For the next few weeks, Kathleen’s new home was a medieval mansion on Chelsea Embankment called Crosby Hall, where trainee MT drivers were billeted. On arrival, she was rather alarmed to discover that many of her room-mates already had extensive driving experience. Like many of the Wrens she had encountered, most of them were terribly posh, and they talked about how ‘Daddy’ let them take the car out whenever they wanted. A few, meanwhile, had come from Canada or Australia, where it seemed everyone learned to drive at an early age. ‘I’ve been doing it since I was nine,’ a Canadian girl called Elsa informed Kathleen nonchalantly.
On the first morning of the training course, a row of vehicles of various sizes pulled up outside the hall, ready to collect the girls for their first driving lesson. They were told that they would have to master not just one but all of the different types if they were to pass their test, including 5-tonne lorries, 15-hundredweight trucks, smaller vans and staff cars.
The instructors were former London bus drivers, and it was clear that they weren’t exactly thrilled about their new job. ‘Here come another lot of idiots,’ Kathleen heard one of them say as the group of new recruits approached.
A middle-aged man with a thin, worn face motioned for Kathleen to get into the driving seat of one of the 15-hundredweights. He hopped up next to her, while the Canadian girl, Elsa, sat in the back, waiting for her turn at the wheel.
The instructor took Kathleen through the different parts of the vehicle, explaining what the pedals did and how the gear-stick worked. ‘Now, why don’t you have a go?’ he said.
Kathleen had been expecting the man to show her how everything was done first, but clearly this was to be a baptism of fire. Soon she was lurching her way along Chelsea Embankment, the truck stalling every few metres – much to the delight of a group of male students who were learning in one of the 5-tonners. ‘Hello, Jenny!’ one of them shouted, as they overtook her. ‘Make sure you’ve got a firm grip on the gear-stick!’
Ignoring the young men, Kathleen turned in the direction of the Great West Road, and began crawling up it at a snail’s pace. Luckily there weren’t too many other vehicles about, or she knew she would probably have been hooted at for her slow driving. Yet to her even this glacial speed seemed dangerously fast, and she gripped the steering wheel anxiously, plagued by the thought that she might be the cause of an accident. Every minute on the road felt like an hour, and she silently prayed for the lesson to end before she killed someone.
When her turn was finally over and Elsa got into the driving seat, Kathleen was overwhelmed with relief. But she cringed at the thought of how much better the Canadian girl was bound to be.
It quickly became clear, however, that Elsa intended to make no concessions for the fact that she was in Central London now, and not the wilds of Saskatchewan. She set off at a roaring pace, and as she came up behind another vehicle going more slowly than she was, she began hooting the horn as hard as she could.
‘Stop that!’ the instructor told her.
‘I know what I’m doing!’ Elsa shouted, driving as close as she could to the other car until it pulled over to let her pass. ‘There, you see!’ she said victoriously.
‘Let’s take a left here, off the main road,’ the instructor said wearily.
‘Right you are,’ Elsa replied, swinging the lorry round into the side road without even slowing, and proceeding to drive up it on the wrong side.
‘Get on the left!’ the instructor cried, as an approaching car began honking at them wildly.
‘Oh, you English and your silly laws!’ Elsa exclaimed, unperturbed, as the car swerved to make way for her. As it went past she turned her head to follow it with a string of swearwords, the like of which even the London bus driver had never heard.
‘Just pull over as soon as you can,’ the poor man said. Kathleen could see he was as shaken by the ordeal as she was. It was a relief to them both when she took the wheel again and they began their slow, lurching progress back to Crosby Hall.
At the weekends, while the other girls on her course went dancing at the Hammersmith Palais, Kathleen would go and visit Arnold’s family, who lived across the river in Clapham. Even before their first meeting, she had heard so much about Mr and Mrs Karlen from her fiancé’s letters that she felt as if she knew them already, and when Arnold’s father opened the door he was exactly as she had imagined. Dark and handsome with a well-tended moustache, she could just picture him commanding the kitchens of the Mayfair restaurant where he worked.
Mrs Karlen, meanwhile, was a rosy-cheeked country girl from Lincolnshire, from whom Arnold and his brothers had inherited their blond hair and blue eyes. Even in middle age, she still had a fresh-faced beauty, and Kathleen could see why her Swiss husband had fallen for her.
The Karlens were warm and welcoming to Kathleen, and in Arnold’s absence they treated her like an adopted daughter. They were all fascinated to hear about her experiences on the driving course, and when she told them the size of the trucks she was learning on they were astonished. ‘I can’t believe a girl your size can even turn the wheel of one of those things,’ Arnold’s mother told her, obviously impressed.
But Mrs Karlen had some news of a more sombre nature to share – Arnold had recently been demoted. ‘I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding,’ she told Kathleen. ‘He and his men arrived at a concentration camp in Germany and he found a box of gold watches that had been taken from the poor souls in there. He took it away for safekeeping, but when his commanding officer discovered the box with Arnold’s things he thought he must have stolen it. He said he had to punish him to set an example to the men.’
‘Oh dear,’ Kathleen replied, ‘poor Arnold.’ She knew how proud her fiancé was of his status in the Army, and how hard the demotion must have hit him. But privately she couldn’t help thinking what a strange thing it was that he had done.
Back at the training centre, Kathleen was growing a little more confident in her driving, but she found the job physically exhausting. The vehicles had been designed with men in mind, not women, and as Mrs Karlen had suggested, just turning the steering wheel was hard work – Kathleen often had to stand up to get enough leverage. She didn’t see herself as a natural driver by any means, but she reasoned that if she could only pass the test then perhaps she would be in with a chance of being posted somewhere exciting abroad.
The girls on the course continued to be pestered by the men training alongside them, and Kathleen found that ignoring their rude remarks only seemed to make them more determined to wind her up. One day, as she was setting off along the embankment, she heard one of them shout to his friends, ‘I’m going to get her.’ Before long, the man began tail-gating Kathleen’s vehicle, forcing her to go faster and faster.
‘Slow down!’ the instructor shouted.
‘I can’t – he’s going to hit me!’ Kathleen cried.
The instructor turned and looked out of the window at the lorry behind them. ‘Bloody hell, he is as well,’ he exclaimed. ‘What does that maniac think he’s doing?’
In the back of the other lorry, the man’s friends were cheering wildly, and, encouraged, he began honking his horn and swerving from side to side, trying to force Kathleen off the road. The girls sitting behind her began to scream, and above all the noise Kathleen couldn’t make out what the instructor was trying to tell her.
‘Turn left, turn left!’ he bellowed, finally loud enough for her to hear it. Spotting a little path, Kathleen swerved at the very last moment. To her relief, the lorry behind didn’t have time to follow, and continued speeding away up the road.
Moments later Kathleen realised that she had in fact turned into a private garden, and she was going too fast to stop herself from driving straight through it. The van careered through row upon row of carefully tended cabbages, which were sent flying up into the air, and Kathleen saw the poor owner of the house standing on his doorstep shaking his fist at her. She didn’t even have time to shout an apology as she smashed right
through a gate on the other side.
At long last the driving course was finally over, and one by one the girls submitted to a practical exam that took up most of the day, as they were put through their paces on the various vehicles they had learned to drive. Kathleen was convinced that she had failed the test, and was thrilled when the instructor told her that she had just scraped through.
When she got back to Crosby Hall, however, she found that not all her fellow trainees had been so lucky. Several of the girls who had been driving for years had failed, and they were bitterly disappointed. Their cockiness had led them to take too many chances on the roads, or to ignore what the instructor was telling them – and in the end their attitude had cost them dearly.
For the girls who had passed, orders soon went up on a noticeboard, detailing where they were being sent next. Kathleen quickly scanned the list, hoping that she would finally be going abroad.
But after all the trials and tribulations of the driving course, there was to be no exotic posting. Next to her name she found the words, ‘HMS Sanderling, Scotland’.
HMS Sanderling turned out to be a former RAF airfield ten miles from Glasgow, which had recently been taken over by the Fleet Air Arm. Compared to Hornbill the camp had a rough and ready feel, but the surrounding countryside was beautiful.
The Wrens found themselves sharing the base with the local wildlife, most of which seemed to be indifferent to the presence of the military in their natural habitat. The airstrip had become a popular hang-out for hares, and at the height of summer hundreds of them were busy mating and fighting on it ferociously. Whenever a plane came in to land, the girls would rush out onto the runways with clappers, to scare away as many of the creatures as they could.
But the animals weren’t the only ones in danger. One of Kathleen’s tasks at HMS Sanderling was to direct the incoming planes to the correct runway, driving a van bearing a large sign that read, ‘FOLLOW ME’. It was a terrifying job, and she could only cross her fingers and hope that the pilots didn’t come in over speed and run her down along with the hares.
At Sanderling, the pristine country air rang with a noise that Kathleen had never heard before – a strange ‘Crrrk, crrrk’ that sounded like someone running their finger along a very large comb. But when she asked her fellow Wrens what was making the bizarre sound, nobody seemed to have any idea.
There was a little farm at one end of the airstrip, run by two ancient Scottish sisters, and Kathleen decided to ask them what kind of animal it was that she could hear.
‘Ach, that there’s a corncrake, lassie!’ one of the old women told her when she described the distinctive call. ‘Ye dinne get them in England?’
‘No, never,’ Kathleen replied. But later that day she finally saw the creature that had been making the astonishing noise, scurrying along the side of the airstrip. It was a dappled browny-yellow bird with extremely long legs, and was giving the hares a run for their money.
Encountering animals around the camp was one thing, but Kathleen dreaded meeting them on the roads. Some girls had already been unfortunate enough to accidentally run down wild deer, which had to be heaved into the back of their vehicles and reported to the authorities. After her first few weeks in Scotland, Kathleen counted herself lucky to have avoided any such encounters, but one day, finding herself lost on the way to the local post office, she drove into a farmyard to turn her van around and accidentally ran over a duck.
Kathleen jumped down in horror and rushed over to where the poor creature was lying, hoping that perhaps it had just been knocked off its feet. But the animal was completely lifeless, its eyes closed and its body perfectly still.
Ever since she had started driving, Kathleen had been gripped by the fear that she would run someone over in her vehicle. Now it had finally happened – the duck had become her first victim.
Wracked with guilt, she rushed over to the farmhouse and knocked on the door, which was opened by a burly farmer. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve just run over your duck!’ Kathleen told him, ringing her hands.
The stout man eyed the flustered Wren on his doorstep. ‘How long ha’ ye bin driving?’ he asked her.
‘Not very long,’ Kathleen admitted. ‘I’ll pay for the loss myself.’
‘It dinne look like ye’ll have to,’ the man said with a chuckle, pointing over Kathleen’s shoulder.
She turned in time to see the duck miraculously get back on its feet, flap its wings and waddle off to join its friends.
‘Oh!’ Kathleen said, her cheeks turning red with embarrassment. She rushed away from the farmhouse and hopped back into her van as fast as she could, the farmer’s laughter following her up the lane.
After the incident with the duck, Kathleen drove more cautiously than ever, anxious to avoid any further casualties. The next time she set off to collect the mail from the nearby village of Paisley, she crawled along the narrow country lanes, keeping an eye out for wildfowl.
One of the perks of doing the mail round was getting to the post before anyone else at camp, and Kathleen made the most of it to rifle through the bag and see if there was anything from Arnold. She was delighted when she discovered a letter from him, and parking her van on the slope at the back of the post office she settled down to read it before heading back to camp. When she got to the end she started over again, treasuring every word.
Kathleen was so absorbed in her fiancé’s letter that she didn’t notice an old man stopping to lean against the back of her van as he got out his pension book. When she finally stuffed the envelope into her pocket and released the handbrake to reverse back down the slope, she knocked the poor fellow clean off his feet.
Oblivious, Kathleen continued reversing, and was astonished when the old man’s body appeared from between her front wheels. She gasped in horror – could it be that, despite her careful driving, she had killed a man at just two miles per hour? She had checked both side mirrors before she released the handbrake, but the van had no rear window and she hadn’t been able to see directly behind her.
To Kathleen’s relief, her victim was soon back on his feet, unscathed but furious at the ignominy of being knocked down on the way to collect his pension. He began ranting and raving, and, hearing his shouts, the employees and customers of the post office rushed out to see what all the commotion was about. ‘She’s run me over, that’s wha’ happened!’ the old man yelled. ‘She tried to kill me, she did!’
The man was ushered inside, and the postmaster was summoned to arbitrate. ‘I’m very sorry for knocking you over,’ said Kathleen, ‘but I can’t see any marks on you.’
‘Well, the wheels ne’er touched me, did they?’ railed the man. ‘But they might ha’! I’ll have ye for this, I swear!’
At the man’s insistence, the postmaster telephoned Kathleen’s camp, informing the driving officer there of the accident and letting him know that they were holding on to her while they ‘gathered evidence’. Thankfully, the officer persuaded the man to release her, assuring him that the matter would be thoroughly investigated by the Navy, and to the fury of the irate pensioner, Kathleen was allowed to go.
Luckily for her, the driving officer had taken a bit of a shine to her, and when she told him the full story, he was able to see the funny side. But from that day on, she always kept an eye out for pensioners as well as ducks.
Kathleen’s regular misadventures on the roads soon became a popular topic in her Nissen hut. Every day, when she got back from her shift, the other girls would ask to hear the latest madcap tale, gathering around her bed excitedly. One evening it was the gear-stick that came out in her hand in the middle of a busy street in Glasgow, another time how she had used her starting handle to thwack a man over the head who she had seen mugging a sailor. But whatever the story, it was always met with awed gasps from her cabin-mates.
‘Oh, Kathleen, you are utterly hil-arious,’ a girl called Diana Featherington-Bingley exclaimed, wheezing with laughter. A fellow driver, she was one of those girls who
had been borrowing ‘Daddy’s car’ since she was a teenager, but despite her cut-glass accent there was nothing stuck-up about her. She was perfectly happy to take her turn entertaining the others in the hut with her own ridiculous tales, such as the time she ‘came out’ as a débutante and was presented at court wearing a bouffant dress and carrying a fan of ostrich feathers.
The girls’ cabin was a complete cross-section of society, its inhabitants ranging from a minor royal who drove the staff cars to Cockney cooks who worked in the camp kitchens. Kathleen’s work as a nanny had taught her how to talk to people from all walks of life, and she found she was able to get along with everyone.
Most of the girls at Sanderling were English, but a few were ‘locally engaged’ – Scottish girls who lived nearby and had joined the WRNS under the proviso that they wouldn’t be posted far from home. Among the latter were a couple of young women called Kitty Burns and Alison Duffy. Alison was a slip of a girl, but at the slightest encouragement she would leap from her bed and perform an extremely energetic Highland Fling, treating the entire hut to a show-stopping performance.
When they had time off, the girls tended to stay at the camp, but one day Kitty came into the hut in a fever of excitement. ‘There’s a highland dancing competition happening this weekend,’ she told the others. ‘We canne miss it!’
Soon she had convinced Kathleen and several of the other English girls that their time in Scotland wouldn’t be complete unless they attended, and the little gang agreed to hitch-hike to the event together.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 26