Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys Read online

  Her mother seemed to perk up, now there was something practical to consider. ‘Oh yes, love, right as rain. We’ll have that for our tea tonight, love. Jack always likes a bit of rabbit stew. Just give me a minute to finish me tea and I’ll go and peel the potatoes.’

  May heard the WVS lady approaching and looked round.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to clear the platform, orders from the high-ups!’ the woman said in a bright, loud voice.

  Her mother, meek as a lamb, put away her knitting and stood up. ‘Come on, love,’ she said to May, ‘that rabbit’s not gonna get cooked with me sitting here all day.’

  *

  She was thinking of her mother’s vague pale face, just as Granny Byron answered the door, Troubles scampering excitedly around her ankles. The contrast was stark. A smile creased her grandmother’s walnut-brown face and the golden hoops flashed as she beckoned May in.

  ‘I was just this minute thinking of you!’ She laughed. ‘And you say my gift’s a load of old cods – well, explain that!’

  May was always amazed at how Granny Byron could find significance in the smallest coincidence.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ she asked, taking off her cap and dipping to check her hair in the low mirror, which was adjusted to her grandmother’s height.

  ‘I was remembering when you was a kid and you went blind, and I was thinking to meself, maybe that’s why you don’t see too clever now.’

  Her grandmother dumped the kettle on to the range and May laughed.

  ‘Well, you got that one wrong, Nan. I had my vision tested by the army doctor – A1! That’s why they put me on the predictor. And when it comes to night vision, I can see better than any of the girls.’

  ‘I’m not talking about these!’ Granny Byron pointed two fingers at her eyes. ‘I’m talking about this.’ She patted her heart. ‘There’s none so blind as cannot see! Peggy tells me you’re in love and you don’t even know it.’

  May flushed. It didn’t seem right for a woman as old as her grandmother to be seeing into her heart.

  ‘Peggy should think more about her own bloody eyesight,’ May said, immediately regretting it as Granny Byron cocked her head to one side.

  ‘Don’t look so guilty. You’ve not let the cat out of the bag. I know what’s been going on with her.’

  ‘Promise not to say anything!’ May added hastily, but her grandmother waved at her like an annoying fly.

  ‘I’m not stupid. I haven’t even let on to Peggy I know, and would I say anything to your mother with her nerves the way they are?’

  May was frightened to ask how she knew. She certainly didn’t want to hear that Granny Byron had seen it in the leaves.

  ‘It’s what happens in a war. I’ve seen it all before. People start to wonder what they’ve been doing with their lives, start swapping around, this one and that one. In the last war there was babies being born at all the wrong times. The men used to come home and they wouldn’t say nothing about it. Just bleedin’ glad to get out of it alive most of the time. No, I don’t worry about Peggy, but I do worry about you, love. You was always a bit slow in coming forward. If there’s something you want, you’ve got to take it, o’ss you’ll end up with nothing, and you know what they say?’

  There were a thousand things that ‘they’ said and May was sure Granny Byron would enlighten her. She shook her head. ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no taste in nothing!’

  *

  She left her grandmother’s, wondering why the old woman wasn’t worried about Peggy, whose life seemed to be in far more turmoil than her own. Peggy hadn’t even asked May if she planned to tell her secret to George or their parents, but perhaps her sister knew that May would do anything to keep the peace at home. She wondered why she couldn’t feel more outraged at her sister’s behaviour. But although Peggy had accused May of learning nothing from the war, that wasn’t true. May had started putting herself before her family. Wasn’t that what she’d done by joining the ATS? She should have stayed home and looked after her grieving mother, but she had wanted her own response to Jack’s death and now, on this final day’s leave, she found herself standing outside Bill’s old home, contemplating another step towards her own destiny.

  Grange House was only a short walk from Granny Byron’s in Dix’s Place, and one of the first of the new blocks of flats built during the previous decade. May remembered the time when many of the old slum streets, where three or four families would share one house, had been demolished, and Bermondsey had become one big building site as new blocks of flats sprang up all over the borough. Most people kept their flats like pristine palaces, such was the novelty of having a kitchen and a bathroom and more than one bedroom. Even now there was a tenant outside Grange House, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the entrance to the stairwell. Every block had a rota, and it was the greatest of social sins to miss your turn at cleaning the stairs and landings. May was pretty sure Bill hadn’t lived on the ground floor, for she’d heard him talking about watching out for planes from his landing.

  ‘Hello, love, wanna get up the stairs?’ Sitting back on her haunches, the woman wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and pulled the zinc bucketful of disinfectant water out of the way. May skirted round it.

  ‘I’m looking for the Gilbies. I think they moved away. I don’t suppose you know where they went?’

  ‘Hmm, Gilbie… Gilbie. Lovely family, three boys?’

  ‘Yes, that’s them.’ Perhaps this was going to be easier than she’d expected.

  ‘No, I haven’t seen them, not for months, but I couldn’t tell you where they’ve gone, love. Could ’ave moved out to relatives. There’s lots in these flats went out of London, and ’course we’ve got all new bombed-out families coming in here now and some of ’em don’t know what a bucket and mop’s for,’ the woman said, pointing to the stairwell. ‘I despair of keeping it clean, what with all the dust and soot and gawd knows what from the bombs. Still...’ she heaved herself up, ‘you’ve got to keep up yer standards. Try on the first floor. The Gilbies had the end flat if I recollect rightly.’

  May thanked her and made her way up to the first floor. As she walked along the landing to the end flat, she ran her hand over the railing. It had a thick coating of sooty ash carried on the wind from the latest conflagration. The poor woman was fighting a losing battle. Crouching in her path was a small child banging a battered tin box with a stick. She kneeled down. ‘Is your mummy in?’ she asked.

  The little boy nodded. ‘Mum!’ he yelled and his mother darted to the front door.

  May explained why she was there, but the woman was one of the newer residents, bombed out of her house in Rotherhithe. She’d found temporary sanctuary in The Grange, though she told May they’d be moving out to live with a cousin in Surrey soon.

  ‘There’s nowhere safe, I know, but you don’t have to put yourself in the firing line unless you can help it. You look as if you have, though.’

  The woman was eyeing her uniform. ‘You could ask old Mrs Martin, at the other end of the landing, about your friends. She’s been here since the flats was built.’

  May tried the flat, but the old lady was deaf and thought she was her own granddaughter. May could get no sense from her.

  As she left the flats she passed the Red Cow on the corner. On a whim, she pushed through the side door and, before she could change her mind, slipped through the crowd of off-duty soldiers to the bar. Keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the publican, she pretended not to see the stares she’d drawn. But she couldn’t help hearing their remarks.

  ‘There’s one for you, Sid. Drop their passion killers for nothing, they will.’

  ‘Oi, oi, have a few manners, she’s in uniform!’ the landlord shouted across to the soldiers. ‘’Scuse ’em, love, they don’t come from round here.’

  May began to inwardly curse Peggy. This had been a stupid quest.

  ‘What can I get yer, love?’ he said, leaning on the bar.

  She
ordered a gin and bitter lemon, feeling she couldn’t walk into a pub without drinking something.

  ‘You’re lucky. Just got some in!’ He pointed towards the optics behind the bar, half of which were empty, but the green gin bottle was reassuringly full.

  When the publican placed her drink on the bar she asked her question.

  ‘Gilbie? Yes, I know young Bill, used to be our piano player before he got called up. I believe his family moved over St James’s Road way, but I couldn’t tell you the address. Sorry, darlin’, it’s like the whole bleedin’ world’s on the move. Like them fellers over there.’ He nodded towards the soldiers. ‘Wouldn’t know ’em from Adam.’

  May finished her drink and went out into the early evening. Just as her father had taught her, she hadn’t got her hopes up, so why was it that she felt so disappointed not to have tracked down Bill’s family? For others, bolder than herself, the little tour she’d just made might be a small thing, but a few months ago she couldn’t have done it. Perhaps it had something to do with the army’s toughening her up, but her fruitless search had convinced her that she valued Bill enough to overcome her shyness, certainly too much to let him vanish out of her life altogether. And by Peggy’s definition that meant only one thing.

  ***

  They travelled from Oswestry to Anglesey firing camp by train, first travelling north towards Chester, then changing trains to hug the north coast of Wales, till the line reached the island in the west. Army lorries were waiting to take them to the far west coast where the firing camp lay, a sprawl of brick huts and gun encampments. When they arrived, it was raining.

  ‘Bloody hell, my nan said everywhere I went it would be raining, and look at that, it’s peeing down!’

  May wiped condensation from their barrack-room window and Bee came up beside her.

  ‘Not very promising. We’ll be out on parade first thing. Christmas Tree parade it says on the board. Be lovely if it’s like this!’ Bee said, peering over her shoulder at the banks of grey cloud rolling in from the seaward side.

  ‘And we’ll spend all week getting our kit dry with that useless lump of tin they call a stove.’

  They turned away and went back to the central stove, where the full bucket of coal waited, unused.

  ‘Stupid bloody army rules. Why do we have to wait till six o’clock before we can put a bit of coal in it – be more sensible to put it on when it’s cold!’

  Summer had barely arrived, and yet this country was cold as well as damp. May looked at the clock: still half an hour to go before they could get any heat.

  ‘Well, you know what they say about this place,’ Bee told her. ‘If you’re looking across the Menai Strait and you can see the other shore, then it’s going to rain. And if you can’t see it, then it’s already raining!’

  May smiled weakly and was about to suggest breaking the rules and shoving on a surreptitious shovel of coal when the hut door opened and the sergeant entered. They all hopped back, standing at the ends of their beds as she walked the length of the hut.

  ‘Very good. Glad to see you’ve got yourselves settled in. Parade and duty rostas posted here.’ She indicated a board at the end of the hut. ‘And in case you thought you’d be getting away with it on your first night, you’re mistaken. You’re on guard duty tonight, and it’s A-team first.’

  May shot a look at Emmy in the opposite bunk and mouthed ‘just our luck!’

  ‘What’s that, Private, got any thoughts you’d like to share with us?’

  ‘No, Sergeant.’

  ‘Good, and make sure you keep them to yourself or you’ll find yourself on guard duty every night! I know you’re all anxious to get on the big guns, but don’t forget that a camp can only run when we all pull together. You’ll still be expected to do guard duty, kitchen duties and drill. But you will be excused PT in the mornings after a night on the guns.’

  That’s big of them, May thought, but kept her lips firmly pressed together.

  But the Welsh rain was still falling that night, soaking through them as she and Emmy stood on guard duty at the camp entrance. It was a penetrating fine drizzle that seeped through their overcoats. After a day’s travelling and an evening of kit cleaning, she would have welcomed just collapsing on the hard biscuits tonight. Not that she’d expected to get much sleep. She was too excited about the coming day.

  Next morning May got her first taste of the guns. They had been ordered to assemble around the gun emplacements and here they first met the men who would form the other halves of their gun teams. They were shown every shell and firing pin, even though their positions with the predictors and height finders would be twenty yards away from the guns themselves. When they finally got to practise firing it was a shock. Nothing in training had prepared May for the noise – worse than the bombs that rained on Bermondsey, worse than the guns in Southwark Park. First came the blinding flashes, lighting the sky, followed by the noise of a hundred thunderstorms rolled into one. Without any ear muffs, the clamour set her ears ringing, so that she could barely hear herself as she shouted out ‘Target!’ at the top of her lungs.

  They stood for hours on the cliff tops, buffeted by wind and rain, waiting for the moment when a small plane was sent over the site. Towing a sock, which billowed out behind it, this was a clearly visible target, nothing so difficult as the small black dashes caught in searchlight beams that would be their real targets. But as May pinned her eye to the predictor and turned dials with trembling fingers, she felt as if she were trying to catch a whale with a fish hook in the middle of a hurricane.

  They fired round after round, till May felt as though every cell in her body was vibrating to the quaking of an earth and sky set in motion by the shells. In the afternoon, they sat in a classroom, with ringing ears and tired eyes, to have their results assessed by the instructor. Mostly they’d missed the target drogue, but it turned out that was preferable to them getting so close they actually hit the tow plane and put it out of action.

  ‘A-team predictor operators, well done, you were the ones with the closest hit. If it had been a Heinkel, it wouldn’t have got back to Berlin to tell the tale! Commendation for you at parade tomorrow. Keep up the good work.’

  May blushed with pride. An ‘almost’ direct hit! And then a vision struck her: falling from the sky, whirling down to earth with his plane, a boy, a flyer, perhaps no older than Jack or Bill, falling in flames over the sea. She shook her head to rid herself of the vision. It couldn’t be helped, and the Germans had started the blasted war, hadn’t they? She would have to deal with it, the part of her that wanted to see everyone else’s side. She had always been that sort of person. No one was right, no one was wrong, people were just different, or so she’d told herself. But now she had been forced to take a side. She would just have to imagine that every plane was heading for Bermondsey, every bomb destined to drop on her house in Southwark Park Road, and it was up to her to stop it. It was the only way she would get through this.

  15

  Engaging the Enemy

  Summer 1941

  Essex was a convenient posting, certainly easier to get home from on leave than if she’d been sent to Scotland or Hull. But thick fog and troop movements, coupled with a forced stop during an air raid, delayed them and it took all night to reach Barkingside. They had been given three days’ leave before reporting to the base, which May largely spent keeping an eye on her mother and sleeping. Their orders were to assemble at Liverpool Street Station and she’d arranged to travel there with Emmy. The meeting with their battery at Liverpool Street was like a sort of homecoming. It was comforting to know they’d all be going into the unknown together. Bee was there and Ruby, but Mac would be coming down from Scotland, so it wasn’t until they arrived at the gun site in Barkingside that they were all reunited and had the chance to properly swap leave stories.

  As they drove into the camp in the back of a lorry, May pulled aside the canvas and peered across a field to the command centre, where the massive bulk
s and long snouts of the ack-ack guns circled like long-trunked elephants. But May knew, once those snouts were lifted skyward, they’d become more like fire-breathing dragons. She was relieved to see that the gun emplacements were situated a fair distance from the ‘spider’, which was army slang for the web of huts connected by duckboards to a central ablutions block, which would be their home. If there should be a direct hit on the guns one night, at least those asleep in the ‘spider’ would be spared. She tried not to think about what would happen to those manning the guns at the time.

  May was the first one to jump off the lorry and pushed open the door into their hut, which could house fourteen girls. She was greeted by the familiar soft Scottish burr.

  ‘Come in, hens, I’ve got your cocoa sitting on the stove!’

  ‘Mac!’ May rushed to embrace the girl. Although she’d known her only a few months she felt the same delight as if she’d come across her own sister. Soon they were all sitting round the stove, sipping the still warm cocoa. Mac had spent her leave on her parents’ small farm up in the west of Scotland. Of all the girls, May felt, she must find this new life the most difficult. Mac said there was nothing but sky and sea surrounding their farm.

  ‘Ohh, and the quiet, I was drinking it in, trying to get ma fill, before comin’ here to be deafened!’ she said.

  But the best leave story was from Ruby, who informed them that she’d met a feller and was determined to get him to pop the question before he went overseas the following month.

  ‘That’s if I can get “passionate leave”, of course!’ she said, to a chorus of laughter.

  There were new girls to get to know and May was conscious too of Pat, hovering awkwardly on the edges of the conversation. She turned to her and asked, ‘What about you, Pat, where did you spend your leave, at home?’

  The girl seemed surprised to be addressed, but moved closer to the group. She had changed, May thought. She’d offered no loud opinions and hadn’t tried to dominate the conversation as she once would have.