Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary

17 January 1940

Days go on and on and nothing important happens in them and then on a day like this it positively crams itself with incredible happenings. Little things first, equipment starts to arrive, first batches of uniforms after we have waited so long with promises of enough and coats for all by Friday, because WAAFs have frozen these last few days in the snow.

The second excitement was my having a preliminary interview with a view to a code and cipher commission, which I don't think I'll be given because they consider me too young.

I am sorry the description of the day's doings had been such an anticlimax but to be honest with you it's now many days later, I having been interrupted in the writing of it by a caller and then forgetting it and life being what it is the excitement is now ended.

Anyway it's now 21 January. I have been out every evening since last Tuesday and consequently feel somewhat jaded. We (Joyce and I) have drawn up the beds and are leaning against them almost in a super colossal fire. We have borrowed (with permission) the wireless from Ray and Peggy. The food is on the washstand and we are waiting for two visitors to call on us. I have to clean my buttons, which is rather a bore. I am very dirty because it's too cold to wash but I don't care. I haven't made my bed for days because I have discovered that if I crawl out carefully it will still do. In short, the layers of ladylike-hood are peeling off pretty speedily and doubtless soon I shall smell. Oh well, what the hell.

29 January 1940

What a weekend! It began on Friday when Eric was taking me to the Little Review with a sore throat and that aching prelude to flu plus a depression caused by Joyce's Monday departure to a very good Air Ministry job, fortunately quite near Hendon. Feeling frightful and having to meet Eric, I stumbled into a chemist from the rain and blackout and demanded that he gave me something to pep me up for the night. Dubiously and unwillingly he gave me a bright brown scalding liquid like fifteen fiery cocktails combined (I do love alliteration), which not only put me on top form for the whole evening but has kept me there ever since. I enjoyed myself very much, we ate and danced and laughed loudly at the Little Review, which was slick and modern, clever and Oh! The genius of Hermione Baddeley as an ancient prima suprima, colisima ballerina, or the most Novelloist of Novello gipsy heroines! Afterwards we had a taxi back to Waterloo in which he was so good that I am afraid he may be wanting to be serious and he saw me off to Claygate asking if I's see the Gate Review with him on his next leave. He's a very nice boy, I don't want him to be hurt, but I've no feeling about him at all.

On Saturday evening I met Joyce in town and we went over with some friends of hers to a dance at her old home in Blackheath. It was quite good fun but I would have enjoyed it more had my voice not been so faint but speaking seemed too great an effort to bother over much.

I was supposed to return to Hendon last night but owing to the snow there weren't any trains. I had hell's delight getting back here (Claygate) on Sunday morning as every electric train had gently died on the nation. I eventually got a steam train as far as Surbiton (passing en route a notice flaunting the words ‘And still the railways carry on’). This morning there is still no train so I am back again by the welcome home fire warming up for a second attempt after lunch starting with a cab to Surbiton.

I February 1940

I have been moved out of house number 18 to number 11 and have been put in temporary charge of it until the return of a very nice corporal friend of mine, Rene Le Mesurier. Its other inhabitants are old and staid and utterly law abiding with a conscience over helping with the housework. I am none of these, with a livid reputation for breakfast lateness. It's half past ten now, I'm on a pouffe before a very hot fire and a half-read American Ladies Home Journal.

8 February 1940

For weeks I've wantonly escaped it, tonight there was no further eluding it. I am on duty on the telephone. That unpleasantness means that you sit from five to nine in the WAAF Recreation Room, if you're like me with both feet in the fire, and when the phone rings you have to answer it and, depending on your conscience, say either ‘leave a message’ or ‘I'll see if I can find her’.

On the wireless a frightful band of men are singing over and over again the same song interspersed with remarks of dullness about keeping on key and top Bs by another man with a shaking voice. I've got to keep it on, it's my only means of knowing six o'clock. I've got cigarettes, my knitting, this diary and a magazine. I can't sincerely be martyred, especially if I did want to go out, I've got no money and owe odd WAAFs 11/6d.

Up and down Booth Road WAAFs are cleaning windows, hiding beer bottles and Dillon is reluctantly black-leading a grate. Big bugs from Air Ministry are coming tomorrow to billet inspect. My room will be the only one not with its morning face. The orderly sergeant has now arrived and is battling with the intricacies of the NAAFI finances. I've combined three good deeds tonight but I've resigned the struggle. I've helped the cooks wash up and I'm taking someone's place in the decontamination squad so that she can leave camp. I glow with a large pro-social feeling.

28 February 1940

Two weeks' interlude between this and the last entry represents a week in the WAAF sickbay with a cold and pink eye and five days in an isolation hospital with measles, separated by two delightful days of sick leave seeing both the Gate Review and Funny Side Up with Eric. I was talking while in sickbay with a girl about platonic friendship, the way you do get talking very late in the night with neither of you tired through too much bed, and she said it never worked because the very fact that you were men and women made one of you at some point, if only very briefly, have feelings for the other. That's true. Sitting beside Eric in Funny Side Up, he in his new undress uniform and I in the unaccustomed femininity of a pretty frock, this dialogue just over between us:

Joan: ‘Mind you've caught my frock.’

Eric: ‘Joan, you're getting me in quite a state.’

Joan: ‘Is that the effect the frock has on you?’

Eric: ‘The frock or you.’

I got the first feeling I had for him of sentimentality but now it's gone and I feel nothing again.

I read somewhere else that a woman who can inspire love and not even feel pity is a dangerous and unhappy character.

8 March 1940

I am becoming a most domesticated girl. The mornings see me sweeping, dusting and bed making and even cleaning the windows of my room, and most surprising, liking it. Housework, I see, is nothing like as soul destroying as typing. Lunch hour saw me in shirtsleeves and mackintosh apron standing before a sink, singing tunelessly the twiddly-pom bit of ‘Eighteenth-Century Minuet’ and faced with piles and piles and more piles of WAAF washing up. Washing up after meals now being compulsory, one of the vast growing number of unpleasantnesses that are compulsory these days. I can't say I enjoyed that but thought hard of soldiers being killed for England and me only being inconvenienced, which helped me along.

Yesterday evening I decided not to go to the station dance as I had a cold, so put on slacks, many jerseys, mittens and a scarf and went out into the back garden where I weeded and dug and generally prepared the earth for its invasion of seeds on Sunday and finished off with a truly colossal bonfire which brought all the little boys from far and wide to watch the fun. Digging there in the mildness of an early spring evening, with the faint sound of other WAAF voices on the billet the other side and a few children climbing in and out of air raid shelters, left me at peace. I had no thoughts beyond the moment; all emotion had run out of the world; it was only the pleasant day and the earth heavy under my fork and my own satisfied tiredness. All this is probably just my way of saying there's something in this gardening racket after all.

After, I came in to find Mickey roasting before my fire and we drank her soup, toasted my bread and ate my mother's marmalade. This morning I got an invitation to Barbara's wedding on 27th of this month and Our Annie, the hearty CO who has taken over from Mrs Rowley, has given me the afternoon off to go to it.

9 March 1940

This evening is Saturday. I had money and decided to go in to Hendon after tea. I walked round Woolworths, shed some several shillings and returned to Booth Road with arms containing bulbs in a pot, six packets of seeds, a face flannel, a tin of boot polish, a duster, a vase, flowers, needles and cotton, a garden trowel and a packet of soap flakes. Back in my room I've lit my fire, cleaned three pairs of shoes, washed several stockings and am preparing for a snug evening before a now burning fire mending clothes and listening to the wireless, supplemented by toast and Stork

(#litres_trial_promo) and marmalade and climaxed by a bath.

Yesterday evening Mickey and I and other deluded WAAFs went through the blackout and into the wilds of Hammersmith enduring the journey with the thought of the rollicking, witty West End show, Broadway Follies, studded with stars, to which we WAAFs had been invited free. I might say frightful, I might say terrible, awful, boring, tedious, but they only reveal the inadequacy of words. After the third hour, or so it seemed, I was convinced that I had died and was in hell, watching turn after turn in unending procession, each longer, each less funny, each more unbelievably bad than the last. During the interval, Hendon WAAFs rushed to the bar, scruffy WAAFS, obviously from West Drayton, sat still rollicking with mirth in the Stalls. We tossed back whisky and ginger beer and watched in a stupor the longer, duller, apparently unending second half. After came the journey back in the blackout made blue by our opinions of the evening.

11 March 1940

How nice it is to listen in the mornings to the BBC broadcasting physical jerks

(#litres_trial_promo) when one has no intention whatsoever of doing them. Our Annie and I have practically no point of common interest. She's a large strapping woman with appalling legs and heaps of hearty laughter. Her spiritual home is in a damp tent with a smoking campfire and a brood of nasty little Girl Guides. In fact, I believe between being a general's daughter she was once a Girl Guide captain.

I went with Mickey and Frances to the pictures tonight and came back arguing about politics and the future of England. Obviously England is a declining power; obviously Communism has come to stay; obviously the breaking of British class barriers is a long overdue necessity if the country's ever to survive. Do you realise only 3 per cent of our populace, the lucky percentage with a public school education, can ever hope to receive any of the really first-rate jobs? Oh, the colossal conceit of a country, to limit its selection of brain ability from a future 3 per cent. There is so much wrong with the world, so much in a nightmarish muddle. Still there is this consolation: it's a bad world but it's not a dull one. It's got evil and stupidity and muddle but it's also got excitement and adventure and variety. For the cynical, for the without illusions, one can still live zestfully and not yearn too unbearably for Utopia.

15 March 1940

I am home and tired, I've been out every night this week. Tomorrow morning I shall lie in a soft warm bed and stretch out a languid hand to my bell, which will bring my breakfast to me. Tonight I shall dissolve the grime of ages (three days and nights) in a large boiling bath.

I've got to give up my room. The corporal whose rightful residence it is has decided she wants it and I am to have the front double room, so very much more to clean. I am sick and sorry; I like my room. I like the sixpenny and flourishing plant on the windowsill. I like the string from the light via the door to my bed which enables me to extinguish both light and wireless without getting back into the cold. I like it because it is little and easy to warm and has clean windows and a polished floor. I wish I were a corporal and not so tired. I am writing this all odd: it was going to be very artful introducing all the week's events in so natural a manner that one slipped easily into the other.

Allow me, says she in her best pompous author manner, to take you from my usual haunts of Booth Road and Claygate and that part of London encircling Leicester Square into the hitherto unexplored region of Hendon Aerodrome. If we are lucky, as we enter its gates, the police on duty will salute me and make me feel very smooth. Why then, reader, do I hurry? Why have I paid unusual trouble with my toilet and clutch in my hand a limp paper when usually I saunter past late, untidy and sucking a Zube? I am going to a Messing meeting as a representative of WAAF airwomen, that's why – a role strangely thrust on me by Our Annie.

We gather in the messing officer's room, the WAAFs waved politely to chairs, the airmen soldiers standing self-consciously behind us. After a pause, which I passed looking out of the window unaware that I was expected to speak and thinking how rude it was that nobody did so, I, as WAAF representative, am asked to complain first. I blushed a lot and said the WAAFs wanted more fruit.

That noted, Pilot Officer Burton turned to the men and the fun began. They said their fried bread was hard. The sergeants, two harsh-faced individuals, said it was inevitable on account of the ovens; Pilot Officer Burton strove courageously to pacify both parties. Throughout the battle, which travelled through hard fried bread to bread at dinner to too thin tea, he remained courteous, fair and eternally anxious to help the men. This was definitely one of the better Service customs. The men get direct to the officers with their complaints.

As a result of this morning meeting, far from finishing my work at the customary 4.15, when I left at 4.45 it was yet undone. At 5 p.m. when I was preparing to go to town, a trembling WAAF informed me that an angry Annie was on the phone demanding my return to finish my work. I returned swearing all up Booth Road and by the time I got to her my anger had surprisingly gone. I accepted, not very well concealing my smiling lack of penitence, her and Henderson's bawling, so that at the end they were smiling too. I like Henderson, she is small and attractive and tough.

20 March 1940

WAAF whisklets –

Mr Dunne, giving Frances Baxter a packet of Smarties: ‘You've got a habit I don't like.’

Frances: ‘What's that?’

Mr Dunne: ‘You breathe.’

Mr Dunne is a civilian clerk under whose care we WAAFs at Station Headquarters are. He has promised to lift me one of those ‘You never know who's listening’ posters for my billet.

Mickey Johnston has a driving test. ‘Don't let her drive inside the aerodrome,’ warns a sergeant to the girl who accompanies her on her test, suspecting Mickey's ability with tragic truth. From the WAAF Mess to the aerodrome gates Mickey takes the wheel. She flashes down Booth Road, her companion beginning to be uneasy and success and speed intoxicating her, and as she takes the corner sends two milk cans hurtling down the road. She misses a swearing stag-like leaping wing commander by inches and jams on the brakes to a halt in front of the frozen face of a station policeman. Mickey has not driven for some years and then only in Prague and on the wrong side of the road. The nearly run-over wing commander was very, very mad. Only much effort, not helped by Mickey's merry laughter as she sat in the van, destruction right and left, got her out of being put on a charge.

21 March 1940