Down Daisy Street (39 page)
That evening, however, when they returned to their mess, a surprise awaited them. She and Jane went straight to the bulletin board, hoping for letters from home. Instead, to their dismay, they saw a large notice announcing that all leave for balloon operatives had been cancelled and that the girls were to report to their new sites at the beginning of the next week. Beneath that was a list of postings and another girl began to read them out loud, lists of names and destinations, then suddenly Kathy realised something was wrong and pushed her way nearer the bulletin board. ‘Oh, Jane,’ she said, almost unable to believe what she was about to say. ‘You’re going to a dock site near Liverpool . . . but I’m being sent to Nottingham as acting corporal in Betty Miller’s place!’
It was a disappointment not to have leave, but later that night as she lay in her bed, Kathy concluded that perhaps a separation from Jane, which she had thought so dreadful, might be the best thing for both of them. She was uneasily aware that she had begun to rely on Jane always backing her up and this had given her a good deal of confidence; now she would have to manage the girls in her crew without Jane’s familiar presence. In other words, had the two of them been together she would have had no fear of a rebellion in the ranks when she began to tell the rest of the crew what to do. Jane would have backed her up and if anyone had tried to bully her, or disobey her commands, Jane would have sorted them out. Now, Kathy would be truly in command and on her own; she would just have to hope that the girls in her new crew would be as helpful and friendly as those in her previous crew had been.
The girls were given rail warrants late on Sunday night and on Monday morning, early, they found themselves jostling amongst a huge crowd of Waafs on the station platform. The crowding eased as trains arrived for various destinations and the Waafs, each one with her two kit bags, clambered aboard. You could always tell a Bop by her kit bags, since they were the only people in the air force who had so much clothing and equipment that two kit bags were necessary. Jane and Kathy grinned at each other but had no opportunity for a proper farewell. Kathy was marshalling her crew, trying to make sure that they all got into the same carriage since they would only be on this train for a few stops and would then have to change. As her train pulled out, she let the window down and poked her head through but could see no sign of her friend, so settled back on her kit bags – every seat had already been taken before the Waafs climbed aboard – to get what rest she could. She guessed that the day ahead of her was going to be a long and trying one and said as much to the ACW1 who was her second-in-command. The other girl, Paddy O’Toole, nodded in agreement. She was a fair-haired, blue-eyed Irish girl whose rose-petal complexion and apparent frailty were deceptive. In fact, she was as strong as an ox and was a great comfort to Kathy as they sat on their kit bags in the corridor and chatted. Kathy gathered that Paddy was determined to rise in the air force and was anxious to do well, and since this was exactly how Kathy regarded her own future they might help one another to attain higher rank.
The girls arrived in Nottingham without incident and climbed aboard the gharry which would take them to their site. Kathy had taken care to get to know the members of her crew, though she had not needed Paddy to point out the two troublemakers, ACWs Stutton and Wintersett. They were large, masculine-looking girls with short haircuts and loud cockney voices. But they were evidently waiting until they reached the site to see whether they could push their new acting corporal around, and once there, Kathy decided, I shall make sure they toe the line. I must begin as I mean to go on, even if it makes me unpopular. I can, after all, make their lives pretty miserable if I choose to do so. I don’t think they’ll like it much if they find themselves always called upon for extra duty, or turned out of their beds to peel mounds of spuds. Yes, if they’re going to be difficult, I shall have to show them it doesn’t pay.
Having made up her mind on her future strategy, Kathy settled down on the uncomfortable metal boxes which passed for seats in the gharry and watched the suburbs of Nottingham gradually give place to countryside. I’ll write to Mam tonight, give her my new address and tell her all about the site, she thought to herself. And after that, I’ll write to Alec, because Nottingham’s a good deal nearer to Lincoln than Cardington was.
In fact, it was a full week before Kathy had the opportunity to write to anyone. They arrived at the site and found a draughty Nissen hut standing on a hill with an ancient churchyard to the left of it and a huge expanse of ploughed field to the right. Kathy cast a quick glance around, checking for hazards such as church towers, well grown mature trees or any buildings tall enough to interfere with the balloon in bad weather, but saw nothing which looked potentially dangerous. She had been congratulating herself on getting a good site when Paddy remarked that it was bloody exposed, so it was, and would mean that half the time they would be fighting strong winds both when flying the balloon and when bringing her down again.
This remark had proved to be all too true. On that first evening, Kathy had organised some of the girls into a domestic party, who would cook and serve the food they found waiting in the kitchen, and had then taken the rest of the crew out to examine the balloon, accompanied by the sergeant in charge. He was a stocky, middle-aged man with a Black Country accent so strong that the girls had difficulty in understanding him at first. The men, who had departed only that morning, had left the blimp on close haul with everything ready so that it could be flown at a moment’s notice and Kathy decided, after a discussion with the sergeant, that they would take it up to two thousand feet as soon as it grew dark. None of them, except for the cheerful sergeant himself, had ever flown a balloon in the dark before, and they had been strongly advised by their instructors at Cardington to practise just as much as they were able, so that the real thing, when it came, did not end in hopeless confusion.
By the time they had had a meal they were all ready for their beds and Kathy felt a secret sympathy with her crew as they stumbled out of the makeshift cookhouse and headed, uncertainly, for the balloon. There was a moon, but because the wind was quite strong the clouds scudded across its face constantly, making it difficult to see what one was doing. The sergeant climbed on to the winch and Kathy, at his suggestion, shouted the orders to bring the balloon lower so that they might add the armaments to the main cable. Since this was only a practice, she did not actually attach any of the explosive devices which stood ready to hand, but merely pretended to do so.
Fortunately, she had disposed her whole team and presently one of the guards came puffing up to shout that the telephone had rung. ‘I answered it and some feller on the other end just snapped “Fly five thousand feet” and slammed the phone down,’ she said breathlessly. ‘What did he mean, Corp?’
Before Kathy could answer, the sergeant began to work the winch and to shout orders. The balloon was brought to the correct height for Kathy to add the armaments in cold fact, and from then on the night became memorable indeed.
They got the balloon up to five thousand feet, fully armed and prepared, but the winds up there were very strong and they could see the blimp behaving more like a ballet dancer than a balloon, rearing and tugging on her cable as though she longed for nothing more than to be free. Then they heard the familiar sound of throbbing engines and the knowledge they had gained so painfully at Cardington became useful at last. ‘Here come the Luftwaffe,’ someone said urgently. ‘I hope they ain’t goin’ to drop no bombs here.’ But on this particular night, they were in luck, for the bombers passed away to the north, well clear of both balloons and the ack-ack, whose batteries kept up a steady fire even though, Kathy suspected, the enemy were well out of range.
Getting the balloon down again when the second phone call came from HQ was a tricky business, with the crew not used to night flying and lacking the experience of the men they had replaced. They managed it, however, and when Kathy saw them back to their hut at last she told them that she was proud of them and meant every word.
The next day, she and the sergeant discussed how they could best prepare the crews for more such events and Sergeant Jackson said they would practise every night for a week so that the girls might become experienced without risking the safety of the blimp.
‘Barrage balloons is tricky beasts,’ he told her. ‘If everyone takes a turn on the winch, then they’ll get the feel of it. It’s a bit like drivin’ a team of four great strong horses, all tryin’ to pull in different directions, and a bit like landin’ a huge salmon when you’ve only got a trout rod, but you gets used to it. I reckon, after three or four months, you will know as much about your blimp as a mother knows about her new babby. But we’ll practise during the day as well, ’cos her needs a deal of understandin’. Have you worked out a rota so’s everyone gets a go at everything? I know you’ve done the guard rota and the kitchen one, but you’ll want one for the blimp as well.’
So for the first week on site, Kathy was far too busy to write letters. Indeed, for six weeks she scarcely dashed off more than short notes. She had looked up Lincoln on the map and had seen that it would be perfectly possible to reach Waddington and Alec when she got the forty-eight hours’ leave they had been promised, but so far everyone had been much too busy to even think about leaving the site. Here, everything was geared to the balloon. When a WAAF officer came to do a kit inspection, she was chiefly concerned to see that the girls’ clothing was in good repair and capable of keeping them warm, or dry, or both. Since the clothing depot was actually several miles away, it would have been quite an outing to go there for new boots, gloves or woolly hats, but so far there had been no necessity for such a journey. As Kathy had told Jane, that day which now seemed so far away, the quality of their garments was first rate. It would probably be years, rather than months, before it became necessary to issue anything new.
In fact the only real outing, if you could call it such, was taken when the girls were marched to the nearest bus stop in order to visit the municipal baths. There was only cold water on site and each night one of the girls was detailed to fill half a dozen large, enamel jugs with water at the kitchen sink and to disperse them among the beds in the Nissen huts. Each girl had been issued with a small tin basin and though everyone did their best to keep clean, the weekly visits to the municipal baths became an urgent necessity, particularly in wet weather, when the site became a morass of churned up mud and the girls grew used to being constantly dirty.
At the end of six weeks, just when Kathy was thinking that she really might take a forty-eight, she was told to report to HQ; it appeared the powers that be had decided she was doing well as acting corporal and wanted her to take the examination which would give her the full rank. Kathy had grown used to command and knew that she would really miss it if she had to go back to being ‘just one of the crew’ again. So she went off at the appointed time and came back successful. She and Paddy had worked hard, swotting up all they would need to know for the examinations, and Paddy had been delighted to be told that she, too, would sit the exam and, if she passed, would eventually be given the rank of corporal and a crew of her own.
‘It’s all change in the WAAF,’ Kathy said dolefully, when Paddy’s posting came through. The two girls had been close throughout the bitterly cold winter and it seemed sad that, with the coming of spring, they should be parted.
‘But we’ll see quite a lot of each other, so we shall, because I’m only posted to Number Two Balloon Site and that’s just a couple of miles up the road,’ Paddy pointed out. ‘I’m going to buy an old bike so I’ll be able to cycle over to Site 21 whenever I get a few hours off and you can come over to me sometimes, even if you have to walk. Or you might be able to buy a bike, too,’ she added craftily. ‘We could go for rides together – there must be some of Nottingham which isn’t flat as a pancake and covered with plough.’
Chapter Fourteen1942
By the time Paddy left, March was well advanced and evenings were pulling out. Kathy decided that she would speak to HQ about the possibility of taking her forty-eight, and the next time the gharry went into Nottingham she went with it to enquire about rail fares to Lincoln, for she had decided that she really would make the effort to see Alec once more. They were still exchanging letters, sometimes as often as once a week, and she thought that the tone of Alec’s correspondence was becoming friendlier with every week that passed. She knew that the bomber crew were on standby, as indeed were the balloon operatives, but hoped that he might manage a few hours in her company at least. She did not intend to tell him of her plans in advance in case he thought she was being fast or forward, but meant to pretend she had come to Lincoln to see a WAAF friend stationed nearby and had rung him up on the off chance of a meeting. A forty-eight started at midnight and ended exactly forty-eight hours later, but if one were lucky, and off duty, one’s actual leave could start the evening before and not end until parade the morning after, so that a forty-eight could be ‘stretched’ into a sixty-hour absence. She would need several hours to reach Lincoln and the same amount of time to get back, but that would still leave her a nice chunk of time in which to meet up with Alec once more. She had seen too many Waafs posted from site to site for no apparent reason to believe that she herself would be immune. At present, the journey to Lincoln was possible – in fact, relatively easy – but if she were to be posted to the north of Scotland . . . she must seize the opportunity while it existed.
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