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

In the afternoon Frances and Evans, with the solemn, nervously smiling faces of people who know their expressions ought to be sad, came to say, ‘We came to tell you something dreadful has happened. Oliver's husband has been killed.’ Oliver used to work with me; she's only been married six weeks; her husband was one of the Hendon sergeant pilots. He crashed near Birmingham and the plane caught fire.

Later, I went into our officers' room and reminded Annie that I was having Wednesday off for Barbara's wedding, and Mrs Burley, the Code and Cipher Officer, said she too was going to a wedding on Wednesday. I said it couldn't be the same one and she said ‘Howroyd’, and I said ‘David’, and the whole room shrieked because it is the same one.

After tea: sitting in the Recreation Room on guardroom duty, hearing more details about Oliver's husband, and everybody telling other dreadful accidents.

24 March 1940

Yesterday evening Bridget, Boompsie and I went to a dance at the Overseas Club to meet Canadians. Before I went I knew I was going to enjoy it, despite spots on my face through overeating and not being energetic enough. I had one of my moods when nothing mattered. Anyway the spots were only few and small and make-up covered them.

When we got there a Paul Jones

(#litres_trial_promo) was in progress and the end of it found me with an officer: very Canadian, very tight and a very good dancer. While others danced decorously around, we trucked and shagged and said ‘ha cha cha’, all his instructions to me being prefaced with a ‘honey child’. I felt like the whole of Gone With the Wind. By the time the next Paul Jones was over I was somewhat weary and ended that with a young French Canadian soldier who took me to supper and with whom I spent the rest of the evening. He's twenty-two and his name is Gerry. He's not good looking nor very well bred but he's young and fresh and I liked him a lot. I enjoyed it all.

At the end both of us wanted to make a date. I was only able to tell him my address and as he's new to London and doesn't speak much English I doubt if it registered; pity because he was fun.

This morning I was woken by Bridget at 7.30, said ‘what the hell’ and went to sleep till 9.30, when I had to tear to work without any breakfast. I had meant to have a quiet afternoon reading and gardening and having a necessary bath, but Eric phoned up and said he was free till seven o'clock, so I went up to town and we went to the zoo. He asked me out next Friday. I only have a French class, which I could have postponed, but I heard myself refusing. I cannot accept every time he asks me.

That beastly sergeant who wouldn't give the men soft fried bread has been put on a charge for swiping coal; I'm very glad.

28 March 1940

This new diary is much too small but it is all that the shop had. I'm starting it off anyway in proper style with a description of Barbie's wedding. Yesterday, a quarter to two saw me waiting for a bus outside Simpson's in Piccadilly. I was looking very smart and clean with my hair newly set, my buttons shining and I was wearing my Moss Bros best blue.

This part of London was sleek and prosperous with its offices and ‘not-having-to-think-about-having-to-take-a-taxi’ people. The sun was shining on its large solid buildings.

In the church I sat by Beasle, a girl from Shell, and I was hardly seated when the congregation rose and in came the bride. I suppose all brides are beautiful but it was hard to believe that for the last two years I had worked and played and talked and eaten with so wonderful looking a person. I couldn't see them at the altar very well, nor hear David's replies, but Barbara's voice was steady and distinct. Then they went up to the altar and knelt down by it together. I saw them hold each other's hands and I said over and over and over in my head, don't kill David. There was a pause, silent and excited and expectant, when they came out of the vestry and then the organ burst out ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and they came past us, smiling and married.

I was a bit wary about the reception. The one wedding I's been to before had a reception that I hated: I's not known anyone and I was lost and embarrassed and shy. I was grateful and glad therefore when all Barbara's relatives I had met at her twenty-first birthday party came and welcomed me with at least an externally perfect sincerity. After a series of champagnes I began to love everyone present. My shyness melted and giggles replaced it. Peter and another boy and girl and I grouped in a corner and collected all the available champagne and got to that lovely floating stage where everything was very very funny. Occasionally I detached myself and chatted animatedly to total strangers, but I always came back to Peter, the Cunninghams' very nice cousin, and Biddy and Patsy, Barbara's almost-as-nice-as-her sisters.

After my fourth champagne there was one moment when I felt worried because things really were getting rather odd and words slipped about in my mouth. However, I rallied all my will-power and kept Biddy by me, who has a head like a rock even if only fifteen. She and Barbara are very alike, while Patsy and I are the silly ones. Then I formally adopted all the Cunninghams, arranged with them and Peter to go down for a weekend and was led by Biddy to my hat and gas mask. By great concentration I got to Mother's office to tell her that the bride carried a lovely wreath of spring flowers.

(#litres_trial_promo)

1 April 1940

Coming back here in the Tube last night I thought, ‘This can't be real, I'm dreaming a nightmare, people can't be as ugly as that row opposite me.’ They had faces like drag-coloured plasticine pulled by grubby fingers into grotesque imitations of human faces. I could hardly bear looking at their ugliness. Then other people came in and made it more endurable: a young soldier with a face like a cheerful Walt Disney dwarf, a red-cheeked baby with a head circled with small ginger curls and a woman with a pale face, hollow cheeks and a long lovely mouth.

On Saturday at home it was sunny and I walked over to Esher to change my library book. Weekends are almost the only time I get for reading now. In the weekdays I'm busy living. Books show you so much though. This weekend I had a good haul: A Life of Christ, Lewis Golding's The Jewish Problem and seven plays of 1939, including an excellent one by Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes, and Terence Rattigan's very thin and very empty After the Dance.

Eric has a week's leave this week. I am seeing Walt Disney's Pinocchio and two plays with him. He suggested that we went to see Cousin Muriel: I don't think he likes serious plays very much but he thinks I do.

4 April 1940

Last night Eric and I went to see Cochran's (I thought disappointing) Lights Up. I'm beginning to be very fond of Eric. The trouble with youth is we are brought up to believe in and expect a Romeo and Juliet romance and that comes so rarely. If we were taught to expect nothing romantic from life, if we were only taught to see life intelligently, clear of literature's ideas of love, if we could only have adult contact with the other sex, we would be saved so much disillusion. If only we didn't want eternal love. My only hope is that by the time I get to be thirty I may have gotten rid of moonlight and roses and can enjoy living as a sophisticated, sane, unsentimental adult.

We had a taxi from Queens Bar to the Savoy and put our feet up on the tip-up seats opposite. Mine wouldn't quite reach.

He said, ‘Put yours on mine.’

‘They'll make your trousers dusty.’

‘It doesn't matter.’

He held both my hands.

‘Curse you.’

‘Why?’

‘For being you.’

‘I can't help it.’

I was stirred and roused so much so that I was unsatisfied and restless for some time after. I wondered what kissing with him would be like.

6 April 1940

Yesterday was one of those unpremeditated evenings that turn out fun. Frances, Mickey and I arranged to go to the pictures and half past five saw Mickey and me ready to go, pacing the pavement impatiently outside the Sergeants Mess, within which sat Frances and company sergeants chatting socially with Our Annie. Beside us in the road was Old Mort (an elderly shapeless WAAF), sitting in the hearse, which is what we have named her utility van, a horrible monster of wood and glass. However, we were not too proud to climb into it and get a lift to Colindale Station once Frances had eventually broken loose.

We found the Classic Cinema and for sixpence had the choice of any seat in the Stalls and two excellent films, one of which being The Wandering Jew. Frances and Mickey ate sherbets and chocolate cushions. I had tooth-ache and just sighed sadly when they passed the bag to each other over me. We approve very much of this cinema: as Mickey said, you even get to go to the lavatory free.

That evening we fumbled through blackout and strange streets in search of a bus stop, then we smelt it – definitely, unmistakably – fried fish and chips! We went methodically down the street smelling each shop, sometimes the aroma was strong, sometimes faint, but the source always eluded us. Finally, defeated and sorrowful, we reached the bus stop. Just as the bus approached I glanced behind me one last time and there was what we wanted. I ripped the other two from the bus, we rushed inside, purchased chips and one piece of fish for Frances, and ate them while wandering lost round Hendon.

When I got back, Beck and Bridget were in the kitchen. We talked about life and love and religion and men and survival of the individual until suddenly it was half past twelve.

10 April 1940

In the event of an air raid WAAF personnel rush to the new steel and reinforced concrete shelters, excepting the Decontamination Squad who huddle in one of the already shaken Booth Road houses.

I have got myself onto the reserve of the Decontamination Squad, a first step to removing myself from it entirely. Three parts of this is ordinary cowardice, the other quarter is my rigid determination to survive and outlast this war. With the Scandinavian invasion, the war is jolted back on us, just as we had almost forgotten it.

(#litres_trial_promo) We heard the wireless reports in the Recreation Room after lunch where we usually huddle over the fire, eating Milky Ways, smoking and reading the daily papers provided free for us by the RAF.

I have had to surrender my little room at last. Last night while I was at French class (for the first time I found myself speaking it fluently without hesitation and effort), the others in the house moved my belongings downstairs into the big room with two disadvantages: no privacy and more cleaning. I think and hope they felt a little guilty about it because they lit my fire and made my bed and offered to help me clean up this morning. However, provided I can keep the room from a strange WAAF invasion and get myself some curtains, cushions and carpets, I can make it reasonably comfortable.

13 April 1940

In the morning of Thursday the officer I work for snatched my Daily Express from my hand and said, ‘Hoorah, hoorah! The war will be over in six months. The Germans have done the very worst thing now’ – and a lot more hoorahs. In my heart I don't myself believe it but I spent the morning saying ‘six months of war and three months of cleaning up and I'll be in Paris by next April’.

In the afternoon we went to be inoculated and filed one by one into rugged grandeur's (the doctor's) office, to have our right arms pierced by the tetanus and our left by the anti-typhoid. I had no time to wait and think about it. Everyone else was genuinely indifferent. I didn't look at the needle. I was really quite brave – an improvement anyway on my screaming days at the dentist doorstep. ‘You'll feel awful in the evening,’ previously inoculated WAAFs told me, ‘freezing cold and nothing you can do will make you warmer.’

Accordingly, that evening I built up a colossal fire in my billet, piled blankets high on my bed with a further reserve on a chair, put on several jumpers and got to bed with a hot-water bottle, two aspirins, a box of cheeses, some broken chocolates, four buns and grapes from South Africa given to me by Bridget Prouse. I got extremely hot and soon went to sleep but the great frost came not at all. In the morning, noble to the last, I got up for breakfast. After breakfast I felt very odd and went back to bed. Finally I felt so foul I cast aside my book and unwisely toyed with the remains of last night's food. At lunchtime friends brought me a letter from Barbara. Cheered by that (she's asked me to Wales for my holidays), I tottered, pale and aching, to the Mess to work and on to a Chinese restaurant with Joyce, Mickey and Boompsie and finally feeling better to Bunty's where she and I laughed a lot about old days at school, while Mrs Goldie knitted (until she broke her needle and pulled it all undone) a year-old coat for a yet unborn baby. Eric listened and fed us with chocolates he's brought over with him for us.

16 April 1940

On Monday Boompsie and I, having no money (Boompsie is sharing my room as it is too large for one), lit the fire, turned on the wireless, got out books, mending etc. and looked sadly at two oranges, two pieces of chocolate cake and three tired tomato-flavoured cheeses. Suddenly there was a knock at the door which I, doing a French exercise and cursing, answered. And there stood Joyce with a car and £1. I pulled on my coat over my tattered slacks (my decent pair have been being cleaned for the last three weeks and I am too poor to reclaim them), my blue shirt and my yellow jacket and we drove down to the local fish and chip shop before returning to the fireside with fish and chips and lemonade and ginger beer. Joyce stayed till 11.30 and we laughed practically continuously.

Yesterday after meeting Mother I went on to my French class where Professor Bolitho told me of his love affairs, beginning at the age of eleven and apparently yet unended, with the seduction of a Girl Guide captain as the highlight. I enjoyed hearing it. I enjoyed discussing the varying moral outlooks of English and Europeans. I enjoyed his constant praise of me with remarks such as ‘J' aime les jeunes filles robustes fortes comme vous’. It did me good but after I left him my exit was shattered by the fact that I tripped and sprawled down the first flight of his stairs.