The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces

A brand new air-raid shelter had been built just across the road from the maltster’s house, but Mr Pott’s health just wasn’t up to the cold, wet conditions there, so when the sirens sounded the whole family remained at home, hoping for the best. Margery was secretly glad – she was more frightened of going out in the dark than she was of the bombs, and the thought of being trapped in a crowded public shelter made her shudder.

The war brought with it new job prospects as well, and soon Margery’s friend Daisy had begun working at a munitions factory in Gosport, filling shell cases. But the idea of factory work filled Margery with dread. She’d had a horror of machines since her childhood, when she and Peggy had ridden the Gosport ferry and been taken below deck to view the engine room. Margery’s sister had been thrilled at the sight of the enormous machines, but she had found the whole experience terrifying.

Daisy seemed pleased with her new factory job and the relatively high wages it offered. But, after a few weeks, Margery noticed that her friend’s blonde ringlets had acquired a strange ginger tinge, and soon her usually pretty face had turned yellow. A few days later she heard from Daisy’s mother that she had been off work sick, and when she went to visit she was shocked by the change in her. Daisy’s entire body had gone a deep shade of orange, and now even the whites of her eyes were coloured with it. ‘We reckon it’s the TNT from the factory,’ her mother told Margery, wringing her apron at Daisy’s bedside.

Over the coming weeks Daisy slowly clawed her way back to health, but her illness only made Margery more terrified than ever at the thought of working in a factory. Yet to her dismay there was talk of young women being conscripted – not only into the armed forces but into munitions factories like the one in Gosport as well. In April 1941 the Registration for Employment Order was passed, requiring Margery, like all other young, single women, to register with the Ministry of Labour. Since she was now 20, she was in the catchment age for the impending call-up.

Margery was frantic. Throughout her young life, joining the military could not have been further from her mind – yet if she didn’t volunteer now, the choice of whether to join the services or be put into a factory would be taken out of her hands. There was nothing for it: she would have to enlist.

She was relieved to discover that she was not alone – another girl at the draper’s called Winnie was facing the same dilemma. But which force should they choose – Army, Navy or Air Force?

‘The WAAF uniform’s a nice colour,’ remarked one of their colleagues over lunch one day, pointing to a recruitment ad in the magazine she was reading. The illustration showed Air Force girls in smart blue uniforms, dancing with dashing pilots. Before long, Winnie and Margery had hatched a plan to get the bus to Portsmouth together that weekend and volunteer for the WAAF.

At the recruiting office Margery’s brief interview seemed to go well, and a WAAF sergeant said they would be pleased to take her, thanks to her experience in accounts. ‘You’ll be hearing from us soon,’ she assured her.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before both Margery and Winnie awoke to find a brown envelope on their doormat. Inside was a letter ordering the girls to report to Portsmouth the next day at 7 a.m. From there, they would be taken to London for a medical exam.

Now Margery was gripped by a new fear – what if she failed the medical? She remembered with a jolt a broken tooth that she had been meaning to get fixed. Could that be enough to keep her out of the WAAF? She wasn’t sure, but she had no intention of taking the risk. Something had to be done – and quickly.

Before long, Margery was sat in front of the local dentist, begging him to remove the offending tooth. The man was a little put out at being asked to perform such a last-minute operation, but he yanked and pulled with his pliers until finally it was extracted.

That night, as she tried to pack her tiny overnight bag while cradling her painful jaw, Margery received some unsettling news. Winnie’s aunt had died unexpectedly, and since she was already motherless and the only girl in the family, her father had decided that he needed her at home to run the house. Winnie wouldn’t be coming with her to London after all – instead Margery would be facing the Air Force alone.

It was a little after 5 a.m. the following morning when Margery caught the bus to Portsmouth. She was wearing her best suit – a pale blue jacket with matching skirt and blouse, which she hoped would make a good impression on the WAAF. As the vehicle trundled along the sleepy country lanes, she wondered where she might ultimately end up. She had never been away from home before – or really, gone anywhere at all, other than a few trips to Dover and Deal to see her relatives. Yet in the Air Force she would have no say in where she was stationed, and she might be sent far, far away from the familiar world of North Wallington.

On the train from Portsmouth to London, Margery sat with a small group of equally nervous-looking local girls, some a little older than herself and some younger. As they rushed towards the capital, a WAAF sergeant told the girls that if they passed the day’s medical exam they would be sent for three weeks’ basic training in Gloucester, but if they failed they would be going straight home again. Margery was wracked with nerves at the thought of flunking the medical, and more thankful than ever that she had got rid of her broken tooth.

At the imposing Victory House in Piccadilly, Margery’s cohort was swept into a sea of new recruits being processed that day. The building was a hive of activity, with line after line of women queueing to see various doctors, each of whom specialised in a different part of the human anatomy. First Margery joined a queue of girls waiting to have their hearts and lungs tested – as they reached the front, they were asked to breathe in and out while a man with glasses listened intently for any rattles or murmurs. Margery was worried that her racing heart would let her down, but to her relief she passed and was moved on to the next line. There, she queued for more than an hour before her limbs were stretched and examined and her knees and elbows knocked with a little hammer to test her reflexes. Then there were the eye doctors, ear doctors, foot doctors – every kind of doctor imaginable – and all of them intent on weeding out substandard recruits. Yet to Margery’s continual surprise and relief, time after time she was passed as fit and healthy.

Whenever she joined a new queue, Margery was sure that the doctor at the front would ask to inspect her teeth, but hour after hour went by and no one did. Finally, after a long and weary day with just a cup of tea and a sandwich to sustain them, she and the other girls from Portsmouth were all passed as fit and told they would be boarding the train to Gloucester.

Margery was overwhelmed with relief that she had passed her medical. But on her way from Victory House to Paddington Station, suddenly a new thought dawned on her – she had undergone the painful dental work for nothing.

It was getting on for midnight by the time the girls finally arrived at No. 2 WAAF Depot at Innsworth, near Gloucester, the central training facility for new recruits. Having opened only a few months before, the base now managed an intake of almost 3,000 girls a week, and ran like a well-oiled machine.

After the hours of queueing for medical examinations, followed by a lengthy journey, the girls were beginning to feel desperate for a hot dinner and a warm bed, but first there was more processing to be done. They were required to submit to the indignities of the FFI inspection and then to gather their kit from the stores, before making up the beds in their dormitory huts, alternately top to toe to limit the chances of infection. By the time they were finally taken to the mess, Margery was ravenous, but to her disappointment the long-awaited dinner consisted of just a spoonful of watery minced beef and lumpy mashed potato.

As the girls were finishing up their food, one of the kitchen hands came round with a large bucket and Margery saw that she was ladling something from it into their enamel mugs. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked her neighbour.

‘Tea,’ the other girl replied with a smile.

Margery was horrified. After all the unfamiliar, exhausting experiences of the day, the thought of having what should have been a reassuring, homely cuppa doled out from a bucket somehow felt like the last straw.

Finally, the tired recruits were led back to their wooden huts for the night, and collapsed gratefully onto their hard iron beds. But now Margery, like many of the other girls, found that the sleep she had longed for was eluding her. The three square ‘biscuits’ that she had been given for a mattress had a tendency to separate every time she rolled over, and the hard bolster on which her head rested creaked under even the slightest movement. It was a miserable end to a difficult day, and Margery felt more wretched than ever. She thought back to that glossy picture she had seen in her colleague’s magazine, which now seemed very far from the reality of life in the WAAF. She had volunteered out of fear, without really thinking about what she was letting herself in for. Now she began to wonder: What on earth had she done?

That night, Margery wasn’t the only one whose mind was falling prey to such dark thoughts. After the constant bustle of a busy day, now, in the dark and quiet, the girls were suddenly hit by the reality of the decision they had made. She could hear a little sniffle coming from a few beds away, and before long it had turned into stifled sobbing.

Margery tiptoed out of bed and hurried over to her distressed neighbour, who she found weeping into her blanket. The two girls clung to each other in the dark, but before long the noise of crying had set off a third new recruit, and she too came over to sit with them, weeping helplessly. After a while everyone else began sitting up in bed too, and the tears flowed freely all around the hut as the girls shared their fears and feelings of homesickness.

‘Well, at least we’re all going to suffer together!’ said one of them, doing her best to laugh. Suddenly, there were smiles in the hut as well as tears, and the girls began to feel calmer, buoyed by their new-found camaraderie. Eventually, even the hard bolsters and irritating biscuits could no longer stop them from slipping into a much-needed sleep.

But for poor Margery a good night’s rest was not on the cards. A few hours later, she awoke to the taste of blood. Her gum was throbbing where the tooth had been needlessly yanked out the previous day, and when she put her hand up to her mouth it came back sticky and red.

Alarmed, Margery ran over to knock for the sergeant who was sleeping in a private room at the end of the hut, and spluttered an explanation of what had happened. The woman rushed with her across the camp to the sick bay, but on their way they were stopped by a man on guard duty. ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ he demanded, flashing a torch in their direction. As soon as he saw Margery, his jaw dropped in horror, and he stiffened as if he was about to raise the alarm.

‘It’s all right, there hasn’t been an accident,’ the sergeant informed him. ‘She just has a problem with her tooth.’

The guard nodded, relieved, and the two women hurried on.

In the sick-bay, a night-time attendant was on duty. In her time, she must have dealt with all manner of gruesome medical problems, but in the middle of the night, half asleep, she was unprepared for the grisly sight which staggered in. For the last few hours, Margery had been tossing and turning in her uncomfortable bed, and the blood which had seeped out of her mouth was now smeared all over her face. Her hair was thick with the stuff too, and a fresh, dark trickle was oozing down her chin. The poor medic took one look at her and passed out.

Luckily the sergeant had quick reflexes, even in the early hours of the morning. She caught the girl before she hit the floor, narrowly preventing her from becoming the second casualty of Margery’s rushed dental work.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the embarrassed attendant stammered, when she came round a few seconds later.

‘Don’t worry,’ the sergeant told her. ‘It’s her fault for looking so gory.’

Once the sick-bay attendant had recovered a little and drunk a glass of water, she began plugging up the bleeding hole in Margery’s mouth. But after such a mortifying start to her career in the WAAF, Margery only wished there were a hole big enough to swallow her up entirely.

Throughout their training at Innsworth, the new recruits were kept so busy that there was barely time for homesickness, and Margery found that the time flew by faster than she had expected. From the moment each day began, with reveille at 6.30 a.m., to the time they collapsed onto their little iron beds at 10.30 p.m., the girls were constantly chivvied around by sergeants and corporals. Everywhere they went they were marched in groups known as ‘flights’, whether that was to meals, physical training, gas and fire drills, sports practice, injections, lectures on the history of the RAF, classes in first aid and hygiene, or drill practice. But for those who found the routine gruelling there was no prospect of running home to mother – new regulations had recently been passed making the WAAF and the ATS officially part of the armed forces, meaning that absentee recruits could now be charged with desertion.

Before the girls knew it, their three weeks of training were up, and Margery and her hut-mates were separated as they went off to master their various trades. A number of them groaned as they learned that they were destined to be cooks and orderlies, enduring some of the longest working hours in the WAAF. Others heard they would be joining a whole host of different trades, working as admin clerks, teleprinter operators, nursing orderlies, mechanical transport drivers, parachute packers, balloon repairers, dental hygienists, wireless telegraphy slip readers, film projectionists and armament assistants.

As the war progressed, technical trades were beginning to open up to women too, as shortages in manpower compelled the RAF to experiment with a larger female workforce – among the new roles on offer were those of instrument repairers, spark-plug testers and charging-board operators, and in time women would be repairing planes and servicing radar equipment too. Although WAAFs were never actually allowed to serve as aircrew, a small number were lucky enough to receive a transfer to the Air Transport Auxiliary, where more than 100 ‘Attagirls’ got the chance to pilot repaired Spitfires and Hurricanes from factories and maintenance units to airfields around Britain.

Thanks to her experience in bookkeeping, Margery was assigned to Pay Accounts. There was scarcely time to say goodbye to the girls from her hut before she and around 60 other young women were marched off and put on trains headed for Wales, where they were to begin their intensive training at an accountancy school in a little seaside town called Penarth.

Although most of the girls in Penarth were billeted together in hostels, Margery found herself staying all on her own, in the house of a middle-aged widow called Mrs Poole. The woman might have needed the money that the WAAF paid her for housing and feeding its overspill, but the arrangement was clearly less than ideal as far as she was concerned. ‘I hope you’re not going to be like the last lot,’ she remarked when the lorry dropped Margery at her doorstep. ‘Out till all hours, then loafing around in the daytime when they were supposed to be at their classes. I had my fill of them, I did.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Margery assured her, ‘I wouldn’t do anything like that.’ Since childhood, she had always been terrified of getting in trouble – her sister Peggy had teased her for being a ‘Goody Two-Shoes’.

Mrs Poole proceeded to tell Margery about the numerous rules of the house – how often she was permitted to use the tin bath and with how many inches of water, what time she was expected to be in by at night and when she was required to stay out. Although the landlady would feed Margery breakfast and dinner every day, between those two mealtimes she was barred from the house altogether.

The last rule proved a tough one for Margery, and after her course finished in the afternoon she often found herself at a loose end, roaming the seafront alone, whatever the weather, until dinnertime came around and she was allowed to return home for some of Mrs Poole’s potato cakes or rabbit stew.

Margery had arrived in Penarth expecting to train for pay accounts, but she soon found herself assigned to equipment accounts instead, along with about 60 other girls. It didn’t take long for her to learn the reason why – apparently the equipment accounts course was incredibly tough, and a large number of recruits who had recently attempted it had flunked out. The WAAF had decided to add an extra week of lessons for their replacements, in an attempt to improve the pitiful pass rate. But if Margery and her colleagues still failed to make the grade, they would be remustered and might end up in the kitchens or cleaning out the latrines after all.

Margery soon discovered for herself why the course was considered so difficult – it required a seemingly impossible feat of memory. There was a different form for every conceivable eventuality involving the issue of items in the Air Force, and the girls were expected to learn the official number of each of them. Form 674 was used to request a new item, but if the item in question was replacing an old and worn out one then a 673 was required instead. A 500 was needed for anything purchased from a private contractor, in which case a 531 would be required to issue the invoice, with the item ultimately paid for on a 600. The list of numbers seemed to be endless, and as well as memorising them all, the girls also had to learn how many copies of each form were required, and where each copy had to be sent. On top of that, every nut, bolt and screw, every piece of clothing, every item of food that went through the Air Force stores, had its own number as well, and these too had to be committed to memory.

Poor Margery had never been particularly good at rote learning, and her head was soon swimming. She worked diligently as ever, but the instructor was less than inspiring, simply reading out the information in a monotonous voice while the girls scribbled away frantically in their notebooks. After a few weeks, a sergeant was sent to check up on the class, and was horrified at their lack of progress. The instructor was promptly removed and a new one put in his place, but the sudden change didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

At least Margery’s days of living at Mrs Poole’s alone were over. One day she returned from her course to find a new arrival who had been billeted on the widow as well. She was a large girl with terrible bucked teeth, which she revealed in their full splendour as she greeted Margery with a big grin. ‘Oh, jolly good show,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘I’m Oriole. Daddy named me after his ship.’

Margery had never felt like a pretty girl herself, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for poor Oriole. Not only had she been lumbered with the name of a seafaring vessel, but she had a face that would struggle to launch a gravy boat, let alone a thousand ships.

With her clipped vowels and naval connections, Oriole seemed like the kind of girl who should have been in the WNRS rather than the WAAF. But Margery appreciated having someone to pass the time with before she was allowed to return to Mrs Poole’s for her evening meal. More than 150 miles away from her home in North Wallington, and with no older sister to look out for her, she had begun to feel terribly lonely.

It was Oriole who first introduced Margery to the delights of the local NAAFI – the Navy, Army and Air Force Institute. The NAAFI canteens and shops were becoming an increasingly familiar sight across Britain, offering forces personnel of the lower ranks a place to get cheap food and a hot drink. At last Margery had a place to go for a nice cup of tea once her classes finished, rather than traipsing along the seafront in the rain.