The Grafton Girls. Annie Groves

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      She was a good sort, Diane recognised, a bit shabbily dressed, but then who wasn’t these days, with the war in its third year and new clothes only available if one had enough coupons with which to purchase them. Luckily she had joined the WAAF before clothing coupons had come in, and so she had not had to part with any of her own precious coupons in exchange for her obligatory WAAF uniform of black lace-up shoes, grey lisle stockings, which none of the girls wore during the summer months if they could help it, a skirt, a tunic, a peaked cap – which the girls loved as much as they hated the lisle stockings –an overcoat, which came in jolly useful in the winter, and even regulation underwear, with its horrid bubble-gum-pink ‘foundation garments’, although none of the girls wore these either if they could get away with wearing their own underwear instead.

      More seriously, the whole country was now feeling the effect of the food rationing that had been brought in at the beginning of the war, but if Hitler had hoped to destroy the fighting spirit of the British by attempting to sink the ships struggling across the Atlantic to bring in the supplies on which the country depended, he had omitted to take into account the sturdiness of the nation’s spirit, Diane recognised proudly.

      Her recent request for a transfer was responsible for Diane’s presence on this train to Liverpool and her new post at Derby House, the headquarters of the combined forces protecting the convoys coming into the port. Her life in Liverpool would be very different from that in Cambridgeshire, she knew. Several of the pals she had been leaving behind had expressed doubts about the wisdom of what she was doing.

      ‘Liverpool!’ more than one of them had exclaimed, pulling a face. ‘You wouldn’t catch me wanting to transfer up there. Not for anything.’

      Diane had affected not to notice the sharp nudge another of her friends had given the speaker, knowing that the warning was kindly meant and intended to protect her feelings. Her broken heart.

      She could feel the burning threat of tears at the back of her eyes, and was thankful for the diversion of the sudden hiss of the train’s brakes and the noise of escaping steam, plus the bustle of her travelling companion getting ready to leave the train.

      ‘Well, here’s my station.’

      Diane forced herself to return the woman’s smile.

      ‘Good luck, lass,’ the older woman said, giving Diane a grateful look as she helped her out of the compartment with her bags. ‘You’ll like Liverpool once you get to know it. Of course, it’s not the place it was, not since that ruddy May bombing back in ’forty-one. A whole week of it, we had, and it ripped the heart out of the city, and no mistake. There was hardly a family in the city that didn’t lose someone, and there were thousands evacuated who didn’t come back. But it takes more than a few bombs to knock the stuffing out of Liverpudlians, as you’ll soon find out.’

      The bright summer sunshine was surely enough of an excuse for her to blink, Diane reassured herself as the train pulled out of the station. And if she was also blinking away those threatening tears then who was to know but her? No one here knew anything about her or her situation. That alone was enough to make her glad that the transfer she had begged for had brought her here.

      ‘HQ Western Approaches won’t be what you’re used to here, Wilson,’ she had been warned when she had been called to the office to receive her new orders from her commanding officer.

      ‘But I’ll still be working as a teleprinter operator, won’t I, ma’am?’ she had asked, uncertainly.

      ‘Well, as to that, I dare say that yes, you will. But Derby House is a joint effort run principally by the Senior Service,’ she told Diane, referring to the British Navy, ‘unlike here, where it’s all RAF. It will be part of your duty as a WAAF to make sure that you create the right impression on those you’ll be working with.’ When her CO had added, straight-faced, ‘The Senior Service takes a pretty dim view of flighty behaviour,’ Diane hadn’t known whether or not she was cracking a joke.

      ‘The CO joke?’ one of her pals had scoffed when she had related the incident to her. ‘That’ll be the day!’

      Diane hadn’t really needed her CO’s warning. Everyone in uniform knew about the rivalries between the various services, and that the Senior Service in particular tended to look down somewhat on the upstart RAF.

      She could practically hear Kit’s voice now -strong and filled with good humour as he laughed, ‘The trouble with those Senior Service lot is that they’re jealous of our success.’

      ‘You mean because of the Battle of Britain?’ Diane had asked, thinking he had meant that the navy men envied the victory the RAF had had over the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940, when men like Kit had driven back the incoming German fighters.

      ‘No,’ she remembered Kit had told her, his eyes – fighter pilot’s far-seeing eyes – crinkling up at the corners with amusement as he had leaned forward and told her boldly, ‘I meant because of our success with the fairer sex.’

      She had pretended to be dismissive, tossing her head as they stood together at the small bar of the packed Cambridgeshire pub on that breathlessly hot summer night, but when a careless airman, overeager to get to the bar before the beer ran out, had accidentally bumped into her, she hadn’t complained when Kit had made a grab for her waist. ‘To protect you,’ he had assured her guilelessly, but he hadn’t been in any hurry to release her, and the truth was that by that stage she had been too entranced by him to want him to. With Kit, over six foot tall, broad-shouldered, with a shock of thick wavy dark hair, and the kind of good looks and easy charm that had already got him a nine out of ten rating in the WAAF canteen, there was barely a girl Diane knew who wouldn’t have fallen for his charms.

      But there had been another side to him, or so she had believed. A side that…

      The sudden jerk of the train’s brakes brought her back to the present. Already the corridor outside her carriage was packed with passengers wanting to get off. Diane reached up to the overhead luggage rack to remove her kitbag, ready to join the stream of people disembarking at Lime Street.

      So this was Liverpool. The voices she could hear all around her certainly had very different accents from those in Cambridgeshire, although the Liverpool accent wasn’t the only one swelling the noise in the busy station, and Diane’s eyes widened a little when she saw – and heard – how many Americans there were clustered around in large groups.

      They would, of course, be the ‘Yanks’ from the American base at Burtonwood, which her fellow traveller had mentioned. American bases were being established in Lincolnshire, and at Bomber Command, in High Wycombe, and there had been American personnel at the Cambridgeshire base as well. Diane had heard from some of the other girls about the attractions of the American male and the American PX – as the stores on the newly established American supply bases were named -both generous providers of much that was unavailable or rationed, including chocolate and stockings.

      The station platforms were busy with men in uniform, with the distinctively dressed women of the Women’s Voluntary Service also very much in evidence with their tea urns. Diane would not have said no to a cuppa herself, but it had already gone five in the evening and she still had to find her way to her billet near Wavertree.

      One of the friendly WVS women was happy to explain to Diane how to get to her billet on Chestnut Close, which was in what she described approvingly as ‘a respectable part of the city’.

      ‘It’s a fair walk, but you could take the bus.’

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