The Rainbow Years (34 page)
Authors: Rita Bradshaw
Amy continued cutting chunky slices of cake so she didn’t have to look at Nell as she said, ‘A friend of mine made it, we’ve been running a café together for some years, her café. She’s a very good cook.’
‘You’re telling me. Likely to send you the odd food parcel, is she?’ Nell added hopefully.
‘Probably,’ said Amy, laughing.
‘Then you’re me friend for life, lass. I’ve had oatmeal buns an’ carrot cookies coming out of me ears at our house. Not that me mam don’t try, bless her, but she’s took all this palaver the Ministry of Food keeps churning out about experimenting with what’s available too much to heart. We’ve had potato fingers and potato floddies and potato carrot pancakes for weeks, and her marrow surprise was a surprise all right. Guess what it was stuffed with?’
‘Potato?’ someone called out as everyone rocked with laughter.
‘Aye, it was an’ all. It was the last straw for me da. He said if she didn’t give him something with a bit of meat in it he’d give
her
a surprise, and it wouldn’t be wrapped with a pink ribbon neither.’
her
a surprise, and it wouldn’t be wrapped with a pink ribbon neither.’
Even Gertie had lost her terrified expression and was doubled up with laughter now, and the evening got merrier as the whisky and a couple of bottles of homemade blackberry wine vanished, along with most of the food. By the time Amy burrowed under the covers in her service striped pyjamas, her greatcoat and a couple of jumpers laid out on top of the thin blankets for extra warmth, she felt things weren’t too bad. Nell had told them all her sister had admitted to sobbing her heart out at lights out on her first night but there was none of that in their hut, mainly thanks to Nell, Amy thought drowsily. The plump, pretty, northern girl was very much like Winnie in personality; a card, as Pamela, the girl from the East End of London, had labelled Nell. But a very nice card. And one anyone would be glad to have in their pack.
The next morning brought hurdles that made Amy very grateful for the settling in and camaraderie of the night before. There was the undressing and washing in front of girls who had been strangers twenty-four hours ago - and the baths were housed in a delapidated shack with thin walls and a roof which allowed the icy wind free rein - and also the dreaded medical inspection. This was called the FFI or Free From Infection test, and poor Gertie turned green when she learned it was a regular part of WAAF life.
Jabs, chest X-rays, doctor’s examinations and - the most humiliating of all - checks for head lice and venereal diseases reduced some of the girls to tears. Even Nell lost her sparkle as they passed the morning in various states of undress while being shunted from pillar to post. It didn’t help that although the airmen and airwomen were treated in two different surgery rooms with their own waiting areas, every so often some lost airmen would wander into their vicinity, causing a few of the more shy girls to squeal in protest. ‘They ought to count themselves lucky,’ Nell muttered darkly to Amy. ‘My sister says on most stations men and women are treated in the same surgery. Nothing’s left to the imagination, according to Beryl.’
It took Pamela to bring a smile to frozen faces. The thin blonde girl strode out of the doctor’s office into the waiting area clad in her thick service vest and winter knickers which resembled a product of a hundred years ago, and glanced round at the sombre faces. She grinned. ‘They’re ready in there for the next poor cow,’ she said loudly, ‘but I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to hear that this particular member of the herd is as clean and healthy as ever the Air Force could wish for. Fur’s sleek and shiny, hooves nicely trimmed, teeth perfect.’The nurse who had followed her out looked askance and everybody tittered.
Amy was the next to go into the doctor’s room and she was a bundle of nerves. The moment came as she had known it would.The doctor glanced from her stomach to her face in surprise. ‘This scar,’ he said quietly. ‘How did you come by it?’
She had rehearsed what she would say and now the words came easily enough. ‘I was involved in an accident some years ago when I was eighteen,’ she said steadily. ‘As a result of the damage done, I had to have a hysterectomy.’
‘I’m sorry. That was most unfortunate.’
Most unfortunate. The worst thing that could happen to a young woman dismissed as most unfortunate. But then what else could he say? And she preferred the brisk matter-offactness to pity anyway.The enforced intimacy with her fellow WAAFs had made her conscious of the silvery white scar over the last twenty-four hours in a way she hadn’t been for years and she knew she was feeling a little raw. She had seen one or two of the girls glance her way in the bath hut and had felt like covering herself up then. But sooner or later people would notice.They didn’t have to know what she had just told the doctor, though, merely that she’d had some kind of an operation.
‘Yes, it was unfortunate but it’s in the past,’ she said, realising the doctor was expecting a reply. ‘And with what’s happening in the world now it doesn’t seem so important any more.’ That wasn’t quite true but she didn’t want to discuss it any further.
The doctor didn’t pursue the matter, finishing the examination in silence apart from the odd instruction to the nurse who was helping him. Amy found she was trembling inside when she re-entered the waiting area. Although she had prepared herself for the question she’d known would arise during the examination she had never spoken about it before and it had upset her more than she’d expected.
‘Are you all right?’ Gertie was sitting with Nell and a couple of the other girls. ‘You look a bit pale.’
‘I’m fine.’ Amy forced a lightness she didn’t feel as she added, ‘Frozen, but fine.’
The others nodded and there were mutterings about catching their death of cold, but Gertie kept her eyes on Amy for a while before turning away.
After the examinations were over, they filed into the cookhouse for a somewhat colourless meal of steamed fish roll followed by vanilla and semolina mould. Nell remarked that she couldn’t tell which was which, even after she’d tasted them. Then they were marched outside and into a large hangar for their first drill, several of the girls nearly falling over themselves on the way to get a good look at a bunch of airmen who were strolling back from one of the distant runways.
‘Eyes straight ahead.’ The sergeant who was leading them didn’t even bother to turn round, adding weight to the story that he had eyes in the back of his head. ‘You’ll be seeing them in the mess tonight no doubt.’
‘Any you fancy?’ Nell whispered in an aside to Amy and Pamela as several of the men gave mock salutes, grinning. Gertie turned beetroot red.
‘All of them.’ Pamela gave a little wriggle of appreciation. ‘Those uniforms are just so romantic, aren’t they? I mean, let’s face it. The Army and Navy can’t compare with our boys.’
Amy let the other two talk on, falling back a little so she was walking with Gertie. The last thing she wanted was to get involved with a man again, and if ever she found herself longing for a pair of strong arms to hold her tight, she only had to touch the narrow line on her stomach for sanity to be restored. Anyway, who would want her now for anything more than a brief fling? And she couldn’t envisage fooling around like lots of women her age did. Her marriage and the death of her child had seen to that. All the tears and anger and depression from that time had changed her irrevocably. If the war hadn’t come along she would have continued to help Winnie build up the business and probably have accepted the partnership Winnie had kept trying to press on her. They’d had plans to expand and buy the building next door, but the war had put everything on hold.
The drill wasn’t exactly a success. Everyone kept sailing off in different directions for one thing, causing the sergeant such frustration he threatened them with a ten-mile route march the next day if they didn’t try harder.
‘He’s a bully,’ Amy whispered to Gertie who had tears streaming down her face after being singled out twice in a row. ‘If he stopped roaring and barking so much we’d understand him better.’
‘Don’t cry,’ Nell added on Gertie’s other side. ‘Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing he’s got to you.’
Amy exchanged a glance with Nell over Gertie’s head. The last twenty-four hours had only confirmed her belief that Gertie was younger than she had let on.
Eventually they were allowed to slink back indoors, utterly frozen and starving hungry in spite of the stodgy food at lunchtime. There they learned that the sergeant - out of the goodness of his heart, as Pamela remarked bitterly - had arranged for them to receive buckets and brushes with which to clean the ablution blocks until dinner time.
Chapter 17
The following weeks passed in a blur of drills, lectures, kit inspections, gas-mask practices and a hundred and one other activities which were all part and parcel of WAAF life, but overall Amy’s abiding memory of this time was sore feet.That and a strong sense of togetherness and friendship. When she would have stayed alone in the hut in her free time rather than mixing with the airmen, Gertie and the others wouldn’t let her. And through their persistence she learned that many of the RAF boys had only recently left the protective shelter of home for the first time, and despite brave phrases and RAF jargon were very unsure of themselves. In fact most of them were little more than babies, she felt, and when she responded to the inevitable passes, ribaldry and invitations with a kind but firm smile and definite no, they appeared almost relieved to be let off the hook of swashbuckling bravado. The trouble was, more than one informed her gravely, they were associated with a force that had a reputation for danger, heroism and romance, and they felt they had to live up to it. But if she just wanted to be friends . . . She did, she’d inform each one gently, and then sit listening patiently as they relived the day’s flying minute by minute.
She learned that flying was their first love however much they might like the opposite sex, and that they were where they were not because they were burning to go to war but burning to fly. But to a man they were ready to sacrifice their lives if it came to it.They both humbled her and restored her faith in the male of the species.
And then suddenly the women’s passing-out parade was over and to hut twenty-three’s pride not one of their number had given up and gone home. Now came the time they had all joined up for - their first posting to a real RAF camp. Gertie would have been bereft at the thought of being torn from the company of her new friends, but in the event both she and Amy were detailed to a station in Norwich; the rest of the girls were scattered at different camps all over the south of England.
‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you, lass?’ Nell was busy stuffing her clothes and belongings into the brand new kitbag they had all been issued with, a tall, white, heavy tube of a thing which required its owner to be possessed of muscles like a wrestler’s to have any chance of carrying it when it was full.
‘Of course I will.’ Amy shoved her tin hat into the top of her own bag and pulled the rope to secure it. Pamela had already exchanged addresses, as had all the girls, but they had all privately agreed that if, in the sweepstake of postings, it was possible for any two of them to stay together, it was better one of the duo was Gertie.
Amy glanced at her young friend. Because she had been terrified she wouldn’t be ready in time for the lorries which were giving the fledgling WAAFs a lift to the train station, Gertie had been up at the crack of dawn packing. She was standing by her bed now, one hand on her kitbag which was lying on top of the covers and her gas mask slung over one shoulder. She had admitted to them all one night that she was only just seventeen, having added more than a year to her age when she volunteered. She said she had joined up because some of her friends had. Amy didn’t quite believe this. Although she had nothing concrete to go on she felt Gertie had enlisted to escape some domestic problem at home, but her friend clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
Gertie caught her eye and smiled wanly. ‘I managed to get everything in,’ she said, ‘but my jacket is going to be ever so creased.’
‘So’s mine but we’ll iron them when we get to Norwich.’ Gertie hadn’t had a clue about how to iron her uniform when she had first arrived, but everyone had taken her under their wing and now she was as capable as the rest of them, if still without a shred of confidence. ‘Right.’ Amy took hold of the rope at the top of her kitbag, slung her gas mask over her shoulder and attempted to swing the bag onto the other shoulder. It landed on the floor with a dull thud just as the sound of impatient hooting outside told them they were keeping their lifts waiting. Everyone else had problems carrying their kitbags too, even Nell who was sturdily built and was fond of telling them all she was as strong as her brothers any day. Those of them who were light and slender, like Amy and Gertie and Pamela, didn’t have a hope in heaven of ever lifting the things onto their backs.
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