The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces. Duncan Barrett

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СКАЧАТЬ they had made. She could hear a little sniffle coming from a few beds away, and before long it had turned into stifled sobbing.

      Margery tiptoed out of bed and hurried over to her distressed neighbour, who she found weeping into her blanket. The two girls clung to each other in the dark, but before long the noise of crying had set off a third new recruit, and she too came over to sit with them, weeping helplessly. After a while everyone else began sitting up in bed too, and the tears flowed freely all around the hut as the girls shared their fears and feelings of homesickness.

      ‘Well, at least we’re all going to suffer together!’ said one of them, doing her best to laugh. Suddenly, there were smiles in the hut as well as tears, and the girls began to feel calmer, buoyed by their new-found camaraderie. Eventually, even the hard bolsters and irritating biscuits could no longer stop them from slipping into a much-needed sleep.

      But for poor Margery a good night’s rest was not on the cards. A few hours later, she awoke to the taste of blood. Her gum was throbbing where the tooth had been needlessly yanked out the previous day, and when she put her hand up to her mouth it came back sticky and red.

      Alarmed, Margery ran over to knock for the sergeant who was sleeping in a private room at the end of the hut, and spluttered an explanation of what had happened. The woman rushed with her across the camp to the sick bay, but on their way they were stopped by a man on guard duty. ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ he demanded, flashing a torch in their direction. As soon as he saw Margery, his jaw dropped in horror, and he stiffened as if he was about to raise the alarm.

      ‘It’s all right, there hasn’t been an accident,’ the sergeant informed him. ‘She just has a problem with her tooth.’

      The guard nodded, relieved, and the two women hurried on.

      In the sick-bay, a night-time attendant was on duty. In her time, she must have dealt with all manner of gruesome medical problems, but in the middle of the night, half asleep, she was unprepared for the grisly sight which staggered in. For the last few hours, Margery had been tossing and turning in her uncomfortable bed, and the blood which had seeped out of her mouth was now smeared all over her face. Her hair was thick with the stuff too, and a fresh, dark trickle was oozing down her chin. The poor medic took one look at her and passed out.

      Luckily the sergeant had quick reflexes, even in the early hours of the morning. She caught the girl before she hit the floor, narrowly preventing her from becoming the second casualty of Margery’s rushed dental work.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ the embarrassed attendant stammered, when she came round a few seconds later.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ the sergeant told her. ‘It’s her fault for looking so gory.’

      Once the sick-bay attendant had recovered a little and drunk a glass of water, she began plugging up the bleeding hole in Margery’s mouth. But after such a mortifying start to her career in the WAAF, Margery only wished there were a hole big enough to swallow her up entirely.

      Throughout their training at Innsworth, the new recruits were kept so busy that there was barely time for homesickness, and Margery found that the time flew by faster than she had expected. From the moment each day began, with reveille at 6.30 a.m., to the time they collapsed onto their little iron beds at 10.30 p.m., the girls were constantly chivvied around by sergeants and corporals. Everywhere they went they were marched in groups known as ‘flights’, whether that was to meals, physical training, gas and fire drills, sports practice, injections, lectures on the history of the RAF, classes in first aid and hygiene, or drill practice. But for those who found the routine gruelling there was no prospect of running home to mother – new regulations had recently been passed making the WAAF and the ATS officially part of the armed forces, meaning that absentee recruits could now be charged with desertion.

      Before the girls knew it, their three weeks of training were up, and Margery and her hut-mates were separated as they went off to master their various trades. A number of them groaned as they learned that they were destined to be cooks and orderlies, enduring some of the longest working hours in the WAAF. Others heard they would be joining a whole host of different trades, working as admin clerks, teleprinter operators, nursing orderlies, mechanical transport drivers, parachute packers, balloon repairers, dental hygienists, wireless telegraphy slip readers, film projectionists and armament assistants.

      As the war progressed, technical trades were beginning to open up to women too, as shortages in manpower compelled the RAF to experiment with a larger female workforce – among the new roles on offer were those of instrument repairers, spark-plug testers and charging-board operators, and in time women would be repairing planes and servicing radar equipment too. Although WAAFs were never actually allowed to serve as aircrew, a small number were lucky enough to receive a transfer to the Air Transport Auxiliary, where more than 100 ‘Attagirls’ got the chance to pilot repaired Spitfires and Hurricanes from factories and maintenance units to airfields around Britain.

      Thanks to her experience in bookkeeping, Margery was assigned to Pay Accounts. There was scarcely time to say goodbye to the girls from her hut before she and around 60 other young women were marched off and put on trains headed for Wales, where they were to begin their intensive training at an accountancy school in a little seaside town called Penarth.

      Although most of the girls in Penarth were billeted together in hostels, Margery found herself staying all on her own, in the house of a middle-aged widow called Mrs Poole. The woman might have needed the money that the WAAF paid her for housing and feeding its overspill, but the arrangement was clearly less than ideal as far as she was concerned. ‘I hope you’re not going to be like the last lot,’ she remarked when the lorry dropped Margery at her doorstep. ‘Out till all hours, then loafing around in the daytime when they were supposed to be at their classes. I had my fill of them, I did.’

      ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Margery assured her, ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Since childhood, she had always been terrified of getting in trouble – her sister Peggy had teased her for being a ‘Goody Two-Shoes’.

      Mrs Poole proceeded to tell Margery about the numerous rules of the house – how often she was permitted to use the tin bath and with how many inches of water, what time she was expected to be in by at night and when she was required to stay out. Although the landlady would feed Margery breakfast and dinner every day, between those two mealtimes she was barred from the house altogether.

      The last rule proved a tough one for Margery, and after her course finished in the afternoon she often found herself at a loose end, roaming the seafront alone, whatever the weather, until dinnertime came around and she was allowed to return home for some of Mrs Poole’s potato cakes or rabbit stew.

      Margery had arrived in Penarth expecting to train for pay accounts, but she soon found herself assigned to equipment accounts instead, along with about 60 other girls. It didn’t take long for her to learn the reason why – apparently the equipment accounts course was incredibly tough, and a large number of recruits who had recently attempted it had flunked out. The WAAF had decided to add an extra week of lessons for their replacements, in an attempt to improve the pitiful pass rate. But if Margery and her colleagues still failed to make the grade, they would be remustered and might end up in the kitchens or cleaning out the latrines after all.

      Margery soon discovered for herself why the course was considered so difficult – it required a seemingly impossible feat of memory. There was a different form for every conceivable eventuality involving the issue of items in the Air Force, and the girls were expected to learn the official number of each of them. Form 674 was used to request a new item, but if the item in question was replacing an old and worn out one then a 673 was required instead. A 500 was needed for anything purchased from a private contractor, in which case a 531 would be required СКАЧАТЬ