The Girl from Station X (28 page)

My mother found it difficult to express affection directly to human beings but was able to do it to her dogs. In that diary she recalled how she used to stroke Zost’s head, calling him,
‘My Lion . . . Sweet Thing!’
I remembered her with one of her bassets – perhaps it was Mr Plod – smoothing the top of his head again and again,
murmuring endearments like that. I was sitting beside her on the sofa. I had had the sudden feeling that she would have liked to stroke
me
and address
me
with such endearments, but
didn’t know how.

The passage about Zost’s death also made me remember something else. When I was about eleven, my own dog Buzzy had acquired a potentially fatal viral disease: hard pad, a form of
distemper. My mother cancelled going skiing with us to nurse him and asked her friend Knotty to accompany me and my father and brothers to Switzerland instead of her. (My father joked that
he’d had to explain to the travel agent: ‘My wife has a disease called Dogoratory . . .’) For two weeks my mother had slept downstairs beside my dog, waking every two hours to
spoon glucose and water into his mouth. She had saved his life.

Now I felt sorry for Anne when I read how she had cried all evening at Knowle, spending Zost’s last night with him downstairs, but then
couldn’t face
being
there when the vet came to do the deed. For months after that, being at Knowle without Zost made her sad.

B
letchley Park now behind her, the second half of the war saw Anne first posted, in April 1943, at the Headquarters of 5 Group – one of the
main Bomber Command stations – at Castlegate House, Grantham, where she was a supernumerary in Intelligence. She was pleasantly surprised by the mess, which, though in the middle of Grantham,
had an attractive garden of fruit trees leading down to the river, but was shocked at having so little to do in the office –
what they call a flap here seems like child’s
play to me and of no importance at all, such is the influence of B.P.

Lettice was yet again trying to help Anne get
another
posting, with the Air Ministry. Anne had only just changed jobs, I thought, with irritation, and again wondered whether, in trying
to be helpful, Lettice was not actually a disruptive influence on her so easily discontented friend.

Despite Anne’s sporadic laments that she was still unmarried, she was now having a good time socially when on leave, and, in fact, she saw that recent marriages of her women friends were
already not going well – Diana’s, to the Brigadier, was to be annulled, and Anne wrote in the diary that Cynthia and
her
husband seemed bored to death with each other.

In early May, a cousin of my grandmother, Alice, and her daughter Maureen visited 40 Belgrave Square, having returned from America, where Alice, a widow, had taken her two teenage sons and
Maureen early on in the war. Anne described the two women – Maureen a few years younger than her – looking
shamefaced and not quite sure of themselves or how people would
receive them
. (They were certainly looked at askance for a long time by their friends and relatives involved with the war effort. I was relieved that my mother, despite her frequent
complaints in the diary about her various jobs, had never once entertained the idea of fleeing to America. Nor indeed had my grandmother, who was a great friend of Alice’s, as well as being
her cousin.)

Now Anne declared herself bored with her work at Grantham, finding the office slow and inefficient compared with her hut at Bletchley – nothing, it seemed, would please her! On a positive
note, she thought of ways in which her workplace could be improved, such as cutting the numbers of those working in the Intelligence Section. Bletchley had given her confidence in her own
judgement.

Luckily, in early May she was sent for a few weeks to another station, this time an airfield, at Waddington, that reminded her of Bicester in 1940:
so my dream of a Bomber ops
station is realised, what will it bring I wonder?
. . .
they work in complete liaison with ops here
. . .
we were given a target
tonight.
She then proceeded – surely indiscreetly – to note down how the Intelligence at Waddington worked as regards bombing Germany.

On her second day there, Anne also met four Russian soldiers –
the first Communists I have ever seen I believe. They looked much like other people
, she wrote
naïvely in her excitement, forgetting that she had seen those other Soviet Russians across the River Dniester from the town of Hotin in August 1938.

The Allies were, at that stage in 1943, all too grateful for Stalin’s help. These four Russian visitors – members of the Russian Military Mission over in Britain – were given a
speech of welcome in which Stalin and the Red Army were praised, and then shown maps and photographs in which they expressed
great interest
; also it was explained to them
why the Ruhr was now the focus of a concerted, and prolonged, attack by Bomber Command.

Anne had arrived at Bomber Command at a crucial part of its operations. Since the very beginning of the war (before Bletchley became so important), Churchill had maintained that the only way
that Hitler could be defeated would be by heavy aerial bombardment. ‘The Navy can lose the war, but only the Air Force can win it,’ he famously said in a Cabinet memo of September 1940.
But despite the will, there had not been the means to achieve ‘the absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers’ that Churchill then considered necessary.

As described in Patrick Bishop’s
Bomber Boys
, by the spring of 1943 munitions factories had been working flat out to build up a stock of Lancasters, Wellingtons and Halifaxes.
With the resources now in place, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who had been appointed Air Officer Commanding in February 1942, was given the go-ahead to proceed with a campaign of all-out
destruction against Germany, specifically its industrial heart, the Ruhr valley.

My mother had arrived at Waddington six or seven days before the Dams Raid of 16 and 17 May (part of this action was the Battle of the Ruhr, made famous by the film
The Dambusters
. As
Bishop writes, ‘night after night, large forces of up to 800 aircraft pitched themselves against the heaviest flak defences in Germany and the most experienced and best-equipped units of the
Luftwaffe to deliver ever greater weights of bombs’). The main targets were the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams. Anne, a few days earlier, had stood at Waddington near the runways and watched
‘the Lancs’ taking off and landing, feeling again as though she was back at Bicester and
part of the thing
. She was shown all over a Lancaster bomber and wrote
in detail about the positioning, inside the plane, of the various crew members, the bomb aimer, the rear gunner, the pilot, the flight engineer, the navigator. She was also taken, by a Squadron
Leader Rankin, to Flying Control, then to the roof to watch twelve aircraft taking off:

they taxied out slowly from dispersal and from the hangars to the take off point, slowly, one behind the other, like huge insects crawling along the ground. Then,
they turned and the roar of their engines could be heard across the a/drome as each moved up and the first began to move faster and faster, the dust flying up behind in a cloud of red they bumped
slightly over the grass and then, suddenly as each became airborne, it seemed to change from a queer inanimate monster with no soul, into a thing of grace and beauty, curiously alive, as though,
for the first time, it had realised its power and had discovered itself and its beauty as it flew away towards the sunset. The Lancaster circled the a/drome 2 or 3 times to gain height before
setting course, so that there were Lancasters at various heights all round the sky, some, just dots in the distance, already making for Skegness and others quite low and others quite low still, the
impression of power that they gave was extraordinary and the roar of the engine was tremendous. And so I saw my first take-off. Target – the Skoda works at Pilsen and a very vital
one.

I suddenly saw this young woman as her escort must have seen her, with her keenness, vitality and willingness to learn.

The brother of a great friend had just been killed in North Africa and, after their first day of bombing those three major dams in Germany, eight out of ten of 5 Group’s
‘Lancs’ never came back. Anne wrote:
at last we are bringing the war home to the Germans in their own country and however awful it may seem, it is the only thing to do to
shorten the war and to give them a taste of their own medicine.

Although she and her former colleagues did not know it then, it was probably their work at Bletchley, rather than the bombing of cities by the RAF, that shortened the war by two years. But
‘Bomber’ Harris, although later vilified, particularly for the bombing of Dresden (unfairly, as it was not his personal decision), had been told by his superiors that the focus of his
operations should be, as Bishop writes: ‘the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards of aircraft factories . . . this must be made clear’. The aim was to destroy the morale of
the German civilian population by more and more bombing.

Anne, meanwhile, was so excited by seeing operations from her end that she wrote that she had

forgotten what it feels like to want to go away on one’s day off . . . I haven’t felt like that since Bicester days. I
love
this place, everyone is so nice, all the WAAFs, Teddy, Kay, Anne, 2 Margarets, Sheila and Yvonne. They are all sweet and the mess is divine. Every time I
come back to Waddington again, I feel happy just at the sight of it, and I scarcely believe it after all this time. This place is full of the smell of hay and grass, of white campion waving in the
wind and larks singing.

There were some lows, inevitably. Two days later, after a raid over Wuppertal,
Erikson, the nice boy from Rhodesia and F/O Holt, the Canadian
were lost.
Both
‘sproggs’ and on their third trips. These boys go straight out onto the Ruhr nowadays and don’t get the gradual hardening process that they used to.

On 1 June, she went to meet her financial advisers in London. (She hardly mentions her inheritance in the diaries, but this time wrote:
I have all this money, I am
as a child in their hands at present – I must learn, but what time have I now for anything?
) The day before, she had got drunk to the point of being sick – at a
sticky RAF party
,
all very sordid.
She excused herself –
somehow one is so bored and depressed these days, one tries to forget
for a moment. Everyone is the same . . .

Most of her friends and colleagues did not drink to the point of being sick and I had noted several other instances of Anne’s drunkenness – nowadays termed ‘binge
drinking’ – earlier on. Her diary of 17 January 1943 records
my attack of drinking Hooch. We were all drinking whisky and water at the Berkeley. I was talking quite gaily
and the next thing I remember is sitting in the cloakroom and a woman bending over me saying ‘I’m a doctor’
.

I noted that my mother would not admit even in her private diary that she might have had too much to drink. Instead, she comforted herself by reporting:
2 other girls passed out in
exactly the same way and had to be taken home.

In early June, Anne received a
surprising
proposal of marriage, from Ralph Tymms (the first British cryptographer to read a German Enigma message at Bletchley Park),
which she turned down, as she did yet another offer from John M. She returned to Waddington, but this time was not happy there. She became restless and wanted to work in the Air Ministry.
It is obvious that I shall never get any job in Intelligence in Bomber Command.

She was proved wrong, as at Waddington, in the nick of time, she was suddenly given something different:

I am at last doing some proper work and love it. I am working with the Sgt. Watchkeepers in the Ops Room, on the telephone exchange. It is the best job going I
consider on a bomber station, apart perhaps from Control. We hear everything that is going on here and can listen to any telephone calls. It is rather an ingenious little exchange and you can have
eight people talking at once, two plugged in and the other two conversations on the 2 telephones. I have always wanted to work on an exchange and have realised my ambition.

She enjoyed it:
this is a picked job if ever there was one and I love it. I think I shall go mad when I go back to Group. Of course, this is entirely the Ops. side.
She
wrote again cheerfully two days later of a visit by another suitor, Keith Rous, of hitchhiking with him on a lorry into Lincoln, of playing tennis with other staff at Waddington and of celebrating
the fourth anniversary of the birth of the WAAF. She added:
Cologne was the target last night
.

In the small hours of 28 June, there had been an incredibly heavy attack by Bomber Command on Cologne, which, as the nearest big German city to the British bomber bases, had already been bombed
fifty-eight times.

This bombing of the Ruhr is a v. big thing. Far bigger than the public I believe realises. With new methods, the accuracy is 100 per cent better than it was a year
ago and although we have a few failures . . . most of the raids have been successful and the photographs of Dusseldorf the other day, seen through a magnifying glass, show incredible devastation
with whole areas just wiped out. We bomb the Ruhr every night, except when we have a special operation to do.