The Bomb Girls

by Daisy Styles

  Exhausted by the previous night’s vigil, all four girls were ready for a nap at the end of their shift.

  ‘Who’s on hot-water bottle duty?’ Lillian asked as they clattered up the cobbled lane that led to their digs.

  Suddenly Elsie froze in her tracks.

  ‘The light’s on!’ she gasped.

  As Lillian, Emily and Agnes stared from one to the other, Elsie started to cry.

  ‘Oh, God! He’s back,’ she wailed.

  Convinced it was Elsie’s crazy dad come back to kill her, a furious Emily strode forwards and flung open the door so hard it smashed against the wall.

  ‘Get out or I’ll kill you!’ she cried.

  Emily’s eyes grew wide as a slim, elegant woman smoking a cigarette in a long cigarette holder walked towards her

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice that could have cut crystal. ‘I’m Daphne.’

  Lillian, Agnes, Elsie and Emily gaped in wonder at the apparition in their sitting room.

  ‘God!’ exclaimed Daphne as she tossed her fox fur onto the sofa. ‘Isn’t this place absolutely ghaaastly?’

  CHAPTER 21

  Cracking

  Winter at Helford House was a perfect white wonderland outside, but inside it was ten degrees below zero with only two fires in the entire establishment. A huge log fire in the drawing room and a wood burner in the dining room, both of which were kept going day and night, were the only sources of heat, but luckily Alice and Robin had their love to keep them warm.

  As Christmas approached, Alice wondered if they’d get Christmas leave. She so wanted to take Robin to Pendle to meet her family and friends, but theirs was no ordinary war work. Their demanding schedule rolled on regardless of bank holidays, and although she never voiced it, Alice was secretly glad because while she might not be with her family and friends, at least she’d be with Robin. And, she thought to herself, who knew how many Christmases they could look forward to together?

  They were no longer referred to as the ‘new recruits’ since fresh trainees had arrived and the senior team mysteriously disappeared over the space of a few days.

  ‘Dropped’, the word went round.

  It gave Alice food for sombre thought. Thirty recruits at a time underwent thorough training for dangerous, intensive action – then they disappeared like they had never existed. One chilling question she and her friends had discussed in their freezing dorm, smoking cigarettes to keep warm, was what was the average life expectancy of a Special Op. Gwynne said six weeks if they were captured; Gladys said much longer if they could operate effectively behind enemy lines; Iris starkly said, ‘But then there’s torture.’

  Whatever the answer, Alice now knew that Special Ops were a breed apart; they were all motivated by the certainty that right was on their side and that victory was a prerequisite for any kind of decent future. Equipped with false identities, they would be expected to play a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the Gestapo while doing their best to wreak havoc deep inside enemy ranks. To this end Alice and her colleagues had had to acquire a range of new skills, spending their time on shooting practice and parachute training, wireless operating and Morse decoding, which was drummed into them daily, month after month.

  They started with learning the Morse alphabet by rote, which was slow, tedious and boring.

  ‘I’ll need bi-focals by the time I’ve got this lot under my belt,’ joked Gwynne as she squinted at the arrangements of dots and dashes that formed letters.

  For days on end they practised writing five words a minute, and after a few weeks of this exacting process the whole Morse alphabet was familiar to the Ops.

  In her sleep Alice dreamed Morse and in her dreams she recognized the series of metallic tips and taps that spelled out a random assortment of words like weather, horse, car and train.

  ‘Been dreaming in Morse code again,’ Alice told her dorm friends as she dressed one morning. ‘I wish it would stop. Not only am I decoding all day, it’s all night too!’ she grumbled.

  Alice’s training in the munitions factory made her instinctively good at bomb assembly, plus she was given additional training in explosives, which set her apart from the others. In the isolated snowy countryside she was taught how to set a bomb in order to sink a boat, blow up a bridge or bomb a railway engine. She was also taught how to derail an express train with an overcoat if there wasn’t a bomb handy!

  Robin, who’d been selected as a Special Op because of his previous wireless experience, was streets ahead of his contemporaries; luckily for Alice, he spent a lot of his spare time helping her acquire the expertise he had a natural flair for.

  ‘One of the terrifying problems in the field is atmospheric conditions. It’s a bloody nightmare,’ he said as they practised late one night. ‘Dampness causes weak transmissions and lightning interferes with electricity in the atmosphere – that’s when you get hisses as transmitting cuts out.’

  ‘So what do you do if that happens?’ Alice asked.

  ‘Try to find a dry place to transmit, preferably indoors – and avoid lightning,’ he said with a cheeky wink.

  One of their most fascinating lectures was their tutor’s introduction to poem codes.

  ‘From a poem you select five words, you give each letter of those words a number and from those numbers you transpose the message,’ their communications tutor explained. ‘You repeat the process for security purposes – this is called a double transposition – and then, just to be on the safe side, you do it a third time. It’s tedious but it works.’

  He paused to look round at his class eagerly taking notes.

  ‘Never choose an obvious poem or something predictable like “God Save the King”. If the enemy were to intercept it they could probably break the code because the poem is so well known. Go for something more obscure, so that even if the enemy managed to break one message they wouldn’t automatically break the rest.’

  On top of learning so many facts, there were the vital physical details to take on board too.

  ‘In order to transmit you need an earth cable, an antenna wire and, of course, your radio set. Take care of the valves that power your set; they’re fragile and if they break in transmission, you’ll have a problem. And remember that once you’re hooked up, the valves take a long time to warm up; they don’t just ping into life.’

  Alice’s stomach churned. How would she ever be calm enough or have time enough to set everything up? How could she avoid making mistakes that might cost her her life?

  As if reading her thoughts, the tutor continued, ‘Agents in the field, surrounded by the enemy, petrified, might sometimes panic and make mistakes when coding. There might be no electric light; the Germans might be in the next room. If you make a mistake whilst transmitting and London can’t read it, London might ask you to re-encode that message, but in that time you could end up getting caught.’

  Next to her, Robin surreptitiously took her hand and squeezed it as the tutor pressed on with the worst-case scenario.

  ‘If an agent’s captured it’s essential that he should be able to tell us so that we can take the necessary steps to rescue him.’

  Alice let out a low sigh.

  ‘That’s the best news I’ve heard all morning,’ she murmured under her breath.

  ‘For example some agents use an agreed security check; they have a system of making a deliberate spelling mistake every third or fifth or tenth word. If they fail to make repeated spelling mistakes, it sends out an alert that they’ve been caught.

  ‘What if you’re on the run and working in the dark? You’re bound to make a mistake,’ Robin pointed out. ‘Won’t London assume, because of all the mistakes, that you’ve been captured?’

  ‘Hopefully, the mistakes you’re talking about will be a lot more random than a conscious mistake every third or fifth word,’ the tutor replied. ‘These are the fine details that we, at this end, must sieve through in order to protect our Ops out in the field.’

  In another lesson the tutor tapped o
ut a message on the Morse code machine.

  ‘Listen to how loud these metal keys sound.’

  Everybody held their breath to listen.

  ‘Unfortunately these machines are noisy enough to give your location away. There’s nothing we can do about that, apart from muffle the keys, which would be pointless. The quicker you transmit your message, the safer you’ll be. Do the job, then get the hell out!’

  Over coffee in the common room the nervous Ops swapped notes.

  ‘Why doesn’t somebody invent silent keys made of plastic?’ Gwynne said as she blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke.

  ‘The chap’s right about getting the job done fast,’ Robin said as he puffed on his pipe. ‘The Huns are better than us at quickly detecting where the enemy signal’s coming from; they can trace the agent’s location on the map in no time.’

  ‘It’s all well and good him telling us the quicker the better, but what if we’ve smashed the valves in the radio set or there’s a bloody lightning strike and the atmospheric conditions are abysmal?’ Gladys asked gloomily.

  A long silence followed as they fiddled about lighting up cigarettes and stirring their coffee while they all avoided voicing the answer to Gladys’s grim question. Alice secretly wondered whether, if she was cornered by the enemy, she would rip open her shirt cuff and swallow the cyanide pill hidden there.

  Advanced parachute training followed their wireless and decoding classes. After a daily, heavy-duty workout, followed by a cross-country run in freezing conditions, they practised various jumping routines. Leaping through apertures that were cut in the bottom of the fuselages of obsolete aircraft, they dropped about twelve feet onto coconut matting, which helped to break the impact of the fall. The daily practice helped Alice, who was terrified of heights. She slowly built up her confidence by repeatedly jumping out of the fuselage, familiarizing herself with the drop, then rolling neatly into a ball after landing. The instructor constantly varied the techniques of the exercise, asking the trainees to fall into forward or backward rolls as they dropped. Agile as a cat after months of hard training, Alice and her team learned the importance of keeping their knees and feet together during the drop.

  ‘Don’t part your legs,’ the instructor bellowed if their thighs, knees and feet weren’t clamped tight. ‘You’re not in bed with a tart!’

  Even though they were taught thoroughly, nothing prepared Alice for her first drop from a Whitley aircraft. When they were flying at an altitude of a thousand feet the navigator gave the red light for the first parachutist to stand by the door, ready for the green light that gave the signal to ‘Go’. With the aircraft travelling at around a hundred miles an hour, even a slight miscalculation by the navigator could mean missing the drop zone by a considerable distance and might result in death in real life.

  When the green ‘GO’ sign came up for Alice she closed her eyes, held her breath and dropped out of the Whitley. In a matter of seconds she was plummeting to the ground whilst experiencing a tight, gripping sensation in the pit of her stomach that made her feel slightly sick. As air rushed through her mouth and nostrils, she dropped like a stone at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. Overwhelmed by sheer terror, Alice was opening her mouth to scream when what felt like a giant hand swept her up by the shoulders. A great flood of relief rushed over Alice as the silk canopy of the parachute billowed open above her like a huge mushroom. Floating gently earthwards, Alice laughed out loud with a wonderful sense of exhilaration.

  ‘I’VE DONE IT!’ she yelled into the arching blue sky.

  By manipulating her harness straps she could control and guide her parachute into snowy fields down below rather than land in a densely wooded area or, worse still, ditch in the freezing waters of the Channel.

  Once on the ground Alice struggled out of her parachute then, remembering her instructor’s words, she proceeded to bury it. Robin, who’d landed minutes before her, muttered angrily as he too buried his parachute.

  ‘Bloody waste of precious time,’ he said. ‘It takes half an hour! By which time you could have been caught by the enemy.’

  ‘What else are you supposed to do with the wretched thing?’ Alice laughed.

  ‘The professionals on the ground say just chuck the parachute into the nearest bushes and get away from the drop point as quickly as possible,’ he replied.

  A shiver ran through Alice as she thought of how soon their turn would come to make their first real drop into dangerous enemy territory.

  Meanwhile, back at Helford House, they embarked on a more sophisticated form of surveillance training that was termed ‘cracking’.

  ‘Cracking is something we expect the women on the course to excel at,’ the commanding officer said with a knowing smile. ‘Which is why we prefer our female agents to be clever, pretty and seductive.’

  ‘That would explain the naughty black lingerie,’ Gwynne giggled.

  ‘Learning to outwit, outmanoeuvre, second-guess and deceive are tools special to a spy,’ their commanding officer said.

  One wintry afternoon Alice was put to the test; she was sent undercover to link up with a new recruit, who she was instructed to ‘crack’.

  ‘We’ve got to find out if he’s trustworthy,’ her commanding officer told her. ‘No point in going to the trouble of training the lad if he’s all blab and no action. See if you can crack him with your pretty face and innocent eyes; see if you can squeeze the poor bastard,’ he ended with a chuckle.

  Choosing her best mushroom-coloured crêpe dress and a fur coat borrowed from Iris, Alice waited in a hotel overlooking the Helford River for her recruit to arrive.

  Wearing a thick tweed suit and a flashy cravat, he bounced into the hotel lobby and vigorously shook Alice by the hand as he introduced himself.

  ‘Clive Rees,’ he said with a wide smile.

  Alice chose a quiet corner by a roaring fire, and they ordered gin and tonics and cheese and pickle sandwiches. As the light faded over the wide river, Alice, looking pretty and deceptively delicate, made apparent small talk with Clive, who was already on his second gin.

  ‘Are you going to be here for long?’ she asked casually.

  ‘Well, no, actually, I’m leaving next week,’ Clive replied with a fake self-conscious smile.

  Alice’s mind reeled at his indiscretion. Was he just trying to impress her or had he already forgotten the basic rules of his training? Never reveal anything.

  Feigning surprise, she batted her eyelids as she pressed on with her questions.

  ‘How thrilling!’ she gushed. ‘Where are you going?’

  With a swagger, the raw recruit moved closer to Alice, so close she could smell the gin on his breath.

  ‘I’m organizing resistance groups so that when the invasion comes there are people ready to stand up and rebel against the Germans,’ he blabbed. Lowering his voice to a melodramatic whisper, he added, ‘I’m being parachuted into enemy-occupied territory.’

  You’ve totally blown it, Alice thought, but her expression remained sweetly impressed.

  After half an hour of even more careless talk from Clive she rose and said she had to go. By now rather tipsy, Clive lurched towards her and tried to plant a kiss on her cheek. Alice skilfully evaded his advances by pretending to look for her gloves.

  ‘Can I see you again before … you know, I disappear into the ether?’ Clive said sotto voce.

  Alice agreed to meet him early the following week, a date she had no intention of keeping, but at least it got him out of her hair.

  The next day the commanding officer called Alice and Clive into his office.

  ‘Do you know this woman?’ the Brigadier asked.

  Realizing he’d been busted, the raw recruit flushed in embarrassment then shouted at Alice, ‘You bitch! You set me up!’

  Later Alice guiltily told Robin what had happened.

  ‘I did a terrible thing,’ she confessed. ‘The poor chap was dismissed on the spot.’

  Robin gave her a hug.

/>   ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ he said. ‘If the man can’t resist showing off to a pretty face he’s going to be useless in the field, when it won’t only be his life that’s in jeopardy but many others too.’

  As 1943 dawned the Ops at Helford House threw a party. Food was procured from the surrounding countryside: a side of smoked ham was bought from a neighbouring farmer with their combined food coupons, and eaten with allotment-grown potatoes, cabbage and leeks. And there was no shortage of booze, thanks to their local black-market contacts.

  ‘After all, we are spies!’ joked Robin. ‘If we can’t track down contraband goods, who can?’

  Helford House was bright with bunting and flickering candles, and the Christmas tree in the drawing room was so tall it almost touched the ceiling. After the meal the recruits took to the floor, dancing all night to the strains of Cole Porter, Anne Shelton, Glenn Miller and Joe Loss.

  It was a wonderfully romantic evening, which Alice and her friends had carefully prepared for. Iris already had an evening dress but Alice, Gladys and Gwynne hadn’t. They tracked down lengths of cloth in junk shops and stayed up late into the night stitching their gowns with frozen fingers. Alice’s silver-grey velvet dress had a deep V neckline and long sleeves, and it fitted tightly around her slender frame, emphasizing her pale skin and stunning silver-blonde hair.

  She gasped when she saw Robin, elegant in an evening suit, waiting for her on the stairs.

  ‘You look so handsome,’ she sighed as she stroked the lapels of his fine suit.

  ‘And you look like a dream!’ he said as he bent to kiss her full pink lips. ‘That dress is so lovely I want to take it off!’

  As they dipped and spun to a lovely Vera Lynn waltz number, Alice closed her eyes and lost herself in the moment. With Robin’s arms around her and the music playing out, she promised herself that she would treasure this golden candlelit moment, keep it for ever and remember it when times weren’t quite as wonderful.

  ‘Do you love me, darling?’ Robin whispered in her ear.