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

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      Jessie watched anxiously as the shells were loaded into the guns. The moment they were ready, Captain Rait boomed ‘Fire!’

      In the stillness of the night, the noise of the guns was like a thunderclap, but by now everyone was too used to it to flinch. As the shells burst thousands of feet above her head, Jessie stared at the lead German plane, hoping to spot some sign of damage. If the damned thing would only burst into flames it would be the most wonderful feeling in the world.

      There was no dramatic explosion, no flaming fireball dropping from the heavens. But as Jessie peered at the little plane, silhouetted in the piercing beam of the searchlights, she saw it swerve slightly from the straight line it had been cutting through the night sky. That was it – they had forced the pilot to deviate from his course, and everyone knew what that meant. Without a clear 30-second run-up before he dropped his bombs, there was little chance that they would land on target.

      The men and women of 518 mixed battery were far too professional to cheer or applaud, but silently everyone shared in the thrill of that moment. A few seconds later, the German planes passed out of the searchlight beams and disappeared back into the inky black. ‘Stand down, everyone,’ Captain Rait said soberly.

      Jessie made her way back to the dormitory hut, her heart still pounding with excitement. ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ she said to Elsie, as they crept back to their beds in the dark. She was just tucking herself in when a strange thought crossed her mind – was she developing a thirst for blood, she wondered.

      But the worry didn’t linger for long. After the exhilaration of her first real-life raid, Jessie felt utterly exhausted, and soon she had fallen into a deep and satisfying sleep.

5

       Margery

      Having passed the dreaded test in equipment accounts, Margery waited anxiously for her posting to come through, wondering where on earth she would end up. By now, the Air Force had women working at stations the length and breadth of the land, from Cornwall to the Outer Hebrides. Some girls were serving as far afield as New York and Washington DC, while a small team of radio operators were about to set off for a post in Cairo.

      But as it turned out, Margery’s new workplace was distinctly unexotic. She was ordered to report to RAF Titchfield, just four miles down the road from her home in North Wallington – so near, in fact, that she was expected to make her own way there, without any assistance from the Air Force.

      It was a scorching summer’s day, and by the time Margery arrived at the camp, struggling under the weight of her heavy kitbag and clutching her respirator and helmet, her blue uniform was soaked with sweat and she was looking distinctly dishevelled. A guard on the gate glared at her before asking dismissively, ‘What are you, one of the new cooks?’

      ‘No,’ replied Margery, blushing. ‘I’m here for Equipment Accounts.’

      When he heard the last word, the guard’s attitude seemed to change a little. ‘Name and number?’ he asked, slightly more civilly.

      ‘Pott, 294,’ replied Margery.

      The man stared at her, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘Say that again, would you?’ he asked.

      ‘Pott, 294,’ she repeated.

      The man turned to a fellow by his side and bellowed, ‘Sergeant, this woman is being rude to me!’ Then the two of them burst out laughing.

      All her life, Margery had put up with jokes about her name, but the endless repetition hadn’t served to make it any easier. She wasn’t one to answer back, and in any case she wouldn’t dare to confront a guard, so she stood patiently, wiping the sweat from her brow, until finally the laughter died down.

      The guard, whose face was by now as red as Margery’s, ushered her through the gate, and soon a WAAF sergeant came to collect her. ‘You can drop your kitbag in the dormitory hut,’ she told her, ‘and then I’ll show you to the office.’

      Margery followed the other woman to a large wooden hut, similar to the one she had slept in during her initial training at Innsworth. There were 30 metal beds arranged along the two sides, with double lockers in between them. She left her things on an empty bed and then followed the WAAF sergeant back outside.

      On her way to Equipment Accounts, Margery got her first proper look at the camp that was to be her home for the foreseeable future. It was a large site, where several hundred men and women worked side by side in seemingly endless rows of wooden huts. There were residential huts for the airmen and WAAFs who lived on the base, offices for administration and pay accounts, the camp police station and armoury, and a series of large mess buildings, with separate huts for officers, NCOs and other ranks. To Margery it seemed like an entire wooden city.

      The Equipment Accounts office looked out over a wide parade ground, on the other side of which was the most striking feature of the camp: four giant aircraft hangars. RAF Titchfield was a maintenance station for Number 12 Balloon Centre, employed when the enormous inflatables, which were sent up from various sites in the area to disrupt low-flying German bombers, required repairs. In the vast hangars at Titchfield the fabric of the balloons would be checked for tears and stitched up by WAAFs handy with a sewing machine, before they were painted with three coats of silver ‘dope’ to prevent any hydrogen gas from leaking out. The girls charged with this unpleasant task spent their days inhaling the noxious fumes from the paint, and were given a special ration of milk as compensation.

      The camp was also a training site for balloon-operating teams, and in a field off to one side Margery could see one of the huge inflatables being filled with gas. Lying on its side on the grass, it looked like a giant beached whale, but as Margery watched, the crumpled surface began to ripple and grow taut, until the magnificent 60-foot balloon slowly started to rise off the ground.

      Although girls had been hard at work maintaining the balloons since the Battle of Britain, it was only recently that the WAAF had agreed to try out all-female teams to actually fly them. These ‘Young Amazons’, as they were known unofficially, were chosen for their physical strength – their training involved weight-lifting, as well as mastering the inflation procedure, splicing the ropes that held the balloons down and operating the winches that kept them anchored. The girls worked in teams of 12, whereas it was seven for all-male groups, but it was a tough job and many women ended up hospitalised with ruptured stomachs.

      Compared to the work of the balloon girls, Margery’s job in Equipment Accounts was pretty low-risk, and the heaviest lifting she would have to do was heaving ledgers around the office. But that didn’t make her feel any less nervous as the WAAF sergeant led her up to the door.

      She entered to find half a dozen young women, along with a handful of men, nattering away at their desks almost as if they were in a mess hall, not an office. For a moment, Margery was a little taken aback. This wasn’t the strict Air Force atmosphere she had grown used to during her training.

      A male flight sergeant stood up and approached her. He was an ugly-looking fellow in his mid-thirties, tall and thin with dark hair. ‘Oh, you must be the girl from the course,’ he sneered. ‘I suppose you’re here to show us all how it’s done.’

      Margery didn’t quite know how to respond to that. She nodded awkwardly and allowed herself to be led over to an empty desk, where she began familiarising herself with the ledgers she would be working on.

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