The Girl from Station X (29 page)

She went to London for her twenty-ninth birthday. John M took her to
The Merry Widow
, then to the 400 to dance. However she complained that he treated her
as though one were
his dog.

There were three further attacks by Bomber Command on Cologne; twenty factories were hit, and the homes of their workers.

July 3rd. This is the day that all Axis sources report as the invasion date. I’ll bet it is not. Was on duty all yesterday. Target was Cologne. Went on to
watch the times of take-off which we chalk up on the board. 50 Squad 3 E/R’s (early returns.) The last a/c was off by 0030 hrs. Went to bed and was called at 0330 again, drove to
Shellingthorpe with Bernard to see the Interrogation.

Interrogation took place in the briefing room, where Intelligence officers – trying to find out more about the German defences – cross-questioned the air crew about
what they had seen.

It seems to have been a good show. One was lost from 9 Sq. (Flt. Lt Wakeford) the only loss in Group. We have six photos showing the aiming point. A Halifax from
Middleton landed at Shelby, for no apparent reason I can see!

As I came out of the Interrogation about 6 o’clock, the hulks of the Lancasters loomed up out of the haze looking like great insects with the black figures of men hurrying and
scurrying about like ants. It is strange how alive these a/c seem and I never tire of the sight of them crouching at their dispersal points. Somehow it is difficult to realise where they have been,
so cut off are we from the continent of ‘Europe’. Paul Nash perhaps better than anyone else in his paintings, has caught the queer aliveness of these war machines.

Anne did seem much happier surrounded by aircraft and pilots; this was a very different life from the hothouse atmosphere at Bletchley. With typical contrariness, though, she kept using her time
off to go back and see her old colleagues at ‘The Park’, recording, after one visit to Bletchley, having received
a real welcome . . . there is something about this secrecy
business that binds one into a small band of those in the know, whom you really feel at ease with, whether you like it or not.

Of her Bletchley friends, Anne had remained in touch with Lettice, Rita Davies and Connie, and also Edward Thomas, who, in between postings, took her to a Chinese restaurant in Soho.
Edward is off to Sicily soon in a battleship. He tells me that the Battle of the Atlantic is going better than it ever has . . .
Edward of course, besides being very
clever, was also a man of action – he commanded ships, as my father was doing.

When I went through my father’s modest book of cuttings – he had lamentably few papers compared with those kept by my mother – I found that in that month, July 1943, he had
been in action in the North Atlantic and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross as a result. Three German submarines were sunk within six hours and my father, who was commanding the sloop
The Kite
, was responsible for sinking one. My mother would not meet him for another five years.

The bombing of Germany continued throughout July 1943, although it was dependent on the weather; Anne’s diary of that month highlights the extraordinary mixture of
exhilaration, sudden death and occasional pleasures – such as a trip to Skegness, where she swam in a saltwater pool and spotted a dog like her darling Zost – and the day-to-day life in
the mess.

By the end of July, the Battle of the Ruhr was over, there had been
riots and cries for peace in Milan
and Mussolini was a prisoner in his palace. The air blitz on the
Italian mainland – Rome bombed in daylight by the Americans – had been called off temporarily and the Battle of Hamburg was about to begin.

On 1 August, while on leave at Knowle, Anne noted that Bomber Command had carried out
two devastating raids on Hamburg and the city is reported as reduced to ruins. The Germans are
obviously in a flat spin and are talking of evacuating Berlin.

On her return to work through London, she uncharacteristically complained of it being
full of foreigners
and wrote that she
loathed the sound of broken
English
. Presumably these were refugees from war-torn Europe; Anne did not seem to appreciate this.

She made a day trip to Bardney, another Bomber Command station, and became fascinated by the Link Trainer, which taught pilots different flying techniques. She wrote about this in great detail,
so excited that, back at Waddington, she had a go in their Link Trainer after dinner. Reading her thrilled yet precise account of it, I realised that in this respect she was like her father, who
had learned to fly in the early days of aviation.

Indeed, she was learning new skills all the time. When the bombers returned from their raids, the photographs taken from the air would be developed, a task she enjoyed mastering. After one
sortie by bombers over Italy she records:

some v. good photographs with amusing points, showing the centre of Milan . . . the best I’ve seen yet, as though taken in daylight with lots of ground detail
and at least 3 aiming points were plotted. It amazed me how quickly you can take a point from a negative. First of all you put the negative over a special machine, place the print on top of it,
close the machine and give it whatever length of time you deem necessary. You then take the print, which is still a blank piece of paper and put it into a tray containing some chemical, you then
swill the water over the print and gradually the picture emerges, the longer you swill it the darker it becomes.

Once again I realised how wrong I had been in thinking that my mother had no practical skills. I now recalled her developing her own photographs in a darkroom at North Heath;
before Raymond’s death, she would often show us children her home movies of Spain, and of us in the countryside around North Heath House. There was one of me and Raymond jumping up and down
in a cornfield full of poppies. She had not only shot those films herself, she had spliced them and put the spools on their reels, using equipment that required immense patience, a process which
would nowadays seem irritatingly time-consuming. She had determinedly mastered the technique. It dawned on me that my mother, once she had set her mind to it, and if she had not become dependent on
drink, could have done so many things.

A pattern was slowly establishing itself and I was reminded of those ‘magic’ painting books that I had been given as a child – you put a paintbrush in water and gently stroked
it over a blank page. Then a picture, hitherto invisible, would slowly take shape. But here, what was transforming my mother’s hidden, and later chaotic and sad, life into an emerging and
colourful picture was not water, but her diaries. Because of them, I was becoming more tolerant towards my mother.

Now I, like her all those years ago, was getting caught up in the war. I had never studied that period in history at school and, apart from having watched war films, my knowledge of those events
was scant. I began to read up about the war and watch documentaries on television. And among all this, my mother, in her WAAF uniform, would appear as if on stage, as someone hitherto unknown to
me. I even dreamed one night that I was taking her place and it was I going through the war, not she. Was I even envious that she had had such exciting experiences?

Back at Grantham after Waddington, Anne was fed up:
August 9th 1943. I loathe it more than ever now, the atmosphere is half baked and there is nothing to do most of
the time. I have got nothing now, no outside life and not even an interesting jobs I had at B.P. . . .

She ended the month even more despondent:
My room is dark and there is damp coming all through the ceiling. Often I wake to hear the plaster falling down onto the floor. Life seems
just like one long dark road and each day I wake up to think, thank goodness that is one more day gone. What will there be to show for it in the end? Nothing except a restlessness and inability to
get back to normal life.

She had spoken prophetically for all those who, after the war, never did get back to ‘normal’ life. Apart from refugees, orphans and other displaced persons, there were many like
herself who, despite not being victims of war, had nevertheless had their futures irrevocably changed. Besides those girls who had left jobs as maids in large houses such as Knowle to work in
munitions factories, never to return to domestic service, there were plenty of young women such as my mother who, before the war, had not had a care about their material circumstances and the easy
tempo of their lives. As for the men, during the war there were those daredevils who had parachuted into the Balkans, the two who had kidnapped the German general in Crete, others who had
volunteered as fighter pilots, and boys such as Mr Dixon, from a small country village, who had gone into the navy at fifteen having lied about his age, then been awarded the Croix de Guerre for
his services in submarines. Many of these would later find it difficult to settle back to a mundane daily life. My father admitted that he had enjoyed the war, but my godmother Meg’s soldier
husband said my father’s nerves had been ‘shot to pieces’ after four years on the North Atlantic. (This was one explanation for his charging about our house shouting orders, never
able to relax.)

At Grantham, Anne was given an interesting job on the watch, dealing with bomb loads and totalling them up. There were other perks in her life: Peggie’s brother Mike arrived from North
Africa with a present of bananas, the first she had seen for four years. The Allies invaded the toe of Italy and then, on 8 September, Italy surrendered.

Drank wine to celebrate Italy’s defeat and went on to a little club round the corner to drink beer. After this I rushed home for dinner and a funny thing
happened, an old man appeared at the front door with an envelope addressed to the U.S. Federal Dept at 40 Belgrave Sq. In it were about 12 sheets containing all Reuters’ latest dispatches and
whilst he got on the telephone to Reuter to ask for the correct address we read all these and gleaned the following: The Armistice terms were actually agreed to on Sept. 3rd, the day we landed on
the Italian mainland and it was arranged that they should not be announced until the moment most opportune for the allies, which evidently is
now
.
About 2,000 of our P/W (all other ranks) have been taken to Germany, the remainder are to be released. Admiral Cunningham has called up all on the Italian Navy and Merchant Navy to sail for Malta,
Gib or any of our ports, and these in the Black Sea to make for Russian ports, those that are unable to get away are to scuttle themselves.

My mother surmised that the Italian navy coming into Allied ports must surely mean
the end of 3N
– her hut at Bletchley.

There were yet more positive diary entries:

September 19th 1943. Knowle.

A perfect day, sun and a lovely clear atmosphere. Just to be in a congenial atmosphere these days, where things do not jar and one can smell the grass and the earth
is Heaven. There are still roses in the garden and the most enormous tomatoes, potatoes and onions. The biggest I have ever seen. News is that the Germans have evacuated Sardinia and the Battle of
Naples is beginning. Badoglio is with the Allied Army. Mussolini has made a speech to the Italian people . . . Came up to London in the evening . . . caught the 10.15 to Grantham as it was Sunday
night, it was packed to the doors and people were lying stretched out flat in the corridors, asleep. I got a seat in rather an amusing carriage with an American soldier, a Lieutenant in the Guards,
2 Scotch women, an ATS girl, a Grenadier Guardsman and another man in civilian clothes who had ‘played’ for the BBC. The American Frank Cox by name produced a bottle of whisky and
ginger ale and Scotch ladies a bottle of lemon squash and we all had drinks. The Americans had thousands of cigarettes and packages all labelled ‘U.S. Army Rations’ – Breakfast,
Lunch, Dinner, etc. They certainly do their troops well . . . the Scotch ladies were in cracking form, also the American who was ‘the life and soul’ . . . I was quite sad to get out at
Grantham.

She was beginning to show signs of nostalgia for her happy times in America. Perhaps it was not surprising that she was now attracted to a Lieutenant Dubois, who, she wrote, reminded her of the
character Larry Budd, who appears in a series of novels by Upton Sinclair. There were further indications that the war might eventually be over – and won – by the Allies. She was
correspondingly cheerful and, instead of complaining about her circumstances as she often did, even pointed out:

Every place seems to have its advantages . . . hot buttered toast and jam for breakfast in bed, if you are lucky enough to get the morning off, not to mention quite
a lot of time off and a good train service . . . The PM returned yesterday after a stay of over 6 weeks abroad. Today, he made his speech to the House. It was Bd’cast on the 9 o’clock
news . . . the first really optimistic speech since the war began and full of hope and common sense.

She would still sometimes lapse into her old despondency and long for a
husband, children and a nice home . . . meanwhile the years roll on, a sea of wasted effort, like a never
ending illness.

I could not help thinking how, in one sense, she went on to ‘waste’ her life in the years after the war was over, in the sense that she never worked properly again and drank more and
more heavily. At least in those six years of the war, despite some of her jobs being dull, she had mostly been ‘in the saddle’, doing her best.

Smolensk had fallen to the Russians and, on 1 October 1943, the Allies occupied Naples. After taking her mother to see the damage in the City, at Cheapside – my
grandmother, unlike her daughter, had lacked the curiosity to go and see it earlier – Anne ended the month with a summary of world events: