‘I think I might be ever so slightly blotto.’
‘Never mind,’ Kathleen replied, striding away from the table. ‘We’ve got to get back to camp. Follow me!’ She made for the little bridge, but found she had to hold on to the side to steady herself as she crossed it.
The other girls were equally the worse for wear, and it took an enormous effort for the three of them to stagger back to camp. By the time they reached the back entrance, they were exhausted from the march, and they bent over for a moment to catch their breath.
Suddenly, Kathleen became aware of the guard on the gate, staring at them with his arms crossed. Through bleary eyes she could make out a distinct smirk on his face. ‘Oh, you won’t half be for it now, girls,’ he told them, doing his best to suppress a chuckle. ‘They’ll have you up for drunk and disorderly.’
‘We’re not drunk!’ Kathleen protested, as she heaved herself back up to a standing posture and did her best to stare the guard down, a task that was rendered rather difficult by the fact that he seemed to be sporting two heads.
‘Ab-so-lutely not!’ Penelope agreed, slurring a little. ‘And we certainly aren’t … dis-ord-erly.’ She nodded her head primly in what she thought must be the guard’s general direction.
‘All right, whatever you say, girls,’ he replied. ‘In you come!’
The guard pulled aside the gate so that the girls could get back into the camp, but now, try as she might, Kathleen couldn’t find her way to the opening. She willed her feet to go in a straight line, but it seemed much harder than it had on the way out.
Evidently her two friends were suffering the same problem. ‘I can’t get through!’ Ethel protested, with evident frustration, as she pushed and shoved at what she thought must be the gate.
‘That’s a hedge, darlin’,’ the guard said, laughing heartily. ‘You want to try over here.’
Finally, Kathleen found her way to the entrance. ‘Now just stand still, would you!’ she implored the gatepost, as she carefully stepped past it and began the trek back to the cabin.
‘I hate to think what your CO will say when she sees the state of you lot!’ the guard shouted, as the three girls made their way up the path.
Luckily, they got back to their cabin without being spotted by a senior officer, and that night they slept more soundly than they ever had before.
16
Jessie
Almost half a year had passed since Jessie and her colleagues huddled around the radio in the NAAFI, listening anxiously for the latest news of the D-Day landings – and during that time the invasion had continued to go well. Paris had been liberated, followed shortly afterwards by Brussels and Antwerp, and the Allied forces were continuing their inexorable march towards Germany.
Jessie and her friends, meanwhile, had remained at their camp outside Great Yarmouth, with even less to do than before. Eventually, they had received an order that their battery was to be disbanded. There was a silver lining to the sad news, however. The other three batteries in their regiment were about to ship out for Belgium, and anyone from 518 who wanted to join them was invited to apply for a transfer.
Jessie didn’t hesitate to put her name down, and she was delighted when Elsie Acres volunteered as well. Elsie Windsor, however, would be staying at home, having accepted a transfer to an Army Ordnance Corps depot in Shrewsbury, where she was responsible for greasing tanks. Jessie was sorry to say goodbye to her old friend, but at least she knew that Stan would keep her up to date on his wife’s news. He had willingly volunteered for the Belgian posting, and would be bringing his trumpet along with him.
Before they set sail, the girls were given a week’s embarkation leave so that they could say goodbye to their families. On her way back to Holbeach Bank, Jessie found herself sharing a train carriage with Molly Norris, the cuddly orderly sergeant who had reluctantly disciplined her for impersonating the PT instructor during her training.
Since then, Jessie had never really spoken to ‘Aunt Molly’, but on that long train journey she was able to make up for lost time. She learned that the sergeant had been wrestling with a dilemma about how to spend her leave. ‘I’m in a bit of a funny situation,’ she confided. ‘You see, when I was 14 I ran away from home and I’ve never been back since.’
Jessie nodded sympathetically. She had always thought her own family situation was difficult, but here was someone whose childhood must have been much harder than hers.
‘The thing is,’ Molly continued, ‘I just feel I ought to see my parents before we ship out.’ She hesitated for a moment before adding, ‘In case something happens to us out there.’
Before long the train was arriving at Peterborough station and Molly stood up to leave. ‘Good luck, Sarge,’ Jessie said, with a smile.
Back in Holbeach Bank, Jessie was relieved to find that her own mother seemed less stern and controlling than usual. Since Jim’s death Mrs Ward had begun writing to her again, and she seemed to have decided to go a bit easier on her around the house as well.
In fact, if anything it was Jessie’s father who was less than happy about
her heading off to Belgium. ‘I must say I’m surprised they’re sending girls overseas already,’ he told her, furrowing his brow with anxiety.
‘Well, it’s a man’s job we do, Dad,’ Jessie replied gently. ‘And remember, we’ve had plenty of practice.’
Before Jessie and her friends were allowed to set sail for the Continent, there were a few matters that had to be dealt with. They were each given a supply of Belgian francs, their pay books were blacked out in case they were captured by the enemy, and everyone was handed a pen and paper to write a will.
Jessie didn’t have much in savings, beyond some money she had received from the Army when Jim was killed, but she decided to leave what she did have to her parents. It felt strange setting down her assets in black and white, although she had always known that the Army considered death a routine matter, for men and women alike. In the back of every pay book were two sections to be competed if its owner was killed, euphemistically labelled Diagnosis and Disposal. ‘In other words,’ as one of the girls had remarked, ‘what killed you and what they did with your body.’
With the paperwork completed, the mixed batteries were ready to depart, and soon Jessie and her colleagues were marching three abreast up the gangplank of the Lady of Man. As its name suggested, in civilian life the little vessel had been an Isle of Man ferry, and it had certainly seen better days. Some of the planks of wood that made up the deck were so rotten that the girls’ feet went right through them.
The channel crossing was a pretty grim experience. The boat was buffeted by a nasty squall and the girls inside were thrown this way and that. Jessie found a railing that seemed to have been bolted down fairly securely, and clung on to it with both hands.
Before long, many of the girls were suffering from seasickness, and a whiff of vomit began to suffuse the boat. Jessie fared better than most, suffering only a mild bout of queasiness, but one girl was so badly affected that when they finally docked in Ostend she had to be taken ashore on a stretcher.
As the girls marched off the vessel, and through the ancient Belgian city, men and women in the streets began to applaud them. I suppose they’ve never seen a girl in uniform before, Jessie thought, looking out at the faces in the crowd. Despite their smiles, many of them were pale and drawn, and their children looked worryingly thin.
When the girls arrived at their temporary billet – an old hotel that had evidently been abandoned for some time – they were given strict instructions not to offer any food to the locals. Normally, Jessie had no problem doing as she was told, but some orders were harder to follow than others. ‘You can’t see children starving and do nothing,’ she told one of the other girls. Many of them still had sandwiches they had been too ill to eat on the boat, and they wasted no time in sharing them out among the local children.
After a couple of days in Ostend, Jessie and her friends were loaded onto a fleet of Army trucks for transport to their various gun-sites. That night the girls stayed in an old German barracks on the outskirts of Malines. The wooden buildings were in reasonably good shape, but the billet was far from popular with the English girls. The walls were plastered with posters proclaiming ‘Achtung!’ and ‘Rauchen Verboten!’ and, Jessie couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable sleeping in what had until recently been a Nazi soldier’s bed.
But most unsettling of all were the silhouettes of British Spitfires and Hurricanes pinned up on the walls, just like the cut-outs of Dorniers and Messerschmitts Jessie was used to seeing at Army bases back home. ‘I don’t like this place,’ she told Elsie. ‘It gives me the jim-jams.’ For some reason, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the camp was haunted, as if the Germans had never really left.
The German barracks might have been creepy but at least it was warm, which was more than could be said for the girls’ final destination, an anti-aircraft camp near the tiny town of Winksele-Delle, on the road between Louvain and Malines.
In fact, to call the site a camp at all was being generous. In reality, it was little more than a load of gun equipment dumped in the middle of a field, with a handful of wooden huts knocked together nearby. There was no running water, no gas and no electricity – the Germans had cut off the local supply when they left the area. Fortunately someone had brought a generator to provide power to the command post, but the rest of the camp would rely entirely on paraffin lanterns outside daylight hours.
Then there was the mud. Peering out of the back of their lorry, Jessie and her friends gazed upon field after field of what looked like molten chocolate. In between the duckboard paths that led from the wooden huts to the gun-site, the ground was little better than a quagmire. In fact, rumour had it that a gunner at one of the other nearby camps had drowned when he lost his footing and fell off the path in the middle of the night.
‘You’ll need some of these,’ called the driver, coming round the side of the vehicle and hurling several pairs of wellies into the back. The girls put them on and reluctantly lowered themselves to the ground. ‘Welcome to Paradise!’ one of them quipped.
As it turned out, the problem with the mud proved to be temporary. A couple of days after Jessie and her friends arrived at the camp, the temperature plunged dramatically, and in place of knee-deep gloop there was now hard ice underfoot. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least there was no danger of drowning in the night.
On the gun-site, the girls were issued with leather jerkins to keep them warm, but in their huts at night they struggled to protect themselves from the cold. Each girl slept under three or four blankets, with a greatcoat draped on top for good measure, and when their supply of firewood ran out, they resorted to burning slats from the bunks.
Jessie’s battery was one of several defending Brussels and Antwerp from German bombardment. The latter city, in particular, was critical to the Allied effort in Europe, since its docks allowed supplies from Britain to reach the front lines without a long journey through France and Belgium. Hitler had wasted no time in attempting to obliterate the city, and had recently given the order for his V1s – flying bombs launched from sites behind enemy lines, which had been pounding London since a week after D-Day – to target Antwerp instead, along with other sites in Belgium.
Compared to piloted planes, the V1s – or ‘Doodlebugs’, as they were popularly known – were even tougher to hit. They flew at up to 400 mph, and generally below the ack-ack guns’ optimum range. But at least the men and women on the gun-sites got plenty of opportunities to practise. Every couple of hours they would hear the characteristic chugging of the V1 engine and look up to see a new wave of the weapons approaching, one after the other. ‘They’re like London buses,’ one of the girls commented wryly. ‘You wait for one, and then three come along at once.’
Before long, Jessie and her friends were becoming more proficient at downing the flying bombs. They came over so frequently that there was little point even attempting to sleep at night, so whichever section was on duty would wait up in a little hut by the gun park, playing cards, reading books or just chatting while they waited for the next wave to come over. Never before – not even on Humberside – had Jessie found herself in action so often.
If the cold was the most immediate hardship for the girls at Winksele-Delle, the lack of clean water soon began to trouble them even more. The closest available source was a well in the grounds of a nearby château, and every day a company of men and women from the camp would head over there with some empty buckets to fill.
But before long, Jessie and her colleagues began to feel unwell, and soon they were coming down with dysentery. ‘I reckon there must’ve been a dead Jerry in that well,’ gasped one of the girls, as she abandoned the morning parade and rushed off to the ablutions.
The toilet facilities at the camp were far from luxurious – just a hut containing a long row of buckets, without even any screens between them for modesty. One day, after Jessie had succumbed to the dreaded illness herself, she raced to the nearest bucket, only to find that the girl squatting next to her was in a s
imilarly miserable state.
‘How many times have you been today?’ Jessie asked her, trying to take her mind off the corkscrewing pain in her guts.
The other girl replied miserably, ‘I got as far as nine and then I stopped counting.’
Unsurprisingly, the area commander soon declared the well at the château off-limits, arranging instead for a local brewery to bring around a tank of water every morning. There wasn’t enough for the girls to wash themselves properly, but Jessie grew increasingly resourceful, finding that if she melted a bucket of snow she could get about a mugful of liquid out of it, enough to rinse her whole body.
While her skin was clean, though, Jessie’s uniform was growing dirty. Fortunately she and Elsie soon met a Belgian couple in the local village who were able to help. They ran a café-cum-bar where the two girls often went to write letters, and when the woman heard that their clothes needed washing she insisted on doing it for them. She refused to accept payment for her work, insisting that there was nothing to buy with it anyway. What she really wanted, she told them, was soap – something she hadn’t seen for many years.
Jessie managed to get hold of a slab of Pear’s finest, and when the girls presented it to the Belgian woman she was ecstatic. ‘Zeep! Zeep!’ she cried, holding it aloft as if it were a bar of gold bullion. Before long she had invited Jessie and Elsie back to her house to say thank you, where she served them coffee made from ground acorns – the closest approximation to the real thing that the struggling Belgians could manage.
While Jessie and Elsie were making friends with the locals, some of the girls in the battery were getting to know the other Allied forces stationed nearby. The whole area around Brussels was swarming with American troops, and with their smart uniforms and even smarter wise-cracks, they had made a strong impression on the English girls.
In fact several of Jessie’s colleagues were now dating GIs. Marie Rose, a girl from a small town near Birmingham, was going out with an American soldier called Dave, who had apparently been seduced by her strong Brummie accent. ‘He thinks moy voice is lov-lay,’ she told the other girls in their hut one night. ‘He says it sounds like sing-ging.’
The Girls Who Went to War Page 22