Millions Like Us (27 page)

The fact was that uniform couldn’t mask the all-too-obvious signs of caste, which every girl in the land knew how to spot.
When Barbara Pym
joined the Wrens she barely needed to glance at her fifty-odd fellow-trainees gathered at the training depot in order to conclude: ‘I don’t think there are really any of our kind of people, though there are one or two pleasant ones.’ Though the Second World War exposed the classes to each other in an unprecedented way, it would take more than that to dislodge centuries of assumed superiority.

Tribal loyalties, tribal allegiances still held sway in the romantic arena too. A debutante in a munitions factory might experiment with egalitarianism by dating her proletarian work-mates, but the bottom line was that they smelled: ‘
I was used to dear
darling upright people, straight from Eton into the Grenadiers.’ Diana Barnato, who flew for the Air Transport Auxiliary, chose only to go out with fighter pilots and Guards officers – ‘you didn’t look at other regiments’.
One well-educated Wren
telegraphist was broad-minded enough to make friendships with the ‘lower deck’ and became deeply involved with a sailor. But she felt compelled to part with him on the grounds that he would never be able to provide for her or their children.

For women, the challenge would be to determine where their value lay in the new world which lay ahead. If a housemaid could work on a blood transfusion service, and a general’s daughter could scrub out a latrine, what did that mean for their respective future identities? Would the housemaid be content to return to mopping floors or would she feel empowered to seek more fulfilling activities? Would the general’s daughter recognise that her money and rank did not absolve her from menial tasks, and might she perhaps develop some fellow-feeling for the housemaid? The melting-pot would ignite change, but the revolution was still a long way off.

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The story of Christian Oldham’s life
in the Wrens in 1942 unrolled against a backdrop of lamentable war news. The RAF suffered humiliating losses when two German battle cruisers based at Brest evaded Channel defences and broke through to the North Sea. In February disaster overtook Singapore with Britain’s worst defeat of the Second World War. Eighty thousand troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese and endured the remainder of the war in deplorable misery, many of them tortured and starved. The Japanese marched on and took Rangoon. The war in the Atlantic continued to take a serious toll, while in the so-called ‘Baedeker’ raids the Luftwaffe blitzed some of Britain’s most beautiful cities: Exeter, Canterbury, Norwich, Bath, York.

No publicity attended a secret meeting held 20 miles from Berlin in a sombre lakeside mansion next to the Wannsee. Here, in January 1942, fifteen representatives of the Nazi military and government sat around a conference table and hammered out the details of what could be done with many millions of assimilated and Eastern European Jews now under German control: the fateful ‘Final Solution’.

At this time Christian Oldham, convent-educated, pretty and privileged, was starting out on an Officers’ Training Course in a spirit of breezy optimism. Christian had no career ambitions. ‘I had no idea what I thought I would do. At eighteen I was really useless and irresponsible and idiotic.’ But she had joined the Wrens full of colourful aspirations. The lovely tricorne hat and couture uniform were foremost among these, closely followed by the vague notion that, having freed a sailor to join the fleet, she would
somehow find herself surrounded by clean-cut naval officers looking for romance.

Christian served her apprenticeship with a year’s clerical work, followed by another year running a degaussing
^*
range at Tilbury. The Officers’ Training Course, based at Greenwich Palace, required her to learn ‘not only how to become an Officer but hopefully a “lady” too.’ Here the trainees were solemnly instructed about the history, dignity and traditions of the Royal Navy, while attending lectures on naval vocabulary, navigation, ciphering and plotting. Wrens did not go to sea, nor were they offered the sailors’ rum ration; however they dined in the vast and lofty Painted Hall, and they were encouraged to sing sea-shanties to get in the mood. At dinner the napkins were of linen, the coffee was hot, and they were waited on by faithful Wren stewards, whose job it was to serve, lay tables, valet and scrub floors for the officers – no worries here about telling ladies apart from the lower orders. In due course Christian qualified as a plotting officer and was ordered to report to Plymouth. At last she had her tricorne hat, and with it perched jauntily on her curls ‘it was headfirst into the unknown, and fingers crossed’.

At Plymouth, Christian was immediately given important duties. She was placed in charge of one of four watches responsible for receiving information from the operators at coastal radar stations, who regularly reported the position of any shipping traffic that appeared on their screens. Working shifts of fifteen hours in the Operations Room, Christian learned fast, as she and her four Wren ratings then plotted the movements in real time on to a map, so that it could be seen and assessed at any given moment by the officer of the day, by captains and visiting admirals. At the age of twenty-two she now had the huge responsibility of recreating a moving panorama of the entire sea war as it unfolded in the North Atlantic, and there was profound satisfaction in the realisation that she was up to it. ‘I loved this job of keeping the picture bang up to date.’ After two days of this they had forty-eight hours off.

Constant contact with Naval and Coastal Command extended into the girls’ off-duty time, and Plymouth life for the Wrens encompassed a round of parties, often on board ship. Glamorous officers now became a reality. Christian – as befitted an admiral’s daughter – socialised with the
crème de la crème
of the naval hierarchy. The naval elite were the submarine crews, and the thought that many of her dancing partners were heroes who came from that ‘unique and brave breed of man’ brought a glow to her cheeks. Often, she and her friends would be asked to a party on a submarine. They had drinks on board in evening dress – ‘space was at a premium and its tiny ward room was very cosy’ – before repairing to the Moreland Links Hotel, ‘where we danced the night away’. Love blossomed with Captain Lennox Napier, one of the more glamorous submariners, who already had a distinguished war record and had been decorated for his exploits minelaying and attacking German transports in the Mediterranean. But Lennox wouldn’t commit. ‘He would never have got engaged till after the war. He was a frightfully serious and successful sailor – sinking everything in the Med. An engagement would have been distracting for him – impossible to cope with.’ They corresponded, and Christian tried to put marriage prospects with him out of her mind.

Towards the end of 1942 Christian was transferred to Belfast. Here the living was easy. All kinds of unobtainable goodies – or ‘rabbits’ as they were known – reached them from over the border. Off-duty, they took the train to neutral Dublin, ate themselves silly on steak and cream, and blew their pay packets on clothes and Christmas presents, which then had to be ingeniously smuggled back to Belfast. The work was similar. From her Operations Room in Belfast Castle she accurately tracked the merchant ships as they came up the Irish Sea from Liverpool and Glasgow, chivvied out to sea by their escort of corvettes like so many sheep herded by a collie dog. Early in 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic was reaching its low point. Shipping was protected by the RAF on one side of the ocean, and by the Royal Canadian Air Force on the other, but there was little that could be done to guard against the relentless U-boat wolf-packs lying in wait in the ‘Black Hole’ in between. The Wrens in Belfast Castle learned to dread the signal which alerted them to a U-boat sighting or attack.

In April 1943 the fleet destroyer HMS
Oribi
arrived in Belfast. The ship had suffered storm damage, and the crew – including Lieutenant John Lamb, its dashing first lieutenant – would be grounded for a fortnight while it was patched up at Harland & Wolfe’s shipyard. No sooner had the
Oribi
docked than an invitation arrived at the Castle for a contingent of Wrens to gather in the ward room ‘just as soon as the sun was over the yardarm’. Christian volunteered to join the party.

Well, John Lamb and I went out every night for ten days, and then we got engaged. One did everything very quickly – otherwise they’d simply be gone! There was a sort of stampede, a feeling that getting married was the only answer! We all got married in our twenties, and if you didn’t you were on the shelf. As for Lennox, well, out of sight is out of mind I suppose … I was really rather hopeless.

I never really thought about a career as such. In any case, it didn’t occur to me that anything one did during the war would have the slightest use after the war. Really, you felt safer if you’d snatched a man. Then at least you felt ‘I’ve got some sort of future’.

Congratulations were offered to the engaged pair, and celebrations ensued. Got up in dinner jackets and evening dress, the Officers and Wrens quaffed copious cocktails, followed by steak and kidney pudding and plum duff, washed down with Dry Martinis and ending with port. Loyal toasts were drunk, before the company, extremely well-watered by now, launched into ‘high jinks’: wardroom polo, with a leftover potato as the ball; torpedoes – in which a midshipman was ‘fired’ tummy-down the length of the polished table at the target, which was the settee beyond; and obstacle races – making a circuit of the room on top of the furniture, without touching the deck. And more drinks all round.

War, and the Wrens, gave Christian Oldham what she sought, and what her upbringing had entitled her to: fun, posh clothes, servants, romance and silly sports; but they also expanded her capacities, tested her potential to its limits. Proficient, responsible and professional though she now was, Christian had grown up with a set of assumptions about woman’s place in the world, assumptions which her wartime experiences were doing little to dislodge. Convinced that Lennox Napier wouldn’t commit to an engagement, and that
her spell with the Wrens could have no practical application in a peacetime future, she seized on the best offer of marriage that came her way. Christian wasn’t one to, as it were, rock the boat. She continued to play a part in the jigsaw puzzle of war; but her talent for organisation, her brains and experience were stretched at that time in a way they never would be again.

Women Must Weep

The Wrens may have been the most fashionable of the women’s services, but if you were looking for love nothing approached the WAAFs for ardent desires and heightened passions.
Eighteen-year-old Pip Beck
joined up with stars in her eyes, her patriotic motives mingling with romantic daydreams of the dashing aircrew she was likely to meet in the course of her new work. In August 1941 Pip left her home, her hairdressing job and her ARP duties in Buckingham behind, and with them her teenage dalliances. Norman, her sweet, serious Territorial boyfriend, had gone to India; he had asked her not to wait. Fancy-free, Pip arrived to take up her duties as a trainee Radio/Telephone Operator at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, the bomber base of 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron, so called after the large number of Rhodesian volunteers serving with it. As the van drew up the mere sight of a group of young sergeants set her pulse racing:

I knew from the brevets they wore that these were aircrew – the fabulous beings that I admired and hero-worshipped.

For a moment my heart beat a little faster and my imagination took wings – they were young gods and were all about me, though I was earth-bound!

Tired after the long journey from her recruit base, Pip headed for the ‘Waafery’ hut and assembled her bed: like all service bedding it was made up of a stack of thin ‘biscuits’ that passed for a mattress, in sections, one on top of the other. Settling in, she was greeted by one of her fellow WAAFs: ‘Hello – you just arrived? I’ve been here for a fortnight. I’m a parachute packer – what are you?’ Their exchange was drowned out by a roar of engines. ‘Ops tonight,’ explained the parachute packer. ‘This is a bomber station you know. You’ll have a
good time here. You can have a different boyfriend every night if you want to – it’s wizzo!’

Pip’s job as an R/T operator was to work two shifts totalling twelve hours each day in the watch office, with every third day off. Seated in front of a microphone and with earphones clamped to her head, she would be talking down the crews as they returned from raids. She learned to transmit and to log her R/T communications, to signal Morse code and to memorise the accepted ciphers: H-Harry, W-William, ‘Niner’ for nine to distinguish it from five, and so on. Soon the cramped watch office became her world and, though respect from aircrew could be grudging, the ‘few’ to whom our nation owed so much recognised that they themselves owed a debt to young women like Pip whose efforts kept them airborne. ‘It was agreed that we applied ourselves to our job, and were really not too bad – it was even admitted that we brightened the place up – and of course, we made tea.’

Early in her time at Waddington, Pip got the chance – all too rare for girls working on the ground – to ‘gain experience of their job from the air’. Today everyone flies, and it may be hard to imagine the intensity of excitement that Pip felt at her first time in an aircraft. Having signed the ‘Blood Book’ (exempting the RAF from any responsibility for killing her if the flight crashed), she was equipped with a parachute and climbed on board the Oxford with the squadron leader and his pupil-pilot. A short taxi down the runway, and they were aloft. Pip was entranced as the plane rose and the familiar airbase diminished into its surrounding fields, while the land below began to resemble a map. Up and up they flew through layers of clouds, until they entered the bright enchanted world of sunshine that lay above the cumulus. Nothing could ever compare with such heady excitement, and as Pip drank in the impressions she felt drugged with their sublimity. Before they descended, however, the squadron leader motioned Pip to change places with his pupil and put on the helmet. ‘ “Now – you are going to fly the aircraft!” I was told.’ Palpitating, she took the stick and, fearfully, effortfully, levelled out their descent as he instructed. Then, using the rudder-bar, she tried a banking manoeuvre, before once more straightening up. ‘ “Ask permission to land.” ’ Well, that she knew how to do. The squadron leader took over again, and soon they were approaching the runway.