The competition turned out to be just part of a whole roster of traditional highland events, with burly Scots in kilts competing against each other in running, shot-putting and tossing the caber, among other sports that Kathleen had never even heard of. And then there were the musical performances. She had never seen so many bagpipes in her life, and as they started to play she felt as if her ears were being blown out.
While the girls sat and watched the musicians, a man with a clipboard came round, taking names for the dancing competition. As he went past, Kathleen caught his eye and said, ‘Here, put me down, would you?’
Kitty stared at her in astonishment. ‘What are ye doin’, Kath?’ she asked. ‘Dinne ye ken the best o’ the world’s highland dancers are here?’
But Kathleen was up for trying anything once. ‘I’ve watched Alison do the Highland Fling enough times in the hut,’ she said, shrugging. ‘How hard can it be?’
Soon the dancing competition was underway, and the girls gathered round the stage with the rest of the crowd to watch the first few contestants. They gazed in amazement as, one by one, the performers leapt expertly in the air, raising their hands elegantly as they hopped from foot to foot, and twirling round on the spot in their kilts and matching socks.
‘Ooh, they are terribly good,’ remarked Diana. Kathleen gulped, wondering what she had let herself in for.
‘Next up we have Kathleen Skin,’ one of the judges called out suddenly.
‘Wish me luck!’ Kathleen told her friends, as she headed up to the little stage. A murmur went round the audience as they saw the young Wren taking her position. Kathleen held her right arm in the air, just as she’d seen Alison do, and nodded to the bagpiper to begin. But as soon as he struck up the tune she began to realise that the perfect coordination of limbs which had looked so simple when the other dancers did it was really rather difficult to emulate. She flailed about wildly as she bounced up and down on the spot, throwing arms and legs out at whatever angle she could, and trying her best to make up for her lack of expertise with sheer energy and enthusiasm.
At first the audience merely stared in shock, but after a while they started clapping along in time with the music, evidently amused by the mad English girl in their midst. Encouraged, Kathleen responded by hopping around more vigorously than ever, causing the crowd to roar with laughter.
By the time her Fling was over, everyone in the room had been won over and they gave her a mighty round of applause – despite the fact that the official judges had just awarded her the lowest possible score.
She returned, red-faced and out of breath, to find her friends in fits of laughter.
‘Oh, Kathleen, you are hil-arious,’ Diana said, wiping the tears from her eyes.
19
Jessie
At the Royal Army Ordnance Corps depot in Antwerp, Jessie collected her next order list from a pile on the desk, and set off with her trolley in search of the required engine parts. She passed row after row of shelves before finally she spotted a box with one of the right numbers on it. Then she climbed up the ladder and retrieved the part, wondering what on earth it was for.
Jessie’s battery had been disbanded just a couple of weeks after VE Day, and the girls had found themselves scattered to the four winds. Elsie Acres had been sent off to Holland to become an Army typist, leaving before Jessie even had a chance to say goodbye. The next day it was her own turn to depart, as she was transferred to the RAOC. Driving away from the gun-site in the back of an ATS lorry, Jessie had taken one last look back, and had seen one of the other girls crying her eyes out at the thought that their little unit was no more.
At the depot, Jessie missed the excitement and camaraderie of ack-ack, but she certainly didn’t miss the war. She was content to continue wearing her ATS uniform for as long as the Army still needed her, doing her bit in whatever way she was told. Being stationed in Antwerp meant she was closer to Mac as well, and the two of them now spent most of their evenings off together, generally at a place called The 21 Club, where soldiers of all nationalities mingled.
Encircling the club’s vast dance floor was a balcony which sported the flags of dozens of different British regiments, and since it was almost impossible to find anyone in the sea of uniforms there, Jessie and Mac always met under the banner of the 11th Armoured Division – a menacing black bull with bright red eyes.
As they danced the nights away, the young Scotsman always held Jessie close. But when he told her he loved her, as he frequently did, she could never quite bring herself to say it back. However much Mac made her laugh, and however much she enjoyed his company, the fact was that he just wasn’t Jim.
Jessie’s work at the RAOC depot was undemanding, certainly compared to the pressure of life on a gun-site, but she didn’t mind. It was a peaceful time and she was enjoying herself in Antwerp, seeing Mac in the evenings and spending her days getting to know the Belgian girls who worked alongside her in the stores, and who were always keen to practise their English. One of them, Jessie learned, had served with the local resistance group, the White Brigade, and had spent the war hiding out in the woods, and even killing Germans in hand-to-hand combat.
Jessie knew that, as far as her own life was concerned, she was just treading water in Antwerp, but it suited her and she was happy not to think too much about what might come next. It was a long time ago now that she had stopped imagining a future for herself, but the habit had stuck.
One day, however, the limbo that Jessie had been living in came to an abrupt end. Orders went up on the RAOC noticeboard announcing that she was being transferred to a depot in Hamburg, in northern Germany, and would be expected to leave the next day. Jessie only just had enough time to dash off a brief note to Mac, letting him know which train she would be catching.
They met on the platform at Mechelen station, which was crowded and bustling with people – clearly there would be no opportunity for a heartfelt private farewell. Mac gave Jessie a little kiss and began helping her up onto the train. Then he stopped, and looked into her eyes for a moment. ‘We can’t go on like this, you know,’ he said thoughtfully.
The guard on the platform blew his whistle, signalling the train to depart. ‘What about getting married?’ Mac asked Jessie suddenly. ‘I think we could make a pretty good go of it.’
Jessie could feel the train begin to move beneath her. She knew that the moment had come to make up her mind once and for all. Mac wasn’t Jim, but then no one ever could be. Was it really worth throwing away a chance at happiness for the memory of a man who was gone?
‘I think you’re right,’ she said after a moment. ‘We could.’
Looking back, Jessie saw Mac beaming from ear to ear. ‘I’m so pleased!’ he shouted after her, as the train pulled out of the station.
Jessie spent the journey to Hamburg feeling more contented than she had for years. Finally, she had made a decision, and for the first time since Jim’s death she had a future to look forward to again.
But before that future could begin, there was one more thing she had to do – serve out the rest of her commitment to the Army. And she would be doing it in a country that, until recently, she had been fighting to destroy. Staying the night in a German barracks in Belgium had felt eerie enough, but now she was entering the homeland of the enemy.
As the train slowed on its approach to Hamburg station, Jessie looked out of the window. Along the sides of the tracks she could see dozens of emaciated German children, their arms reaching up hopefully towards her. Despite the bitter cold outside, they were wearing little more than rags. She thought back to the hungry Belgian kids who had taken her friends’ sandwiches in Ostend – compared to these urchins, they had looked well fed.
Under armed guard, the ATS girls were hastily transferred onto a lorry and driven eastwards out of the city. All around them loomed the ghastly spectacle of post-war Hamburg, a place so utterly devastated by bombing and siege that it was scarcely recognisable as somewhere that human beings had eve
r lived. As far as the eye could see, there was not a single building standing intact, just jagged fragments of walls surrounded by endless heaps of rubble.
Everywhere Jessie looked she saw desperate-looking people picking through the debris, while gangs of feral teenagers hung about on street corners, homeless, parentless and starving, staring menacingly at the Army truck as it made its way through the streets.
Hamburg had suffered one of the most devastating bombing campaigns of the war. In the space of a week, more than 40,000 people had been killed as the US Air Force pounded the city by day and the RAF blasted it at night, sparking a 1,500-foot tornado of fire that had engulfed hundreds of thousands of homes and factories. And as if that wasn’t enough, in the final month of the war the city’s streets had played host to a vicious two-week battle, as the German forces there fought to the bitter end.
Beneath the rubble, thousands of corpses still lay undiscovered, attracting rats and disease. As they turned a corner, the girls in Jessie’s lorry saw a team of workers digging up body parts and putting them into black bags. The stench of rotting flesh was almost unbearable, and she covered her mouth with her sleeve.
When they finally left the city behind them, Jessie couldn’t help feeling relieved. A little while later the lorry arrived at a large RAOC depot in the woods near the small town of Glinde, and as it came to a halt inside the gate a male corporal with fair hair and a friendly face held out his hand to help Jessie down. After four years of doing a man’s job, she was rather taken aback at the unexpected act of chivalry, but she soon discovered that her cohort were the first ATS girls to arrive at the depot, where the mixing of the sexes was seen as something of a novelty. Men and women were not even allowed to eat together in the canteen, and over dinner that night the girls sat at their own segregated table.
The next morning, the new arrivals were lined up and given injections for typhus, which was rife in Hamburg as a result of all the rotting bodies. They were warned never to leave the camp without an armed guard, and to try to stick to groups of six or more even while they were there. ‘The people here are in a desperate state,’ an officer told them. ‘They’ve been known to slit a man’s throat just for a pair of shoes.’
The new girls were told that they would be working alongside German civilians in the stores, but that any fraternisation with them was forbidden. That was hardly going to be a problem, thought Jessie. After six years of war, she had no desire to speak to a German, and neither did any of the other girls.
Nonetheless, as the weeks went by and she got used to the sight of her German colleagues, dressed in rags and with bits of old tyres wrapped around their feet for shoes, Jessie couldn’t help feeling sorry for them – and when she noticed odd supplies going missing from the depot she made the decision not to report it. After the wholesale devastation she had seen in Hamburg, she could only imagine the dire conditions the women must be living in. Around the camp, she had heard some of the British soldiers talking about their ‘bits of frat’ – a term they used to describe girls who were so desperate that they would sleep with a man in exchange for coffee or cigarettes.
Perhaps sensing that Jessie was more sympathetic than most of her colleagues, one of the German women eventually came up and spoke to her. ‘From your husband?’ she asked, pointing to the ring that Jessie still wore on her left hand.
‘Late husband,’ she replied coolly. ‘He was killed in the war.’
The woman nodded. ‘My husband also was killed,’ she replied sadly.
‘Where?’ Jessie asked, not entirely sure if she wanted to hear the answer.
‘Luftschlacht um England,’ the woman replied. ‘I think you say, Battle of Britain.’
Jessie looked at her for a moment. Most of the German pilots she had helped shoot down had probably had wives at home, she realised – women who had missed them just as much as she had missed Jim. ‘There are a lot of us, aren’t there?’ she said gently.
‘Yes,’ the woman agreed. Then she went back to her work.
For the girls stationed there, the RAOC depot was a strange and unsettling posting – they were cooped up in the middle of nowhere, and too scared to ever leave camp. After a couple of months a building in Hamburg was shored up to make them their own little cinema, but even so they had to visit it under armed guard and then come straight back as soon as the film had finished.
The men and women of the depot did their best to make their own fun, and as ever Jessie’s piano playing was much in demand. The kind corporal who had helped her out of the lorry when she first arrived turned out to be a classically trained baritone, who performed with his local operatic society back home in England. He introduced himself to Jessie as Ralph, and asked if she would mind accompanying him on the piano so that he didn’t get too rusty while he was out in Germany. They whiled away many happy hours singing and playing together while she waited for her demob papers to come through.
Finally, after several months in Germany, Jessie was told that her number had come up, and she gladly boarded a train headed back to Calais. After an uneventful voyage across the channel, she found herself back in England again.
At a depot in York, Jessie joined the other troops waiting to be demobbed. The girls were herded around like sheep from one end of a large hall to the other as they underwent the process of being turned back into civilians. One by one, they handed in all their kit except their service dress and greatcoats, and collected clothing coupons and railway warrants for their journeys home.
Among the crowd, Jessie spotted a girl she remembered from her basic training in Leicester. She rushed over to say hello, and soon they were trading stories of how life in the ATS had treated them. It was only when she heard the other girl’s account of the last few years that Jessie realised just how incredible her own experience had been – while she had been shooting down enemy bombers and travelling to Belgium and Germany, this girl had spent the entire time at an office in England. Working on the ack-ack guns had been tough, but Jessie and her friends had been lucky to have a job that was so important, and she felt proud of what they had accomplished together.
Now, though, Jessie’s career in the ATS was over, and a few minutes later she emerged from the hall as a civilian once again. For the first time in years she was a mere individual, no longer part of the great machine that was the Army. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and she wondered for a moment whether she should have signed up for another two years, as some of the girls had done. But she knew Mac was waiting to be demobbed too, and once they were both out of the Army they could begin their new life together.
Jessie caught the train down to Spalding, marvelling as she got out at the station just how little the town seemed to have changed. Back in Holbeach Bank too everything was exactly as she remembered it.
When she arrived home her father was out, so it was Mrs Ward who opened the door. ‘Jessie!’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve just been demobbed,’ Jessie told her. ‘I’ve come home.’
‘I’m glad,’ said her mother, with a softness that her daughter hadn’t seen before. Jessie knew that they would never be close, but perhaps if her mother was willing to treat her with kindness they would get on all right after all.
To Jessie’s relief, her mother’s good mood seemed to last, and when her father came home she found herself showered with affection. ‘Here she is,’ Mr Ward declared proudly. ‘The girl who won the war!’
The next morning, for the first time in years, Jessie opened her old wardrobe, staring uncertainly at the civilian clothes left over from her previous life. Somehow they didn’t feel like they belonged to her any more. The colours all looked so bright and childish, and she couldn’t bear to put any of them on.
Instead she slipped back into her service dress and set off for Spalding, determined to blow her clothing coupons on a new outfit. But when she got to the shops, she realised that she had no idea what to buy – she had got out of the habit of thinking abou
t which clothes went together, and had completely lost track of what was fashionable. In the end she bought a handful of blouses in various shades of brown, and a large packet of green dye.
When she got home, Jessie transformed her ATS skirt from khaki to a muddy olive colour. Then she put it back on, along with a brown blouse and her old Army shoes. It wasn’t exactly a new look for the recently demobbed Private Winkworth, but at least it was a start.
After a couple of weeks, Mac too was released from the Army, and before returning to Grantown-on-Spey he came to visit Jessie in Holbeach Bank. When she met him at the station she couldn’t help laughing at the sight of his grey demob suit, which hardly matched his cheeky personality. Jessie realised she would have to get used to it soon, though, when he returned to his old job at the Bank of Scotland.
‘Well, you might not like the suit, but I hope you’ll like this,’ Mac said, taking a little box out of his pocket. Inside was a gold engagement ring, set with opals.
Jessie gasped. ‘They’re my favourite stone!’ she told him.
For the first time since she had married Jim, Jessie took her wedding ring off and put it in her pocket. Then she let Mac slide the beautiful engagement ring onto her finger.
She felt fairly confident that Mac would get on well with her father. Mr Ward had a lot of time for any man who arrived at his door bearing tales of Army life, and her new fiancé knew how to spin a good yarn. Back at the house in Holbeach Bank, she was pleased to see the two men dissolving in fits of laughter as they traded old stories.
It was her mother that Jessie was more worried about. But all through dinner that evening, Mrs Ward continued to behave herself, treating Mac with courtesy and respect. At the end of the evening, she came up to Jessie and said, ‘I like him.’
Coming from Mrs Ward, who liked few people on this earth, it was a rare compliment. Jessie knew that, in her own way, her mother was trying to atone for the past.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 27