Margery’s Story: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces
Duncan Barrett
Calvi Calvi
From the bestselling authors of The Sugar Girls and GI Brides, this is Margery’s story, one of three true accounts from the book The Girls Who Went to War.“‘Who does that man think he is?’ Margery muttered to a girl standing next to her. The words had slipped out before she could stop herself, but she realised, to her horror, that the warrant officer had heard them. ‘What was that?’ he demanded, striding over and fixing her with an angry stare. Margery gulped – but there was no going back now.”In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, and a population almost twice the size of ours from which to draw new waves of soldiers. Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn’t going to be enough.Margery Pott signed up for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, leaving her quiet home for the rigours of training, the camaraderie of the young women who worked together so closely and to face a war that would change her life forever.Overall, more than half a million women served in the armed forces during the Second World War. This book tells the story of just one of them. But in her story is reflected the lives of hundreds of thousands of others like them – ordinary girls who went to war, wearing their uniforms with pride.
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Copyright (#u8aaa7c09-2387-552f-aee1-6640eb681753)
HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2015
© Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs (not representations of the women portrayed herein) © George W. Hales/Getty Images (WAAF officer); The Everett Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library (military officer); IWM Collection (WRNS officer); London Fire Brigade/Mary Evans Picture Library (background)
Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi assert the moral right
to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007501229
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007517558
Version: 2015-03-17
Contents
Cover (#u18b99579-3567-5d26-835e-9b440c2cc91f)
Title Page (#ulink_64f39f3f-4c2b-5403-94c4-01f109e7e4b8)
Copyright (#ulink_39ea8b04-894d-5902-bead-bc2a04b7703c)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_73d5ef47-2abf-5480-94c9-8e7361dcda82)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_8091cd95-b850-5ebe-80be-e96dd72a8496)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Moving Memoirs eNewsletter (#litres_trial_promo)
Write for Us (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#u8aaa7c09-2387-552f-aee1-6640eb681753)
When Margery Pott announced that she had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, her family couldn’t help laughing. Surely, they thought, she must be pulling their legs – but the serious look on her face told them it was no joke.
‘Fancy Margery doing that!’ was all her sister Peggy could say, a remark that accurately captured the view of the whole family. It was, in fact, a view that Margery privately shared – she was the last person in the world who anyone would expect to join up.
If anyone should be answering the call to war, it ought by rights to be Peggy. A tomboy three years older than Margery, she had always been the fighter of the family. When Margery was a little girl and her best friend Daisy had knocked her to the ground, it was Peggy who had rescued her, marching up and giving her attacker a good walloping.
Growing up, Peggy had always been there to protect Margery, but she had also been a tough act to follow. She loved nothing better than cycling to the local forest and camping out overnight, and her favourite films were action-packed Westerns. Margery was too scared of insects and the dark to join her sister on her expeditions, and their mother didn’t let her go to the cinema in case the cowboy movies gave her nightmares.
As the youngest of three daughters, Margery was the baby of the family, and Mrs Pott kept her wrapped in cotton wool, forbidding her to ride Peggy’s bike for fear that she would fall off and hurt herself. Little did she know that Peggy had already taken it upon herself to give her little sister lessons in secret.
Mrs Pott had a lot on her plate, since she also had her husband’s failing health to worry about. His emphysema, which had prevented him from fighting in the last war, was only worsening thanks to the dust he inhaled in his job as a maltster, turning the roasted barley every day. Mrs Pott kept a spittoon for him to cough into each morning, and poor Mr Pott would hack and hack until he brought up large lumps of phlegm. But at least his employment meant that the family got to live in the maltster’s house, which meant they were the only ones in the little rural village of North Wallington to have running water.
When Margery began secondary school, she felt more in her sister’s shadow than ever. ‘Oh, Peggy was ever so good at games,’ were the words that greeted her when she first arrived on the school playing field. Margery, who had never been particularly good at anything physical, felt her heart sink. In her academic lessons she always did well, but she was convinced she was nothing special.
By the time Margery left school at 15, Peggy had already moved out to train as a nurse. But when she urged her little sister to follow suit, their mother was horrified, and soon Margery had been dissuaded. Instead, she took evening classes in accountancy and found herself a job close by, in the back office of the local baker’s.
At Pyle & Son Margery spent her days perched at a high desk, scribbling away in the accounts ledger. She was ruled over by the head clerk, a woman named Miss Pratt, who was always on the lookout for ink blotches. Miss Pratt quickly discovered Margery’s pliant nature and began adding to her list of official duties. Soon the poor girl was required to clean the offices each morning, light the fires, type up the menus for the bakery’s cafe and even wait tables, in addition to the bookkeeping she had been hired for.
One day, when Peggy popped in to see Margery, she was furious to find her stacking up goods for the delivery round. ‘My sister is a ledger clerk,’ she fumed. ‘She shouldn’t be packing buns!’ But her outburst made no difference in the long run. When one of the horses escaped from its cart on the way back from the delivery round, it was Margery who was sent to catch it, and then to the chemist to fetch the ointment she was expected to rub into the animal’s sore knees.
The unsatisfactory situation reached a new low one day, when Miss Pratt flew into a rage and called Margery a nincompoop for failing to fetch the dog’s dinner. Margery wasn’t normally one to stand up to authority, but even she could see it was time to leave.
She got as far as the shop next door – a musty old draper’s called Dodge’s, where she took a job as a cashier instead.
As Margery made her small stand against the tyrannical regime of Miss Pratt, the world was facing up to tyranny of a different kind. The first notable impact of the war on the quiet life of North Wallington was the sudden appearance of hundreds of sailors, when a naval training college, HMS Collingwood, opened up in nearby Fareham.
Soon, there were more reminders of the drama unfolding beyond the village. In the evenings, the sky was all too often lit up by an eerie glow, as German bombers pounded Portsmouth and Gosport. One night, the operating theatre at Peggy’s hospital was hit, and the doctors and nurses had to form a line, passing buckets of water along in a desperate attempt to put out the fires.
A brand new air-raid shelter had been built just across the road from the maltster’s house, but Mr Pott’s health just wasn’t up to the cold, wet conditions there, so when the sirens sounded the whole family remained at home, hoping for the best. Margery was secretly glad – she was more frightened of going out in the dark than she was of the bombs, and the thought of being trapped in a crowded public shelter made her shudder.
The war brought with it new job prospects as well, and soon Margery’s friend Daisy had begun working at a munitions factory in Gosport, filling shell cases. But the idea of factory work filled Margery with dread. She’d had a horror of machines since her childhood, when she and Peggy had ridden the Gosport ferry and been taken below deck to view the engine room. Margery’s sister had been thrilled at the sight of the enormous machines, but she had found the whole experience terrifying.
Daisy seemed pleased with her new factory job and the relatively high wages it offered. But, after a few weeks, Margery noticed that her friend’s blonde ringlets had acquired a strange ginger tinge, and soon her usually pretty face had turned yellow. A few days later she heard from Daisy’s mother that she had been off work sick, and when she went to visit she was shocked by the change in her. Daisy’s entire body had gone a deep shade of orange, and now even the whites of her eyes were coloured with it. ‘We reckon it’s the TNT from the factory,’ her mother told Margery, wringing her apron at Daisy’s bedside.
Over the coming weeks Daisy slowly clawed her way back to health, but her illness only made Margery more terrified than ever at the thought of working in a factory. Yet to her dismay there was talk of young women being conscripted – not only into the armed forces but into munitions factories like the one in Gosport as well. In April 1941 the Registration for Employment Order was passed, requiring Margery, like all other young, single women, to register with the Ministry of Labour. Since she was now 20, she was in the catchment age for the impending call-up.
Margery was frantic. Throughout her young life, joining the military could not have been further from her mind – yet if she didn’t volunteer now, the choice of whether to join the services or be put into a factory would be taken out of her hands. There was nothing for it: she would have to enlist.
She was relieved to discover that she was not alone – another girl at the draper’s called Winnie was facing the same dilemma. But which force should they choose – Army, Navy or Air Force?
‘The WAAF uniform’s a nice colour,’ remarked one of their colleagues over lunch one day, pointing to a recruitment ad in the magazine she was reading. The illustration showed Air Force girls in smart blue uniforms, dancing with dashing pilots. Before long, Winnie and Margery had hatched a plan to get the bus to Portsmouth together that weekend and volunteer for the WAAF.
At the recruiting office Margery’s brief interview seemed to go well, and a WAAF sergeant said they would be pleased to take her, thanks to her experience in accounts. ‘You’ll be hearing from us soon,’ she assured her.
Sure enough, it wasn’t long before both Margery and Winnie awoke to find a brown envelope on their doormat. Inside was a letter ordering the girls to report to Portsmouth the next day at 7 a.m. From there, they would be taken to London for a medical exam.
Now Margery was gripped by a new fear – what if she failed the medical? She remembered with a jolt a broken tooth that she had been meaning to get fixed. Could that be enough to keep her out of the WAAF? She wasn’t sure, but she had no intention of taking the risk. Something had to be done – and quickly.
Before long, Margery was sat in front of the local dentist, begging him to remove the offending tooth. The man was a little put out at being asked to perform such a last-minute operation, but he yanked and pulled with his pliers until finally it was extracted.
That night, as she tried to pack her tiny overnight bag while cradling her painful jaw, Margery received some unsettling news. Winnie’s aunt had died unexpectedly, and since she was already motherless and the only girl in the family, her father had decided that he needed her at home to run the house. Winnie wouldn’t be coming with her to London after all – instead Margery would be facing the Air Force alone.
It was a little after 5 a.m. the following morning when Margery caught the bus to Portsmouth. She was wearing her best suit – a pale blue jacket with matching skirt and blouse, which she hoped would make a good impression on the WAAF. As the vehicle trundled along the sleepy country lanes, she wondered where she might ultimately end up. She had never been away from home before – or really, gone anywhere at all, other than a few trips to Dover and Deal to see her relatives. Yet in the Air Force she would have no say in where she was stationed, and she might be sent far, far away from the familiar world of North Wallington.
On the train from Portsmouth to London, Margery sat with a small group of equally nervous-looking local girls, some a little older than herself and some younger. As they rushed towards the capital, a WAAF sergeant told the girls that if they passed the day’s medical exam they would be sent for three weeks’ basic training in Gloucester, but if they failed they would be going straight home again. Margery was wracked with nerves at the thought of flunking the medical, and more thankful than ever that she had got rid of her broken tooth.
At the imposing Victory House in Piccadilly, Margery’s cohort was swept into a sea of new recruits being processed that day. The building was a hive of activity, with line after line of women queueing to see various doctors, each of whom specialised in a different part of the human anatomy. First Margery joined a queue of girls waiting to have their hearts and lungs tested – as they reached the front, they were asked to breathe in and out while a man with glasses listened intently for any rattles or murmurs. Margery was worried that her racing heart would let her down, but to her relief she passed and was moved on to the next line. There, she queued for more than an hour before her limbs were stretched and examined and her knees and elbows knocked with a little hammer to test her reflexes. Then there were the eye doctors, ear doctors, foot doctors – every kind of doctor imaginable – and all of them intent on weeding out substandard recruits. Yet to Margery’s continual surprise and relief, time after time she was passed as fit and healthy.
Whenever she joined a new queue, Margery was sure that the doctor at the front would ask to inspect her teeth, but hour after hour went by and no one did. Finally, after a long and weary day with just a cup of tea and a sandwich to sustain them, she and the other girls from Portsmouth were all passed as fit and told they would be boarding the train to Gloucester.
Margery was overwhelmed with relief that she had passed her medical. But on her way from Victory House to Paddington Station, suddenly a new thought dawned on her – she had undergone the painful dental work for nothing.
It was getting on for midnight by the time the girls finally arrived at No. 2 WAAF Depot at Innsworth, near Gloucester, the central training facility for new recruits. Having opened only a few months before, the base now managed an intake of almost 3,000 girls a week, and ran like a well-oiled machine.
After the hours of queueing for medical examinations, followed by a lengthy journey, the girls were beginning to feel desperate for a hot dinner and a warm bed, but first there was more processing to be done. They were required to submit to the indignities of the FFI inspection and then to gather their kit from the stores, before making up the beds in their dormitory huts, alternately top to toe to limit the chances of infection. By the time they were finally taken to the mess, Margery was ravenous, but to her disappointment the long-awaited dinner consisted of just a spoonful of watery minced beef and lumpy mashed potato.
As the girls were finishing up their food, one of the kitchen hands came round with a large bucket and Margery saw that she was ladling something from it into their enamel mugs. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked her neighbour.
‘Tea,’ the other girl replied with a smile.
Margery was horrified. After all the unfamiliar, exhausting experiences of the day, the thought of having what should have been a reassuring, homely cuppa doled out from a bucket somehow felt like the last straw.
Finally, the tired recruits were led back to their wooden huts for the night, and collapsed gratefully onto their hard iron beds. But now Margery, like many of the other girls, found that the sleep she had longed for was eluding her. The three square ‘biscuits’ that she had been given for a mattress had a tendency to separate every time she rolled over, and the hard bolster on which her head rested creaked under even the slightest movement. It was a miserable end to a difficult day, and Margery felt more wretched than ever. She thought back to that glossy picture she had seen in her colleague’s magazine, which now seemed very far from the reality of life in the WAAF. She had volunteered out of fear, without really thinking about what she was letting herself in for. Now she began to wonder: What on earth had she done?
That night, Margery wasn’t the only one whose mind was falling prey to such dark thoughts. After the constant bustle of a busy day, now, in the dark and quiet, the girls were suddenly hit by the reality of the decision 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 to issue the invoice, with the item ultimately paid for on a 600. The list of numbers seemed to be endless, and as well as memorising them all, the girls also had to learn how many copies of each form were required, and where each copy had to be sent. On top of that, every nut, bolt and screw, every piece of clothing, every item of food that went through the Air Force stores, had its own number as well, and these too had to be committed to memory.
Poor Margery had never been particularly good at rote learning, and her head was soon swimming. She worked diligently as ever, but the instructor was less than inspiring, simply reading out the information in a monotonous voice while the girls scribbled away frantically in their notebooks. After a few weeks, a sergeant was sent to check up on the class, and was horrified at their lack of progress. The instructor was promptly removed and a new one put in his place, but the sudden change didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
At least Margery’s days of living at Mrs Poole’s alone were over. One day she returned from her course to find a new arrival who had been billeted on the widow as well. She was a large girl with terrible bucked teeth, which she revealed in their full splendour as she greeted Margery with a big grin. ‘Oh, jolly good show,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m Oriole. Daddy named me after his ship.’
Margery had never felt like a pretty girl herself, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for poor Oriole. Not only had she been lumbered with the name of a seafaring vessel, but she had a face that would struggle to launch a gravy boat, let alone a thousand ships.
With her clipped vowels and naval connections, Oriole seemed like the kind of girl who should have been in the WNRS rather than the WAAF. But Margery appreciated having someone to pass the time with before she was allowed to return to Mrs Poole’s for her evening meal. More than 150 miles away from her home in North Wallington, and with no older sister to look out for her, she had begun to feel terribly lonely.
It was Oriole who first introduced Margery to the delights of the local NAAFI – the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute. The NAAFI canteens and shops were becoming an increasingly familiar sight across Britain, offering forces personnel of the lower ranks a place to get cheap food and a hot drink. At last Margery had a place to go for a nice cup of tea once her classes finished, rather than traipsing along the seafront in the rain.
One day, Margery was sitting in the NAAFI with Oriole after a long and dreary afternoon in the classroom when an Army chap took a seat on the bench opposite them. As he warmed his hands over a steaming mug of coffee, he asked her, ‘Got any ciggie coupons, love?’
Margery looked up, startled. She and her friend didn’t usually attract the attention of the servicemen.
The man was a good ten years older than her, of medium build, with dark hair. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about him, except for a strong Lancashire accent, but he had a friendly face and that was something Margery was sorely missing.
‘I think I might have – hold on a minute,’ she said, rummaging in her pockets until she found her cigarette ration card. Since she didn’t smoke, she was happy to hand it over.
‘Don’t you want anything in return?’ the man asked, surprised.
‘Oh no, it’s all right,’ Margery told him.
‘Aw, go on,’ he pushed her. ‘How about a nice choccy coupon? That’d be a fair swap, wouldn’t it?’
Margery smiled shyly. ‘Yes, please,’ she said, taking the chocolate coupon gratefully.
The man seemed to interpret their little transaction as permission to stop and chat. Before long he had introduced himself as James Preston and was nattering away about the Army catering course he was doing in Penarth. He had an easy, Northern warmth, and Margery suspected that he, too, must be lonely and just keen to find someone to talk to while he was so far away from home.
Usually Margery kept on eye on the clock until 6 p.m. every evening, when she and Oriole were permitted to return home, so it came as a surprise when her friend pointed out that they were in danger of being late for dinner. ‘Better get moving, old thing,’ Oriole told her cheerfully. ‘Mrs Poole’s potato cakes wait for no woman!’
But before Oriole could drag her away from the NAAFI, Margery had agreed to meet James for coffee there the following day – and soon the afternoon chats had turned into a regular arrangement. For the first time since she had arrived in Penarth, Margery had begun to feel less cut adrift. All day long, as she studied the relentless lists of items and their numbers, she looked forward to the time she would be spending in the NAAFI with James.
With the end of Margery’s course looming, the need to study only increased, as she became more and more anxious that she might fail the dreaded test. Night after night, she went over the long list of forms and parts until her eyes were swimming with numbers. But the thought of having to write home and admit to her family that she had fallen at the first hurdle in the WAAF, and imagine them laughing at her ambitions again, was unbearable.
Finally, the dreaded day arrived, and Margery and the 60 other girls who had trained alongside her turned over their exam papers. She summoned all her brain power to the task of recalling as many of the wretched forms and parts as she could, as well as the various processes and procedures she had learned. But by the time she reached the final page of the exam, she had only been able to answer less than half of the questions.
The following day, the girls were ordered to line up in alphabetical order on the seafront. One by one, their surnames were called out, and their results were read off in front of everyone. Margery cringed as a good few of the As, Bs and Cs in the group were told that they had failed to reach even the remarkably low pass mark of 40 per cent. It was an agonising wait until the sergeant finally made it down to the letter P. ‘Pott,’ she barked, ‘40 per cent exactly. Pass.’
Margery blinked her eyes in the early morning sunlight. She couldn’t believe it – somehow, she had succeeded where so many others had failed. Despite her terrible memory and her crippling nerves, she had scraped through.
The poor girls who hadn’t been so lucky soon heard their fates. One of them was furious when she found out she was being sent to train as a cook. ‘I wanted to be in accounts!’ she cried miserably. But it was no use – once the Air Force had made up its mind, the decision was final.
Meanwhile, the girls who had passed the test were marched off for a series of inoculations. Feeling heady after her unexpected victory, and exhausted from the stress of the past few weeks, Margery fainted before she even saw the needle.
The next day, the girls were issued with railway warrants to take them home, so that they could spend a bit of time with their families before they had to report to their new postings. Margery was sorry to say goodbye to James Preston, but he had taken her service number and promised that he would write. The two months she had spent in the WAAF was the longest she had ever been away from home, and she felt desperate to get back to North Wallington again.
After a long train journey, Margery walked up the lane to the old maltster’s house, carrying her grey kitbag over her shoulders. The neighbours came out of their houses to get a look at her in her uniform, and when her parents opened the door she could see a glimmer of pride in their eyes.
Margery felt proud of herself too, she realised with a start. Nobody was laughing at her now.
Chapter 2 (#u8aaa7c09-2387-552f-aee1-6640eb681753)
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.
The job of Equipment Accounts was to keep track of things ordered from the camp stores – everything from cups and saucers to guns and ammunition. But it wasn’t long before Margery realised that her new colleagues had very little understanding of the procedures they were meant to follow. Since none of them had gone through the official training course, they had got used to muddling through with a mixture of common sense and improvisation.
Each item ordered at Titchfield would be registered on a form and signed by the officer responsible, but as Margery flicked through the paperwork, she began to notice a number of strange irregularities. Many of the forms in her ledger had been marked up with unfamiliar acronyms, ‘NIV’ and ‘OI’. Had she missed something in her accounts training, she wondered.
Nervously, Margery went up to the flight sergeant’s desk. ‘What do the letters NIV mean?’ she asked him.
‘Not in vocab,’ the man replied dismissively.
Margery was puzzled. She knew that every item, even down to the tiniest nut or screw, had a vocab number, which was supposed to be used on all paperwork. The idea of an item not being in vocab went against everything she had learned during her training. ‘What about OI?’ she asked, anxiously.
‘Over-issued,’ replied the flight sergeant, without looking up from his own work.
Now Margery was really confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ she told him. ‘How can you issue something you haven’t got?’
The man fidgeted in his chair, before mumbling, ‘Well … you know … it doesn’t really matter.’
His reply only made Margery feel more worried. Clearly something had gone badly wrong in Equipment Accounts. If they were audited, she realised, they could all find themselves in hot water. ‘Would you like me to go over to the stores and try to sort it out?’ Margery suggested helpfully.
But her boss was less than appreciative of the offer. ‘Suit yourself’ was all he said.
The girls in the stores were not much more interested in Margery’s problem than the flight sergeant had been, but after a bit of pleading, she persuaded them to consult their own records. It didn’t take long for her to work out where the irregular entries were coming from – if someone took a form down to the equipment store and hadn’t bothered to look up the vocab number, they would write ‘NIV’ in its place. The ‘OI’ was a way of covering their backs – as without the correct number, stock in the stores would no longer match up with what was written in the ledgers.
Back in the office, Margery didn’t say anything, but she was secretly horrified at the state of the department’s paperwork. From then on she made it her mission to put everything in order, beavering away at the ledgers and heading down to the stores every time she found an ‘NIV’, and begging the girls there to look it up for her.
The warrant officer who presided over the stores, however, was none too happy with someone from Accounts coming in and asking inconvenient questions. Around Titchfield, he was known as a bit of a bully, who delighted in tormenting new recruits, especially female ones. One day, when he saw Margery come into his department for the umpteenth time that week, he bellowed across the room, ‘Not you again, Pott!’
After her days working at the baker’s, under the reign of the terrifying Miss Pratt, Margery was used to putting up with rough treatment from those in authority. But right now her heart swelled against it. After all, she was the one striving to put the books in order, despite the lackadaisical attitude of her colleagues. To bawl her out publicly just for making a bit of an effort seemed so unfair.
‘Who does that man think he is?’ Margery muttered to a girl standing next to her.
The words had slipped out before she could stop herself, but she realised, to her horror, that the warrant officer had heard them. ‘What was that?’ he demanded, striding over and fixing her with an angry stare.
Margery gulped – but there was no going back now. ‘I said, “Who does that man think he is?”’ she replied, before adding, ‘Sir.’
She could hardly believe that she had done it. Ordinarily, Margery wouldn’t say boo to a goose – she was the last person to stand up to authority.
Suddenly the implications of her uncharacteristic outburst began to dawn on her. She was for it now, she felt certain – her career in the WAAF was about to come to an ignominious end with a court-martial for insubordination.
But to Margery’s surprise, instead of yelling at her, the warrant officer burst out laughing, evidently tickled pink at her unexpected forthrightness and honesty. ‘I like it when one of the girls shows a bit of gumption,’ he told her, once he had caught his breath. ‘It doesn’t happen to me all that often.’
Margery was stunned at the sudden change in the man’s attitude. But she was beginning to feel a little more confident now, so she asked him boldly, ‘Why do you talk to people like that?’
The man thought for a moment, and then gave a rueful smile. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘I suppose I like seeing them quake.’ Then he turned around, still laughing, and went on his way.
After that, Margery never had any trouble from the warrant officer again. When she saw him in the stores he was always courteous, and sometimes even downright friendly. She certainly hadn’t gone down there looking to assert herself, but in doing so she had learned a valuable lesson: sometimes, if you stood up for yourself, people respected you more.
While Equipment Accounts was not exactly a beacon of high standards, everywhere else around RAF Titchfield things were run very much by the book. Unlike Penarth, where Margery had been free to wander along the sea front for hours at a time, here she was truly subjected to the rigours of Air Force discipline. There were regular parades, drills and route marches, and every day the camp flag was raised and lowered in military style.
The airwomen’s days began at 7 a.m., when a corporal yelled through the door of their hut, letting them know that it was time for physical training. After they had run around the camp a few times in just their shorts and shirt tops, beds had to be stripped and stacked to exacting specifications. Only then were the girls lined up in flights and marched off to breakfast.
Once they’d eaten, the half-dozen young women in Equipment Accounts would form another flight to march over to the office, even though it was just the other side of the parade ground. The rigorous military discipline continued throughout the day – the lax atmosphere within the office itself excepted – until the dormitory lights were switched out by the duty corporal at 10.30 p.m. sharp.
As the months rolled by and the weather turned colder, nights spent in the wooden dorm huts, where one window was always left open, whatever the weather, grew increasingly miserable. And it wasn’t much warmer in Equipment Accounts either. When the flight sergeant saw the girls shivering at their desks, his solution was to order them to take their tunics off, roll up their sleeves and run around the camp. The girls certainly returned warmed up – but also dripping with sweat, which they struggled to keep from blotting their ledgers.
The huts were not only cold but dark as well, and the dwindling daylight hours made it increasingly hard for the girls to read the paperwork in front of them. They complained bitterly to each other and encouraged Margery, who as ‘the girl from the course’ carried a certain dubious authority, to mention the problem to a WAAF officer on their behalf. But to Margery’s dismay, when the unimpressed officer turned up at the hut and demanded to know if anyone else felt the same way as she did, suddenly the cat seemed to have got her colleagues’ tongues. Margery was carted off in an ambulance to get her eyes tested at the nearest hospital, returning with a very ugly pair of steel spectacles. They were distance glasses, so they made no difference to her work in the dimly lit office, but the sight of her wearing them gave the rest of the girls a good laugh.
One thing that brightened Margery’s days at Titchfield was the arrival of the latest letter from James Preston, the Army cook from Lancashire who she had met during her training in Penarth. He had recently been posted to a camp on the Isle of Dogs in London, and for Margery his long, artfully written letters brought every detail of his experiences there to life. Tearing open the latest missive to find page upon page of his beautiful handwriting always brought a smile to her face.
It was James who had helped allay Margery’s loneliness during her time in Wales, but at Titchfield she made her first proper friend in the WAAF – a Geordie woman in her mid-thirties called May Strong, who more than lived up to her name. May was the corporal in charge of Margery’s dorm hut, and slept in a private room at one end of it. Before the war, she had worked as an office manager at a paint factory in Haltwhistle, a coal-mining town not far from Newcastle. She had a natural self-assurance and authority, combined with a talent for leadership, and all the girls in the hut looked up to her – none of them more so than Margery.
One evening, when one of Margery’s hut-mates was suffering with a bad cold, May announced that she knew just what to do. ‘A tot of whisky would cure this,’ she proclaimed. Then turning to Margery, she said, ‘Come on, we can get some at the Joseph Paxton.’
It wasn’t exactly an order, but somehow Margery didn’t feel she could say no, so she grabbed an empty bottle and accompanied May to the pub in the nearby town of Locks Heath.
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