Daisy's Wars

by Meg Henderson

  And it wasn’t just a bad winter, with ice forming and staying put for months at a time. It also started unusually early, but pleas for more clothing only produced a promise of airmen’s greatcoats – for next winter. In December the camps were hit with flu and German Measles epidemics – ‘Hun Measles’ as they insisted on calling them – prompting Lord Nuffield to present the WAAFs with a Christmas gift of eighty-two wirelesses to amuse them as they recovered.

  Still, most of the girls mucked in and coped as best they could, and Daisy wrote to Joan Johnstone that Christmas: ‘Freezing cold, no hot water or heating, cold food and flimsy clothing, but great people.’ She was also able to write, with great relief, that there had been ‘no after-effects’ of her leaving home, which was code for not being pregnant. Added to that joy was her knowledge of the arrangement that Joan would visit Kathleen every Friday with her letters, which meant that Daisy could now write with her mother in mind. Even if Kathleen couldn’t reply, the fact that she wanted to hear how she was doing was proof of what Joan had already told Daisy, that her mother hadn’t turned against her for her ‘desertion’.

  Joan didn’t tell her, though, that Kathleen had lain in her room that night, listening to the unmistakable sound of Dessie raping her daughter. She knew that would be too much for the girl to cope with.

  From April 1940 things did improve. Uniforms arrived, even if they were built to last rather than complement the female figure. Widespread building of accommodation slightly more advanced than chicken coops was underway everywhere, and station establishments were being settled. Married women were admitted for the first time, and it became more accepted that the WAAFs were not just there to cook, clean and ‘serve’ the men of the RAF, but to substitute for them, thereby freeing them for combat, the one area women were never allowed to enter.

  Even in uniform Daisy drew unwelcome male attention. The curves were all too obviously all in the right places under the WAAF uniform, it was almost as though the unflattering uniform had been designed specifically to showcase them. The other WAAFs said that Daisy in uniform proved that there was no justice, and she knew it was true that it also appeared to have been designed to make them look frumpy. Why else give attractive young women a heavy, long, grey serge skirt and a tunic that didn’t even fit where it touched? And a shirt and tie was designed to be worn by men: flat-chested men. On women it rolled into bunches, making them look misshapen. And let’s not to go near the hat, Daisy thought. Add to that thick tights and sensible shoes, and how could anyone find that lot alluring? No, it had to be a deliberate attempt by ‘them’ to disguise normal female attributes so that the RAF men were not distracted from war work. That’s what the girls thought.

  There was another problem for the girls too: people in and out of the RAF thought the WAAFs were only there to provide the men with sex. That’s why the uniform-as-disguise theory hadn’t a chance of working, because Daisy knew, and the girls would find out, that men would crawl over broken glass to get close to anything female, especially in wartime, when the thought of the Grim Reaper looking over every shoulder somehow upped the libido.

  Daisy understood how the girls felt about their uniforms, and their complaints were valid. Just because there was a war on was no reason why they should be made to dress like men with inconvenient body shapes. Somehow the uniform didn’t have that effect on Daisy, though. The masculine constraints seemed magically to emphasise her shape; plus, of course, she had an understanding of the business of clothing the female form, and having been an accomplished needlewoman since childhood she had made a few, well, adjustments.

  As a fourteen-year-old working in Fenwicks she had learned about well-heeled, stylish women and what made them walk with that uppity air. They dressed beautifully from the inside out, and even if no one knew what kind of knickers they wore, they knew, and it made them feel confident. Daisy took it to heart. She’d had no intention of staying in Newcastle and regarded her days in Fenwicks as training for the life she would one day lead. The very best silk underwear, that had been her first purchase as soon as she had saved up enough, and one day soon she would no longer settle for anything on the basis of what was functional and hard-wearing, she promised herself, and the quality of what she wore outside would one day catch up with what was underneath. One day soon.

  The war had arrived to release her sooner than she had planned, but the principle remained the same: Daisy would never settle for second best, even if she had to put up with it temporarily. There was no wearing of the regulation underwear either, where she was concerned. No ‘blackout’ or ‘twilight’ long-legged knickers touched her contours, and she had dispensed with the uniform bras and vests at first glance without even trying them on. She would make her own silk fancies out of parachute silk if nothing else was available, she decided, but elastic was in short supply. It made her laugh to think of all those women being prepared to do anything for a length of elastic to hold their knickers up, when that same ‘anything’ often involved their knickers coming down.

  So Daisy became the unofficial WAAF seamstress, adjusting ill-fitting uniforms in secret, as long as no word leaked out, because the last thing Daisy wanted was to be shunted into tailoring for the duration. She wanted excitement, she wanted adventures, she wanted a different life than she had ever known before, because as far as she was concerned, that old life had gone forever.

  Now she was one of the girls, though, and she was gradually emerging as the leader. They worked under the same conditions as men, went through the same tests, and were reclassified and remustered in exactly the same way, although there would always be those who refused to accept the very idea of women actually doing real work in the Air Force.

  In due course Joan reported that Kay had given birth to her second child, a boy named Patrick. What else? Daisy thought wryly. Joan also wrote that her mother loved hearing of Daisy’s exploits and was much as she had been, her father too. Daisy knew what that meant: there was no way to any relationship with Michael. Dessie had volunteered for the army, either keen to do his bit or desperate to escape life at Guildford Place, but at least he was gone, and Kay was safe from another immediate pregnancy.

  Every now and then Joan would send Daisy the kind of feminine underwear she loved, saying it was pre-war stock and just lying around the store, though Daisy knew better. As it enabled her to avoid the terrible RAF long-legged knickers on offer, she was doubly grateful.

  ‘Everyone with a garden has an Anderson shelter,’ Joan wrote to her. ‘George has planted a garden of vegetables over ours, and we’ve all got gas masks because they say the Germans will attack us with poison gas. George is on a decontamination squad, they run around doing exercises with buckets and garden hoses. I suppose they know what they’re doing. And everywhere you look women are standing about with skeins of wool across their outstretched arms, rolling them into balls for Heaton Social Services to knit things for servicemen. They’ve taken all the garden railings down to melt them down for armaments, apparently, and we’re having to salvage everything. Paper, aluminium and scrap iron are valuable, so they say. The parks are being ploughed up to plant vegetable crops and lots of people have pigs. In many back gardens, Pig Clubs are springing up. It’s all so strange, Daisy, you just wonder if life will ever be the same again.’

  Of course, everyone wondered that, and many, like Daisy, hoped it wouldn’t be. After the initial enthusiasm of those first girls who had joined the WAAFs, the hardships proved too many for some, and around a quarter had left by May 1940. But nothing could be done about deserters, as the Judge Advocate General had ruled that WAAFs couldn’t be charged

  The reaction of those who stayed was one of annoyance; they saw it as a sign that they couldn’t be up to much if they weren’t to be treated the same as deserting airmen. It seemed to strengthen the attitude they had been working hard to dispel, that their real function was to be ‘officers’ home comforts’, but on the other hand it acted as a kind of natural selection process, e
nsuring that the WAAF ranks contained only the best and strongest.

  Daisy had made some firm friends, all of them from different backgrounds, yet this no longer mattered. They were in this together and that was that. Just like the boys who had volunteered, most of the girls had joined for their own reasons – to get away from home, parents and boring lives.

  Gradually, the attitudes towards WAAFs changed. Maybe Dunkirk had something to do with it. When the evacuation got underway in late May 1940, the WAAFs sat around Lord Nuffield’s radios in absolute silence, listening intently as the BBC newscaster’s chilling tones described the rescue of 220,000 Allied troops from the advancing German army, plucked to safety by every ship and small boat able to travel across the Channel. British ships picked up more soldiers from Cherbourg, St Malo, Brest and St Nazaire, and by the beginning of June 558,000 men had been saved to fight another day. In three weeks the Germans had taken one million POWs; losing only 60,000 of their own men, but the threat of invasion was over. Britain alone remained unconquered.

  Even so, everyone knew that all RAF stations would now be under attack, every aerodrome and aircraft would be a target, as well the eyes of the RAF, the Operations Rooms and Radar stations, staffed mainly by WAAFs, would be in the firing line.

  Daisy wrote home to Joan and Kathleen about the aftermath of Dunkirk. ‘They’ve taught us to handle handguns and rifles and we have to watch out for German paratroopers. We go around checking doors and windows every night in our nighties and fluffy slippers, a .45 pistol hanging out of our dressing-gown pockets, then we turn and look at each other and break down in fits of giggles. We’re always getting told off and we do know it’s serious, but it does look so funny, and if we ever come on a German paratrooper I think there’s more chance of us laughing him to death than shooting him.’

  And that was one of the big questions for the RAF, how women would react under fire, but they quickly got over their self-conscious feelings. As station after station came under attack, Fighter Command signalled, ‘The C in C has heard with pride and satisfaction of the manner in which WAAFs at Dover, Rye, Pevensey, Ventnor and Dunkirk conducted themselves under fire today. They have abundantly justified his confidence in them.’

  Daisy and the others exchanged glances as this commendation was read out by an officer in their hut, as they stood to attention at the bottom of their beds. When the officer left, the girls lay down.

  ‘Did he think we’d all run home to Mummy saying the naughty Germans had thrown big bad bombs at us?’ Daisy asked indignantly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Celia replied. ‘Women with families in civvy street are being bombed every day and coping with it, so why wouldn’t we? Damned cheek!’

  As things had settled down the girls knew that part of the assessment process to be allocated jobs, meant they would have to go through Intelligence Tests, and for the first time Daisy regretted her lack of schooling. There would be fractions and decimals and percentages to be worked out, the girls who had already gone through testing reported back, all ‘as easy as pie’ they said. Only Daisy hadn’t learned any of that, she had been looking after her mother and running the Sheridan household.

  Daisy confided this to her friend Edith, a small, serious girl. Edith had been head girl at her school and about to apply for a university place she didn’t want when she saw the prospect of escape through the WAAFs. So, in the evenings, as they huddled round the coal-burning stove in the hut, Edith taught Daisy how to conquer the black arts of fractions, decimals and even long division, while Daisy introduced Edith to the intricacies of darning – a skill, she was coming to understand, that did not sit well with those of an academic mindset.

  Daisy went over a mental list of her strengths as the IQ Test loomed. Her handwriting, she knew, was good. It had often been commented on at Fenwicks. And she could spell and do sums – all of that was part of practical learning from her years as a child housewife. But the more complicated stuff had terrified her, till she realised it was all based on logic and was therefore just as easy as the others said.

  When the time came to sit her twenty-minute test in spelling, arithmetic and general knowledge, she passed with ease – and a little bit of play-acting as someone who possessed supreme confidence. The two officers asked about her schooling and she conned her way through by simply replying that the Sacred Heart was considered to be the leading Catholic school in Newcastle, without actually saying she had never set foot in the place. It wasn’t really a lie, it was more not answering the question they had asked and hoping that in the circumstances no one would have the time to check up.

  The fact was that Daisy was bright, and it showed, so no one thought of looking more closely at her replies. More than anything else she wanted a posting that wasn’t based on housework. She didn’t want to cook, clean, be a seamstress or be stuck caring for the sick, the very things she had experience of, so she kept quiet about them and stressed her office skills. She could type – she didn’t say she had taught herself – she knew about filing and handled phone conversations with real as opposed to pretend confidence; and her voice, with the Geordie accent toned down, was clear and precise. She came across as calm and efficient, so they made her an administrator, a rather grand name for a clerk, and asked her where she’d prefer to be posted, and having been clued up by Dotty, another friend, she said London.

  Thanks to Dotty’s advice most of the girls asked for London, where there were perks, like free or reduced-price theatre tickets, clubs and places to stay when on leave, and the possibilities for fun loomed larger than they did in the sticks. After a time, of course, those allocating the girls to their postings got wise to the London requests and simply ignored them, so that girls asking for London would find themselves consigned to a remote Scottish island with no right of appeal.

  Back in the hut the three original friends were re-united to find out their respective fates.

  ‘What’ve you got? What’ve you got?’ Celia demanded excitedly.

  ‘Administrator,’ Daisy said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Oh,’ Celia said sadly.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Pigeons,’ Celia replied.

  ‘Pigeons?’ Violet and Daisy screeched in unison.

  ‘Who the hell gets pigeons?’ Violet asked.

  ‘I do!’ Celia replied, hurt. ‘It’s what I wanted, I just didn’t say because I knew how you two would react.’

  ‘Well, put it another way,’ Violet said wryly, ‘why the hell would anyone – even you – want pigeons?’

  ‘My father’s been a pigeon-fancier all his life,’ Celia said defensively. ‘There’s nothing I don’t know about pigeons.’

  ‘But what do pigeons do in a war?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘All sorts of things,’ Celia replied. ‘Shows how much you know! They go up in kites and if the crew are shot down or have to ditch, the pigeons fly back with their position so that the boys can be rescued.’

  Daisy and Celia laughed out loud, staring at her.

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ Violet demanded. ‘Look at her, the least pigeon-chested female I’ve ever seen and she’s a sister to pigeons!’

  ‘So what’ve you got, then, Miss Lardy Buttocks?’

  ‘I,’ said Violet, rolling her eyes and sticking her tongue in her cheek as she nodded her head cockily, ‘am to train as a mechanic.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘RAF Langar,’ Violet replied.

  ‘Me too!’ Celia shouted. ‘We’ll still be together!’

  Then they looked at Daisy. ‘So,’ Violet said quietly, ‘this is the parting of the ways, then, my fellow flower. It’s just me and the pigeon lady from now on.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Daisy demanded. ‘A couple of verses of “We’ll Meet Again”? I’ll survive without you two, you know!’

  ‘I know you will,’ Violet said. ‘The question is, though, how am I to survive with just the pigeon lady in future?’

 
; And the three girls hugged each other, as others were doing in WAAF huts all over the country. Partings were part and parcel of war.

  By this time Dotty Bentley had already found a place among Daisy and her friends. Though she had arrived at West Drayton in the same batch, until the night of the NAAFI incident she had just been a face, noticeably of different means to most of them, but they were all girls together now.

  There in front of them Dotty had been engaged in a conversation with an RAF officer who had approached her, though there was an impression from their greetings that they had met before. Then she had left with him, a beaming smile on her face.

  ‘Bit brazen, wasn’t it?’ Celia asked. ‘I mean, everybody saw, didn’t they?’

  Daisy shrugged. ‘It’s none of our business, is it?’

  ‘Well, it is,’ said Violet, ‘in a way. If she trots off to tango with the first officer she meets, it reflects on us all, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t see why,’ Daisy countered. ‘Anyway, it looked as though they knew each other.’

  Violet and Celia were shuffling about uneasily in their chairs, not entirely convinced. The thing still didn’t look right. Suddenly they heard raised voices outside and ran to the door. There stood Dotty, and sprawled at her feet was the officer.

  ‘What happened?’ a voice asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dotty sweetly. ‘You just slipped, didn’t you, Sir? Let me help you up.’

  It was clear by the way she said ‘Sir’ and by the way he pulled away from her as she proffered a hand, that something had happened.

  ‘Must be the new shoes, you forgot to roughen up the soles,’ Dotty continued. ‘We’ve all done it.’

  As the officer departed with his friends among the crowd he was rubbing his face, and Daisy said suspiciously, ‘He was sitting down, but he was rubbing his jaw. Just where did he land when he, er, slipped?’