The Bomb Girls

by Daisy Styles

  Alice’s heart skipped a beat; she’d already packed cordite into nearly thirty shell cases, bombs that could take out a family, a home, a life. She knew there were German women packing cordite into identical shell cases in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and other places all over Germany, just like British Bomb Girls assembling explosives in munitions factories all over her own country. Alice sighed. How many thousands of women would pack how many millions of bombs before this hideous war was over?

  That first shift was long, exhausting and repetitive.

  ‘I know I’ve got the attention span of a gnat,’ groaned Lillian. ‘But this has got to be the most boring job in the world.’

  Without stopping shovelling cordite into the bomb cases passing before her on the conveyor belt, Elsie answered happily, ‘It’s interesting!’

  ‘INTERESTING!’ Lillian screeched. ‘Depends what you were doing previously, love.’

  ‘Cooking, cleaning, cooking, cleaning, getting belted if I weren’t cooking and cleaning,’ Elsie replied with remarkable cheerfulness.

  Lillian exchanged a look with Emily and Alice on either side of her and quickly backtracked.

  ‘Well, if you put it that way I can see that this would be a bundle of laughs, Elsie,’ she laughed.

  The government-backed shows on the radio and regular breaks in the canteen, where they could help themselves to endless mugs of sweet tea and free food, lifted the workers’ spirits but by 10 p.m. Emily, Alice, Elsie and Lillian were on their knees.

  ‘I just want to go home and sleep,’ groaned Emily.

  Alice, who hated to be dirty or untidy, scowled at the yellow stains on her slender fingers.

  ‘We’ve got to get this stinking cordite off our hands first,’ she insisted.

  ‘A woman on another section told me to scrub milk and cold tea onto the yellow,’ Lillian said.

  Emily yawned and shook her head.

  ‘Right now, I don’t care – I’m going to bed.’

  ‘If you go without cleaning it off you’ll stain your sheets yellow,’ Lillian warned.

  Emily laughed as she said, ‘Maybe I’ll sing like a canary and keep you awake all night!’

  It was nearly eleven by the time they made their way up the cobbled track to their digs, where they found all the lights on. Inside Agnes, who was exhausted by her journey north, was curled up fast asleep on the sofa. She jumped up when her room mates entered and blinked at them in surprise.

  ‘Hello,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m Agnes. I’ve been transferred from the Woolwich Arsenal.’

  Emily, Elsie, Lillian and Alice were visibly taken aback. Agnes was a good ten years older than them; she was sallow-skinned and thin; her clothes resembled the style of the thirties rather than the forties, and her black-metal, bottle-top glasses hid the beauty of her large eyes.

  Alice was the first to remember her manners.

  ‘You must be exhausted,’ she said as she poked the embers in the wood burner and filled the kettle. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  Elsie opened the tin that contained Emily’s delicious carrot and coconut buns.

  ‘We’ve got some cake,’ she said with relish. ‘Proper good cake, home-made, like.’

  Agnes gratefully accepted their generosity but there was an awkwardness in the room, especially when she announced she might be their line supervisor.

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Emily flatly.

  ‘Great!’ muttered Lillian under her breath. ‘Nothing like living with the boss.’

  Alice glared at her whilst Emily gave her a kick. Sensing their discomfort, Agnes rose.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ she said tiredly.

  Kind, sensitive Elsie leaped to her feet.

  ‘You’ve got the single room,’ she told Agnes as they made their way down the corridor. ‘It’s got a belting view, like, when it’s not raining.’

  Lillian scowled as she lit a Woodbine.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she seethed. ‘Now we’ll have to be on our best sodding behaviour all the time!’ She blew out some smoke before adding scornfully, ‘And where did she get those terrible clothes from?’

  ‘You can’t always go by looks,’ sweet little Elsie chided as she returned to her friends gathered round the crackling warm stove. ‘I looked like a rag and bone man when I arrived,’ she added with a giggle.

  ‘Well, at least we gave her the single room,’ Lillian remarked. ‘It’d be a nightmare waking up to the bloody boss every morning!’

  Elsie, in awe of Agnes’s age and experience, kept a respectful distance whilst Alice was curious, especially when she caught sight of a framed photograph on Agnes’s bedside table with a little knitted dolly propped up beside it. The picture was of a little girl, aged about two or three years old, with long, dark silky hair, a wide happy smile and big brown eyes fringed with thick dark lashes.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Alice told Emily. ‘She must be related. She has the same dark looks as Agnes.’

  ‘She never talks about her family,’ Emily said.

  ‘Maybe something terrible happened to them,’ Alice replied.

  ‘Best not to mention them until she does,’ Emily warned.

  Agnes was strict and tight-lipped on the factory floor too; she worked her section hard whilst keeping an eye out for their safety. During her second week, Agnes approached Elsie.

  ‘Can I have a word with you?’ she asked.

  Elsie’s eyes grew wide as she was escorted off the factory floor.

  ‘Have I done something wrong? Am I in trouble? Please don’t send me home,’ she gabbled in terror.

  In a quiet corner of the canteen, Agnes assured Elsie, who was by this time almost hysterical, that all was well.

  ‘It’s nothing to panic about,’ she said gently. ‘I’m just concerned that you’re working too hard.’

  Elsie wiped away her tears and smiled, and when she did so her lovely green eyes were filled with happiness. Grabbing Agnes’s hands, she squeezed them tightly.

  ‘I love my work,’ she cried. ‘I love the Phoenix and all my friends in the digs.’

  Agnes patted Elsie’s chapped hands.

  ‘At the rate you’re going, I’m afraid you’ll burn yourself out.’

  ‘I’m not frightened of hard work,’ Elsie insisted. ‘If the truth be known, I’ve never been so happy in my whole life!’

  Intrigued by her reply, Agnes asked, ‘And why’s that, Elsie? Munitions work isn’t exactly a picnic.’

  Elsie replied with her usual innocent candour.

  ‘I love not living at home and I love my new friends. I couldn’t ask for more.’

  Agnes smiled gently as she gazed into Elsie’s earnest face. What kind of previous life could she have had if relentless hard work at the Phoenix made her so very happy?

  Giving her a reassuring pat on the shoulder, Agnes simply said, ‘You’re a good girl, Elsie, and you’ve nothing at all to worry about.’

  On a free night off, all five room mates decided to go and see Laurence Olivier in Rebecca at the Phoenix picture house.

  ‘I can’t wait to see all the posh frocks,’ Lillian whispered as she passed around a bag of nut brittle.

  As they settled down in their seats, the lights dimmed and the Pathé News preceding the main feature film flashed up. A hush descended over the packed picture house as the narrator spoke.

  ‘Secret footage of British POWs in German concentration camps has been released to the War Office. It is clear that Hitler’s officers have thrown aside the rules laid down by the Geneva Convention.’

  There was a collective gasp of horror as stark images of skeletal men staggering half naked around a prison yard appeared larger than life on the wide screen.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ a woman behind them murmured.

  Some of the cinema-goers had to cover their eyes at the sight of British soldiers crawling on the ground and begging for food, but it was Agnes who reacted the most dramatically. Stifling a cry of agony, she literally jumped over the top of her
cinema seat.

  ‘NO! Please, God, I can’t bear it!’ she cried as she ran out of the building.

  Emily, Alice, Elsie and Lillian looked at one another, shocked. Then they left their seats and ran after their distressed friend.

  ‘Maybe she recognized somebody in that terrible film,’ Alice gasped as they hurried up the steep hill back to their digs.

  ‘Poor girl,’ murmured Emily. ‘She sounded like she was in agony.’

  They found Agnes lying white-faced on her bed.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ Alice gently asked, perching on the end of the bed.

  ‘There’s nothing anybody can do,’ Agnes whispered as slow tears rolled unstopped down her cheeks. ‘My Stan might be in one of those camps … He could be dead for all I know.’

  Emily, Elsie and Lillian quietly approached the bed.

  Elsie stroked Agnes’s limp hands.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘Talking doesn’t help,’ she replied bitterly.

  ‘How long’s he been gone?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Almost two years; he was reported missing right at the beginning of the war.’ She took a deep ragged breath then sobbed, ‘If he is alive I can’t bear to think of him being treated like those poor men, like an animal.’

  There was a long pause as Emily, Alice, Lillian and Elsie, all totally lost for words, wondered how any one person could bear so much.

  Seeing Elsie peeking at the photograph on her bedside table, Agnes whispered, ‘That’s my daughter, Esther. She’s got polio. She was evacuated to a hospital in the Lake District just after Stan was reported missing. She doesn’t know anything about her daddy,’ she added sadly.

  Filled with pity, Emily said, ‘So your whole family was taken from you at the same time?’

  Agnes nodded.

  ‘I’m hoping to see more of Esther now I’m working in the north.’

  ‘Well, that sounds a step in the right direction. Look, I’ll make you some tea, lovie,’ Elsie said softly.

  ‘I need a drink too,’ muttered Lillian. ‘And I don’t mean tea!’

  Alice stayed with Agnes while the others crept into the sitting room, where they whispered together as they made tea for Agnes and mixed it with a dash of brandy.

  ‘What with a daughter in hospital and a husband in a concentration camp, it’s a wonder she’s not topped herself,’ Emily murmured.

  ‘She’s so brave,’ Elsie added quietly.

  Lillian nodded grimly. ‘Bloody tough too,’ she said as she took a deep pull at the brandy bottle.

  ‘Well, we’ve certainly seen a different side to our boss tonight,’ Emily remarked.

  ‘There was I thinking she was a tight-lipped, toffee-nosed southerner,’ said Lillian self-deprecatingly. ‘How wrong can you be!’

  ‘From now on we’re going to look after Agnes,’ Emily said firmly.

  ‘Cheers to that!’ said Lillian as she took another swig from the brandy bottle.

  Things changed after that. On the factory floor Emily, Alice, Elsie and Lillian were civil and obedient with their line supervisor; but once back in their digs Agnes was their dear friend who they treated with love and kindness. Apart from the respect and affection they had for Agnes, they all shared a secret desire to reunite her with her little girl, Esther, as soon as possible.

  CHAPTER 8

  Evacuee

  The Bomb Girls had arrived at the Phoenix in time to enjoy a mild spring followed by a warm, wet summer.

  ‘Does it ever stop raining up here?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘Moanin’ southerner!’ Lillian teased.

  ‘Rain’s good for the complexion,’ Emily added.

  Agnes stared at the rain belting against the factory windowpanes and clattering down onto the metal roof.

  ‘A bit of sunshine wouldn’t go amiss.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, pet, it’s not like we get out much,’ said Elsie, who put a positive spin on everything.

  A damp and misty autumn gave way to a hard winter in the Phoenix, and what with the constantly damp floors and the blustery Pennine winds whistling round the factory, the workers were chilled to the bone from dawn till dusk. There were, however, the welcome breaks in the warm canteen, where Emily had made great friends with the cooks. They had welcomed her help and her new ideas with open arms.

  ‘Mek yourself at home, lass, the more the merrier!’

  Emily’s flaky pastry, improvised from shin-beef dripping and reconstituted lard, had gone down a storm, so had her herb dumplings, and nobody in Lancashire could cook fish and chips like Emily. Spuds grown locally were in abundance but fish was scarce so, as ever, Emily improvised, making scallops from thick slices of potato deep-fried in a light golden batter.

  Elsie nearly fainted with ecstasy when she tasted her first crispy golden scallop.

  ‘Mmm!’ she groaned in pleasure. ‘How do you do it, our Em?’

  ‘Desperation!’ Emily replied. ‘If I have to eat any more boring canteen food I might start gnawing my elbows,’ she added in a low voice so her new friends in the canteen wouldn’t hear her. ‘The cooks try their best but they don’t think outside the box. Rationing makes cooking a challenge not a drag.’

  ‘Is there owt else you can deep-fry, cock,’ a big woman from packing asked. ‘Them bloody scallops were a treat!’

  The workers’ unabashed enthusiasm for ‘good grub’, as they called it, drove Emily on. There was only one thing Emily liked more than pleasing her friends, and that was cooking, so when the two were combined she was in her element.

  Emily knew that the local farm grew plenty of root crops, and one morning, after batting her beautiful blue eyes at the farmer, she walked away with a sack of parsnips which she peeled and boiled then mashed with margarine, salt, pepper, dried sage and thyme. With Elsie’s help she rolled the cooled mashed parsnips into little balls then deep-fried them in a big pan of lard and the shin-beef dripping that she kept exclusively for her own purposes.

  As the parsnip fritters crackled in the sizzling hot fat, Elsie was anxious.

  ‘Won’t we get told off for being in’t canteen, like?’

  Emily confidently shook her head.

  ‘It gives the cooks time off. Look at them,’ she added, as she nodded in the direction of the canteen ladies, who were sitting at one of the tables reading the papers with their feet up. ‘Plus, we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts in our spare time,’ she pointed out.

  ‘If you ever open a chip shop, Em, can I work for you?’ Elsie said with a sweet shy smile.

  ‘For sure, on condition you don’t eat everything in the shop!’ Emily replied.

  The parsnip fritters were served with an improvised Spam hash that Emily concocted with onions, carrots, blobs of marg and potatoes. She topped the meal with bread pudding, which she spiced up with cinnamon and bulked out for the hungry workers with prunes and apples.

  ‘Eeh, lovie, I wish we could eat like this every day,’ an appreciative Bomb Girl said as she hurried back for seconds.

  ‘You could, if they took me off the bomb line and put me in’t canteen,’ Emily said with a chuckle.

  On cold winter days Emily made warm nourishing food to keep the workers going through their long hard shifts: a rich broth from pearl barley and mutton, or soup from dried peas and a pig’s head, which she boiled up for stock and meat she could slice out of the cheeks.

  Malc, the overseer, had to take Emily on one side to remind her she was a Bomb Girl not a cook.

  ‘I’m not paid to cook, I just love it – and I do it in my free time,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I quite understand,’ Malc hurriedly replied. ‘Just wanted to remind you of your priorities.’

  Pretending innocence, Emily stared up at him with her big blue eyes. ‘I can stop if you want … ?’ she added mischievously.

  Malc paused for a few seconds. No way did he want Emily to stop; there’d be a riot if her fritters, scallops, soups and broths weren’t
on the menu.

  ‘We don’t have to go that far,’ he prevaricated. ‘Just don’t make it obvious when Mr Featherstone’s around.’

  There was great camaraderie among the two hundred-strong women at the Phoenix. It wasn’t as if they all liked each other, far from it, there were rows and differences every day. People got tired and grumpy, the repetitive hard work, long shifts and relentless cold weather ground the workers down. The fact that most of the women were far away from their loved ones caused spats of anger or tears of sadness. Agnes was always good when these situations erupted. She never offered platitudes because she knew from experience that sort of talking was a waste of time. She had a calm way of addressing problems and asking the right questions, and she always remained focused and strong.

  ‘Never give up!’ was her unequivocal advice to all.

  The increase in the number of deaths, casualties and reports of ‘missing in action’ had a profound effect on the workforce. A young girl on the next section to the cordite line collapsed when she heard her kid brother had died of septicaemia in a lifeboat. He’d been a young sailor on a minesweeper that had been torpedoed by German U-boats, and the lifeboat he was in had drifted in the freezing North Sea for days before it was picked up by a merchant ship.

  Life was unbelievably hard and getting harder by the day, but the best the Bomb Girls could do was work harder, stay cheerful – and pray.

  The need for more and more bombs put pressure on the munitions factories; stringent targets were set and had to be achieved on each shift.

  ‘I know the new targets are going to make things even tougher than they already are,’ Agnes said to her overworked team. ‘But the boys we love need a lot more bombs, and that’s why we have to do it.’

  Conscientious Elsie’s green eyes opened wide with anxiety.

  ‘We can’t fill the bomb shells any faster,’ she said. ‘If we did we’d end up spilling cordite then God knows what would happen.’

  Lillian rolled her eyes.

  ‘We all know exactly what would happen – BOOM!’

  Agnes quickly interrupted.

  ‘I’m not saying take chances; health and safety come first.’