The Girl from Station X (17 page)

On 5 May 1940, she was again on leave, at Knowle. That day began with another lyrical description of the spring, which led me again to believe that she had once loved the place:

The most perfect day in the world. I lay in the orchard in the baking sun, looking up through a mass of blossom to a blue sky beyond . . . bees hummed all around
me. I love the smell of summer, the amazing greenness of everything in England at this time of year never ceases to seem like some miracle to me. No other country has quite this almost liquid green
and it is a most beautiful thing. We cooked our lunch in the woods, amongst primroses and violets. Later played croquet and Ludo. I long for David so much sometimes that I can hardly bear
it.

David seems then to have been the focus for Anne’s general yearning, restlessness, and excitement caused by the spring – a season when one often longs for a romance. But he remains
indistinct, and there is no indication of mutual passion. However, she went dutifully off to London for another wedding-dress fitting – having initially not wanted a grand ceremony, she wrote
that she now longed for a big peacetime wedding with lots of bridesmaids.

On May 6th, she made a special trip to Kelvin House to say goodbye to her former boss Mrs Welsh, who was about to leave her own job there. However, Anne did not request a transfer to London, as
David had asked, even though she records Mrs Welsh wondering if the younger woman had come to ask her about
something special
.

Anne may have had a little crush on Mrs Welsh, though she probably viewed her mainly as a mother figure. She had worked well for the older woman and wanted to please her. Unlike my grandmother,
who had let her fifteen-year-old daughter give up school, Mrs Welsh, who already had a senior position and three and a half years later was made 2nd Director of the WAAF, had encouraged Anne and
seen her potential. She had urged the younger woman, while they were both still at Kelvin House, to do the Code and Cipher course, instead of remaining just a driver. My grandmother, who told me
once that she had been perfectly happy working in a canteen during the war, would not have thought of it.

However, it is clear from her diary that Anne was finding her new job exciting and absorbing.

May 10th 1940 Bicester.

We heard that Germany has invaded Belgium and Holland in the early hours of this morning. Events move so quickly these days that it is almost incredible. People will
wonder one day perhaps in the future exactly what it felt like to live through these days and the answer would be difficult to give, in my case at any rate it is definitely delayed reaction. I just
daren’t let myself think about it. We seem to be in an awful way with the split in the Government and tonight we heard that Chamberlain has resigned and Churchill is Prime Minister. People
thought that Halifax would be but everyone has such confidence in Winston these days it is amazing and I feel it myself. The traffic was fast and furious today and all RAF personnel were recalled
from leave. Over 48 hours leave was cancelled and orders came back to man all the gun posts and be prepared for air attacks and descents by parachute troops. We also had a request for the list of
planes we could supply for operational use and we are expected to supply 18 Blenheim and 7 Ansons. Mr. Gunn thinks we are planning a colossal air attack on Germany in the near future. Brussels and
Amsterdam have been bombed and British and French troops are in Belgium arming the frontier this morning. Now we thought Chamberlain would resign in the face of this crisis. All the civil defences
in this country are standing by. We had a message from ‘Puma’ saying that bombs had been dropped with varying time limits, several hours in most cases, before they exploded. Una was
supposed to be on duty tonight, but Mr. Gunn did it and I went into Oxford with Buller. We went to the Rathbones’ party in the Randolph in a private room . . . The Rathbones again asked me to
go tomorrow with them to ‘The Gondoliers’ but I didn’t know whether I can get off or what is happening at all. I rushed straight back and Mr. Gunn was inundated with Type Y
messages, so I stayed down in the office until 2.15 am having eaten nothing since lunchtime today! . . . Rathbone wore his gas mask throughout the evening, even sitting in the theatre, to impress
the A.O.C.!

Anne went into Oxford with a young pilot, Sandy Buller, to see a production of
The Mikado
.
He really is rather sweet
, she wrote. Finally, after more weeks of
hearing nothing, on 21 May she received a letter from David, sent, she guessed, from
the Med
– the first time he had contacted her since their visit to his old
family home in early April. She does not refer to the letter’s contents, but by 1 June was writing,
Sandy Buller is going away . . . I long for David so much sometimes, especially
when I am tired or depressed
.
I haven’t seen him for years it seems.

On 5 June 1940, five days after the retreat across the Channel by British troops from Dunkirk, she wrote:
Rathbone went over to West Drayton today, where he saw Sandy, who sent long
and tender messages to me . . . I long for David so much sometimes specially when I think what our life might have been like in other circumstances.

It was surely Sandy – who, during their short acquaintance, showed more warmth and affection towards her than David – whom she really missed.

Then, on 10 June, David’s birthday, she heard that Sandy Buller had been killed ‘On Active Service’.

I felt quite ill and my knees could hardly hold me. He was so especially nice, the one person here that I really was fond of and he is only 20. I cried, it all
seems so futile and he loved life and things so much. Such a waste of a person like he was, so full of charm and sweetness of character and fine too. I kept thinking all the way to Oxford of the
times we had driven along that road together and of all the things we talked about and it was only a day or two ago now that he sent me these messages. I regret terribly never having said goodbye
to him. He wanted so much to be on the staff here too . . . I sort of can’t believe he is dead at all and he had only just begun his life. He had qualities that reminded me of David, I think
that is why I almost loved him, the same quiet charm and individuality, only Sandy was more vivacious. He loved the stage and wanted to go in for Producing . . . At such moments I long to see Aunt
Dita walking towards me and like a child I would like to rush into her arms to be comforted. To be fêted and spoiled once again and to know peace away from all this agonised
suspense.

It was her aunt far away in America from whom she wanted comfort, not her mother. I am almost certain that Anne never wrote or spoke so tenderly about any man again as she did in that passage
about Sandy – not, I fear, about my father. I found myself crying as I read it.

At home I had always heard my father making cracks about ‘Brylcreem Boys’ and delivering other insults and jokes about the RAF. After reading of Sandy, and my mother’s
subsequent accounts of life on bomber stations, I saw how belittling these remarks must have been. She rightly admired the pilots and always remained proud of having been close to them.

I had never read anything before which made that period so real to me. It was different from histories of the war, which of course were written with hindsight. My mother was writing from
inside
the experience, day after day, not knowing whether Britain would be invaded, which parts of London would be demolished, or whether Knowle, which was on the flight path to London of
the German bombers, would go up in flames.

I knew that I would have tried to do the same, record each day in my diary, as I did about my own life. But it was my mother who had gone through the war, not me. It was my mother writing, but
in the diaries she was a different person from the one I had known. Again, I found myself experiencing admiration, something which was foreign to me in relation to my mother.

The most surprising aspect was how she took responsibility, something that I had hardly ever known her to do.

On 19 July, she led a parade of WAAFs past King George VI when he came to Bicester on an inspection:

When I got a few paces from the King I gave the order ‘Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, eyes left!’ and I saluted myself till we marched out of the
hangar and I said ‘Eyes Front’, ‘Right Wheel’. I marched them down and got to the Gas Centre where I halted them (on the right foot!) and said ‘Officers Fall
Out!’ then I said ‘Flight Dismiss!’ and most of them turned with their backs to me and none saluted, partly my fault I suppose but I’m not certain. Anyway there were no
awful muddles. We cheered the King away at the Gate.

Was this young woman leading a parade past the King really my mother, who couldn’t even switch on the TV when my father was alive, who always shoved me in front of her when we entered a
theatre, hissing: ‘You take the tickets!’, who had never once cooked in her own kitchen and whose favourite cry was: ‘I can’t struggle any more!’?

Sometimes in the diary Anne would look back on her pre-war life, with its freedom, its absence from care. Every so often she would have little tastes of that life again. In early August, she and
my grandmother, in an echo of those pre-war Devon holidays, went to Thurlestone, where they stayed in a hotel, as the house at Hope Cove nearby was full of evacuees. The golf course above the
Thurlestone cliffs, where my grandmother and her daughter and their friends had spent so many enjoyable summers, was now dotted with posts, to prevent German aircraft landing.
The watch
on the coast is full of romance and takes me back to the days of the Armada, although often, I can’t believe it is true, when I lie sunning myself on the beach and look up all about me to see
a soldier’s figure silhouetted against the sky gazing out to sea.

At Knowle, she witnessed some of the most dramatic scenes of the Battle of Britain. She and my grandmother stood beside the swimming pool on 2 September 1940, watching through field glasses.

There was a faint roar in the distance which grew and grew as it approached us until it was almost deafening and one of the most menacing sounds that I have ever
heard . . . a huge formation of Bombers came into sight, flying in magnificent order, the whole sky was black with them and above there was another mass of fighters. We were watching these, when I
suddenly looked up and saw that the sky directly above the house was agleam with silver Messerschmitts, darting about the sky. I stepped under the shelter of the verandah, still with my glasses and
counted seventy-five Bombers in the formation, which was speeding away towards London . . . relentlessly while we stood there helpless to do anything. It seemed impossible that one stone of London
would be left standing.

A
nne had again not heard from her fiancé David for nearly six weeks; not a word since that letter from ‘the Med’.

While he was away at sea in the early autumn of 1940, and Churchill was issuing warnings of a German invasion, Anne first mentions Alan, a pilot. She writes that he is
charming
, used to be on the stage, and is South African. He takes her to visit some friends, one of whom runs a private printing press.
I always feel so at
home with these sorts of people and in my heart of hearts adore the artistic world.

Away from her mother’s influence, Anne was introduced to an environment to which she was perhaps more temperamentally suited, where creativity and the life of the mind were uppermost. Alan
also possessed other qualities that she admired – physical courage and daring.

I was aware throughout my childhood of the importance that my mother attached to these attributes. She was a good tennis player, skied well in snow and on water, and often boasted of how, as a
child, she had climbed the rocks with bare feet in Hope Cove, outdoing the fishermen’s sons. I remember that she was particularly excited by the anecdote of a man who had skied down the
Cresta Run – sheer ice, only for professional tobogganers. My father’s courage in having commanded destroyers on the North Atlantic must have impressed her. I recall how, after a
holiday with him in Greece, my mother described to me how she had looked out of the window as their plane was landing at Athens and to her alarm noticed one of its engines on fire. She alerted my
father, who replied: ‘I’ve seen it already’ and continued to do the
Times
crossword.

Several times in the diary my mother writes that she would have loved to learn how to fly a plane.

On 29 September 1940, Anne had news of David, via his mother.
I am thankful to hear something at last
. . .
Sometimes I feel unless I see
David soon I shall go mad.
But she was soon being courted by Alan and I do not blame her; David had become remote. She and Alan grew closer. She took him to dinner with her first
cousin Michael (Aunt Elisa’s son), at Wotton, Michael’s house near Oxford. The following day, she watched Alan
messing about with his motor bike.

When a young woman is content just to watch a man messing about with his motor bike, it usually means she has fallen for him. But Anne did not appear to be familiar with these warning signs.

On 17 October, she went up in a plane, an Anson – she does not mention whether this was with Alan. However her description –
brilliant sun . . . great billowing mountains
and valleys . . . the great power and strangeness of the universe
– tallies with her exalted state. She was falling in love. Two days later, she admitted:
He is the
person I like almost most in the camp.