Margery’s Story: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces

Now Margery was really confused. ‘I don’t understand,’ she told him. ‘How can you issue something you haven’t got?’

The man fidgeted in his chair, before mumbling, ‘Well … you know … it doesn’t really matter.’

His reply only made Margery feel more worried. Clearly something had gone badly wrong in Equipment Accounts. If they were audited, she realised, they could all find themselves in hot water. ‘Would you like me to go over to the stores and try to sort it out?’ Margery suggested helpfully.

But her boss was less than appreciative of the offer. ‘Suit yourself’ was all he said.

The girls in the stores were not much more interested in Margery’s problem than the flight sergeant had been, but after a bit of pleading, she persuaded them to consult their own records. It didn’t take long for her to work out where the irregular entries were coming from – if someone took a form down to the equipment store and hadn’t bothered to look up the vocab number, they would write ‘NIV’ in its place. The ‘OI’ was a way of covering their backs – as without the correct number, stock in the stores would no longer match up with what was written in the ledgers.

Back in the office, Margery didn’t say anything, but she was secretly horrified at the state of the department’s paperwork. From then on she made it her mission to put everything in order, beavering away at the ledgers and heading down to the stores every time she found an ‘NIV’, and begging the girls there to look it up for her.

The warrant officer who presided over the stores, however, was none too happy with someone from Accounts coming in and asking inconvenient questions. Around Titchfield, he was known as a bit of a bully, who delighted in tormenting new recruits, especially female ones. One day, when he saw Margery come into his department for the umpteenth time that week, he bellowed across the room, ‘Not you again, Pott!’

After her days working at the baker’s, under the reign of the terrifying Miss Pratt, Margery was used to putting up with rough treatment from those in authority. But right now her heart swelled against it. After all, she was the one striving to put the books in order, despite the lackadaisical attitude of her colleagues. To bawl her out publicly just for making a bit of an effort seemed so unfair.

‘Who does that man think he is?’ Margery muttered to a girl standing next to her.

The words had slipped out before she could stop herself, but she realised, to her horror, that the warrant officer had heard them. ‘What was that?’ he demanded, striding over and fixing her with an angry stare.

Margery gulped – but there was no going back now. ‘I said, “Who does that man think he is?”’ she replied, before adding, ‘Sir.’

She could hardly believe that she had done it. Ordinarily, Margery wouldn’t say boo to a goose – she was the last person to stand up to authority.

Suddenly the implications of her uncharacteristic outburst began to dawn on her. She was for it now, she felt certain – her career in the WAAF was about to come to an ignominious end with a court-martial for insubordination.

But to Margery’s surprise, instead of yelling at her, the warrant officer burst out laughing, evidently tickled pink at her unexpected forthrightness and honesty. ‘I like it when one of the girls shows a bit of gumption,’ he told her, once he had caught his breath. ‘It doesn’t happen to me all that often.’

Margery was stunned at the sudden change in the man’s attitude. But she was beginning to feel a little more confident now, so she asked him boldly, ‘Why do you talk to people like that?’

The man thought for a moment, and then gave a rueful smile. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘I suppose I like seeing them quake.’ Then he turned around, still laughing, and went on his way.

After that, Margery never had any trouble from the warrant officer again. When she saw him in the stores he was always courteous, and sometimes even downright friendly. She certainly hadn’t gone down there looking to assert herself, but in doing so she had learned a valuable lesson: sometimes, if you stood up for yourself, people respected you more.

While Equipment Accounts was not exactly a beacon of high standards, everywhere else around RAF Titchfield things were run very much by the book. Unlike Penarth, where Margery had been free to wander along the sea front for hours at a time, here she was truly subjected to the rigours of Air Force discipline. There were regular parades, drills and route marches, and every day the camp flag was raised and lowered in military style.

The airwomen’s days began at 7 a.m., when a corporal yelled through the door of their hut, letting them know that it was time for physical training. After they had run around the camp a few times in just their shorts and shirt tops, beds had to be stripped and stacked to exacting specifications. Only then were the girls lined up in flights and marched off to breakfast.

Once they’d eaten, the half-dozen young women in Equipment Accounts would form another flight to march over to the office, even though it was just the other side of the parade ground. The rigorous military discipline continued throughout the day – the lax atmosphere within the office itself excepted – until the dormitory lights were switched out by the duty corporal at 10.30 p.m. sharp.

As the months rolled by and the weather turned colder, nights spent in the wooden dorm huts, where one window was always left open, whatever the weather, grew increasingly miserable. And it wasn’t much warmer in Equipment Accounts either. When the flight sergeant saw the girls shivering at their desks, his solution was to order them to take their tunics off, roll up their sleeves and run around the camp. The girls certainly returned warmed up – but also dripping with sweat, which they struggled to keep from blotting their ledgers.

The huts were not only cold but dark as well, and the dwindling daylight hours made it increasingly hard for the girls to read the paperwork in front of them. They complained bitterly to each other and encouraged Margery, who as ‘the girl from the course’ carried a certain dubious authority, to mention the problem to a WAAF officer on their behalf. But to Margery’s dismay, when the unimpressed officer turned up at the hut and demanded to know if anyone else felt the same way as she did, suddenly the cat seemed to have got her colleagues’ tongues. Margery was carted off in an ambulance to get her eyes tested at the nearest hospital, returning with a very ugly pair of steel spectacles. They were distance glasses, so they made no difference to her work in the dimly lit office, but the sight of her wearing them gave the rest of the girls a good laugh.

One thing that brightened Margery’s days at Titchfield was the arrival of the latest letter from James Preston, the Army cook from Lancashire who she had met during her training in Penarth. He had recently been posted to a camp on the Isle of Dogs in London, and for Margery his long, artfully written letters brought every detail of his experiences there to life. Tearing open the latest missive to find page upon page of his beautiful handwriting always brought a smile to her face.

It was James who had helped allay Margery’s loneliness during her time in Wales, but at Titchfield she made her first proper friend in the WAAF – a Geordie woman in her mid-thirties called May Strong, who more than lived up to her name. May was the corporal in charge of Margery’s dorm hut, and slept in a private room at one end of it. Before the war, she had worked as an office manager at a paint factory in Haltwhistle, a coal-mining town not far from Newcastle. She had a natural self-assurance and authority, combined with a talent for leadership, and all the girls in the hut looked up to her – none of them more so than Margery.

One evening, when one of Margery’s hut-mates was suffering with a bad cold, May announced that she knew just what to do. ‘A tot of whisky would cure this,’ she proclaimed. Then turning to Margery, she said, ‘Come on, we can get some at the Joseph Paxton.’

It wasn’t exactly an order, but somehow Margery didn’t feel she could say no, so she grabbed an empty bottle and accompanied May to the pub in the nearby town of Locks Heath.