Millions Like Us (22 page)

Oh we celebrated that all right. Cunningham had gone to the exact spot where they were going to attack the convoys. And yes, we had a drink – amongst ourselves – and I remember we got hold of a very cheap bottle of wine, and wrote Matapan on the label, and then discovered of course that the cleaner would see it, so we had to take it off. One had to be terribly careful about the cleaners! What would they think when they read about Matapan in the paper, and then saw a bottle in the office waste paper basket with Matapan on the label? One had to think fast about that kind of thing.

Soon after we saw Cunningham on Pathé news, and we only wished we could have told our parents that it was all because of these messages we’d deciphered that he’d won the Battle of Matapan.

Later, Cunningham came down to congratulate us, and we all had drinks together. I think the Matapan business really was a high spot of my life – just knowing we had done something that was helpful. But so much had to be repressed and kept secret. I think that is probably the most extraordinary thing about Bletchley – there were about 10,000 people, not just at Bletchley itself, but the Y service people and so on who were doing the intercepting; they
all
knew this secret – and nobody ever blabbed.

The Italian navy was now in disarray, unable to intervene in the British retreat from Greece and Crete. Victory at Matapan was wisely attributed by the press to good air reconnaissance; thanksgiving services were held, and Admiral Cunningham hailed as unchallengeable master of the eastern Mediterranean. He was a fine naval commander, but it was only just that he thanked the women who had made his position possible. Mavis was not able to tell her own side of the story to a soul for another thirty years.

*

In her eighties, with many later achievements to her name, Mavis Batey (née Lever) is able to look back with satisfaction, aware that her intellect, her intuitive powers and her stamina have been acknowledged. She knows that her work and that of her colleagues, carried out in a chilly hut in Buckinghamshire, enabled men on destroyers in the stormy Aegean Sea to scramble bombers, fire torpedoes, drown enemies. The kind of historic actions which had Nella Last reaching for the ‘off’ button on her radio directly involved many remarkable women, whose contribution was not only important in itself, it changed their lives.

Yet, though crucial to its outcome, the Bletchley girls could only imagine what it was like to live through a battle. Nurses were among the few women who had close-up experience of war in all its frightening, sick, ugly reality.
After her narrow escape
from France in June 1940, QA Lorna Bradey might have been excused for deciding that
front-line nursing was not for her. On the contrary, her appetite for adventure was undiminished: ‘One felt a great urgency to get on with the war – sitting at home was no good.’

She didn’t sit at home for long. Lorna was ordered to join the medical team on board a hospital ship bound for Cape Town. She was thrilled – ‘tremendous excitement everywhere’ – until she discovered that her job was to help care for a rabble of disorderly Australians, most of them, it appeared, injured in street brawls. This ‘loathsome collection of men’ were en route home to Australia. The plan was to jettison their troublesome patients at Cape Town, but it was not to be. Orders were now received that the ship must proceed to Suez, where the men who had recovered would be required to join the desert army against Rommel’s advance. They had just forty-eight hours before departure so, while the Aussies went on a drunken rampage, Lorna and the QAs took advantage of a wonderful welcome by the Cape Town expat community. Then they were back on board for another six weeks. Between theatre duties, deck tennis, bridge, boat drill practice and her new boyfriend (this time, a handsome blue-eyed first officer) the journey passed, but the rebellious Aussies were near boiling point by the time they got to Suez. ‘We were ordered to lock our cabins at night.’ When the troops were finally disembarked and carried off in transports, ‘a silent cheer of relief went up from all of us … That was our first mission done.’

The hospital ship was Lorna’s home for fourteen months. And she was fulfilling an ambition: ‘I would travel, see everything and have plenty of fun.’ Once rid of the Australian soldiers, life began to resemble a cruise as the ship plied between Suez, Aden, the Cape and Bombay; wherever they docked the QAs were welcomed with parties and dances. They ate delicious food, sampled South African wines, bathed and went horse-riding. Folding hills, jacaranda trees, blue bays and moonlit velvety nights completed the picture-postcard quality of those unforgettable months in the southern hemisphere.

But this wasn’t war. We itched to get back to work … 1941 was a bad year for the Allies and we were destined to go into the teeth of the battle at sea.

From January 1941 the deep-water port of Tobruk, on the northern Libyan coast near the border with Egypt, had been in Allied hands. From April, the troops there were besieged by Axis forces,
who finally retook this important base in December. During the siege, the Royal Navy provided vital support, bringing in supplies and fresh troops and ferrying out casualties. Lorna’s ship was one of these, under orders to run between Alexandria and Tobruk.

We were to go to Tobruk at top speed – load the wounded from the Lighters and return, operating on the severe cases on the way down. So the ‘Tobruk Splint’ was born – a long plaster of Paris splint to immobilise the wounded and fractured limb until we could get them to base … We took great pride in the time it took us to load the patients and turn around. Tobruk harbour was a mass of wrecks and floating debris and made the entry most difficult. It was always made about 5.00 a.m. We would wait outside the harbour at night and go in … We would be well on our way back by 10.00 a.m.

At last we were being put to the test …

This was no Mediterranean cruise. As winter came on the weather grew cold, grey and stormy. Tobruk was running short of medical supplies, and many of the patients, who had been holding out there for months, were in a lamentable state with festering, gangrenous wounds. The run to Alexandria was fraught with danger. Their sister ship was torpedoed and sunk. Lorna’s counterpart on this ship, the theatre sister, survived to tell a harrowing tale. The captain had given orders to abandon ship at the moment when the surgical team were in the middle of a serious abdominal operation. In dreadful haste they closed up the patient’s wound, bound him to a stretcher and, holding on to it to the best of their ability, leaped into the sea. When she was picked up the sister still had her operating gown and gloves on, but the patient was never heard of again. Lorna and her medical team were working flat out. Everybody knew that the sea was full of enemies and that they were being ‘watched’; constantly at the back of her mind was the thought that their ship could be next, and the tedious boat drills no longer seemed pointless. Caring for their patients and getting them to safety was paramount, but nursing through a force 8 storm was beset with difficulties. ‘You can imagine taking off stinking plasters in a rough sea!’ Lorna remembered having to break off in the middle of an operation and dash to the side of the ship to throw up. The best cure was pink gin and a slice of ham – apparently it worked.

Stocking Wars, Sex Wars

At home, though the Blitz had abated, a sense of urgency prevailed. Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, wanted 2,782 new aircraft by December 1941, and it was accepted that women factory recruits like Doris Scorer in Wolverton were essential.
For her part,
she was starting to become familiar with wearing overalls and putting up with the bad language, sexism and tomfoolery of her male colleagues. She was now regularly working a twelve-hour day helping to get damaged aircraft flying again.

But she was eighteen and looking for fun too. Missing out on Friday night dances at the Institute was not an option, but the long hours presented a challenge to a dressy young woman like Doris with a taste for colour and sparkle. Lustrous locks were essential to distract from wartime shabbiness. The thing to do was to put your hair in curlers in the morning, anchoring them under your headscarf, wear stockings under your boiler suit for speed and carry a paper bag containing your dress and shoes into work. Then at the end of the day you nipped into the Ladies for a quick wash, curlers out and hair brushed. Time for some make-up: lavish lipstick was indispensable if one was to be attractive. Mascara came in solid cakes in a small plastic box. You spat in it to loosen the colorant, then rubbed in a little long-handled applicator brush. Next the dress came out of the paper bag to be slipped on and the trousers were discarded, silky stocking-clad toes reappearing in high heels; the final touch: a flower, or a diamanté hairslide clipped to the coiffure. Transformed, the girls pranced out of the works to stunned gasps from the male fitters: ‘Bet there’s not a virgin amongst yer,’ muttered one.

Glamour was important to Doris. A townie born and bred, she felt out of place in rural Wolverton and missed the London shops, which had stocked fashionable styles influenced by movie stars like Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth. Wedges or peep-toes with ankle-straps were the only smart way to totter: the higher the better if you were small, like Doris. But as rationing made itself felt, the Hollywood look got harder to maintain. Doris’s ability with a needle helped her to keep up appearances on the clothes front, though like everyone she found the shortage of rubber, a vital component of elastic, awkward to say
the least.
A frequent wartime catastrophe
was the sudden collapse of knickers in the most inopportune places, due to elastic- or button-failure. Accounts of this misfortune, which seems often to have been greeted with wolf-whistles and guffaws, recur with comical frequency in wartime memoirs. From Tottenham Court Road to Sheffield city centre, from Truro train station to the British Embassy in Cairo, women’s dropped knickers littered the ground, to the appalled embarrassment of their owners, who were forced to step daintily out of them, before picking them up and stuffing them in their handbags. Doris never went anywhere without a small gold safetypin.

‘Don’t look now, old girl, but your undercarriage is coming down.’ Elasticated underwear often gave way due to the rubber shortage. Her suave date has grown accustomed to RAF vocabulary.

Doris disregarded the older generation, who thought that to wear make-up was ‘low’ or ‘fast’. Compared to the country bumpkins, city girls like her were big spenders on manicures, beauty products and permanent waves. More than anything she minded not being able to lay hands on the paints, powders and perfumes she craved. Magazines of the time encouraged women not to let themselves go in wartime. Beauty was a duty: ‘
No man wants to come home
to a wife or sweetheart who shows in her face how much she has worried about him.’
So Doris slapped on Pond’s Cold Cream by the potful until it became scarce. But by 1941, despite the best efforts of the Board of Trade to procure cosmetics (motivated by the belief that they were good for feminine morale), the popularity of such products was contributing to the shortages. Queues formed whenever news got out that a consignment had arrived from Coty or Max Factor. So how was a girl like Doris to keep her pretty curls in place with Kirby grips and Wave-Set virtually unobtainable? How was she to achieve that dreamy gleam on the lids with no jewel-tinted eye-shadow? Along with thousands like her, she learned all kinds of dodges. Sugar-water did the job just as well as Wave-Set, it turned out, and Vaseline on the lids made one look irresistible – ‘or so we thought’. Doris and her contemporaries learned to eke out their dwindling supplies, and to adapt. A lipstick’s final days could be prolonged by adding warmed almond oil, or by melting it in an egg-cup over hot water. Bicarbonate dusted under the armpits could substitute for deodorant, shoe-polish could replace mascara, starch could be used instead of face powder. Perfume, made with imported substances, was particularly hard to come by. Doris would have loved to dab Bourjois’s ‘Evening in Paris’ or ‘Ashes of Roses’ behind her ears, but made do with a sixpenny phial of Lily of the Valley or Violet Water dispensed from a huge bottle at the chemist’s.

Women in civilian jobs like Doris had far more scope to primp and prettify than their sisters in the services.
When Doffy Brewer left home
to do ‘a man’s job’, and packed her individuality away in her suitcase, she also packed up many accepted ideas about femininity. Gone were modesty and maidenliness, personal vanity and refinement.
Barbara Cartland,
a life-long champion of ‘ladylike’ values, worried a great deal about the way the ATS appeared to be systematically eradicating femininity. The training programme seemed geared to stripping out all that was ‘soft, feminine and illogical’ from its impressionable young recruits. ‘There were some appalling results of intensive training and suppressed femininity,’ she wrote, and reported instances of ATS officers who were indistinguishable in appearance from men. Underlying the prejudice against masculinity in women was a fear, too, of female homosexuality, which remained, in the 1940s, a topic both inflammatory and surrounded by ignorance. Away from home in an all-female environment, there was
more scope for ‘pashes’ and crushes to develop both into love and licence.
One ATS officer
who had been jumped on by her drunken corporal reported to her commanding officer that she had been subjected to a lesbian assault. ‘What’s that?’ was the CO’s bewildered reaction.