The Bomb Girls

by Daisy Styles

  ‘Ugh! Not that stuff,’ Elsie laughed as she wrinkled her nose at the fizzing wine.

  ‘Don’t let the hatchet-faced sister see us drinking!’ Lillian giggled as she took a brimming mug from Daphne.

  ‘I’ll just tell her it’s Eno’s Liver Salts,’ laughed Elsie.

  Daphne raised her mug.

  ‘Here’s to you all, my brave and wonderful Bomb Sisters!’

  As the girls thumped their mugs together, Emily solemnly added a second toast.

  ‘And here’s to our little Elsie, the girl who saved all our lives!’

  Elsie blushed.

  ‘Don’t be daft!’

  She grimaced as she forced herself to swallow a drop of Daphne’s champagne, then gave a little burp.

  It was lovely to go back to the digs with Daphne.

  ‘I’ve been so lonely here,’ Emily admitted as they settled down in front of the crackling wood-burning stove that Emily had lit on their return. ‘Tell me,’ she urged, ‘how’s married life suiting you?’

  Daphne took her time placing a cigarette in her long silver holder then lighting it with a silver-filigreed cigarette lighter.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said as she exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  Emily’s big blue eyes widened in disbelief.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  Daphne nodded.

  ‘It’s rather a bore,’ she said without a hint of emotion.

  Emily was so stunned she couldn’t think of a word to say.

  ‘Rodders is all right but he’s either on a bombing raid, or holed up in a Nissen hut waiting for a bombing raid, or he’s home talking about the bally bombing raid!’

  Emily burst out laughing.

  ‘There’s got to be more to it than that!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Well, there’re the cocktail parties in the officers’ mess and the dinner parties, but to be honest I’ve had more fun sitting in this room with my hair in rollers and drinking beer whilst laughing with my dearest girl friends.’

  ‘We’ve had some happy times together,’ Emily agreed. After a thoughtful pause she said, ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Oh, put up with it, of course,’ Daphne replied cheerfully. ‘See if things improve when the war’s over. Hope for the best!’ she finished with a shrug. ‘Anyway, what about you? Still the vestal virgin of the Pennine Way?’ she teased.

  ‘I haven’t been chasing around after Freddie,’ Emily replied. ‘Not that I’ve seen him,’ she added with a cheeky giggle. ‘If he sees me he runs a mile.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you in the circs?’ Daphne tittered. ‘Knowing you’ve got a photo of him stark bollock naked on a moonlit moor might curb his randy ways till peace is declared.’ Daphne paused as she gave Emily a long critical stare. ‘Believe me, darling, there are plenty of fish in the sea for a gorgeous young woman like you.’

  Emily shrugged.

  ‘I’ve lost interest in men, apart from one, and he’s definitely lost interest in me,’ she replied.

  ‘Time to move on, darling.’

  A few days after Daphne had left for London, little Esther suddenly appeared at the open window beside Agnes’s bed.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ she said as she thrust a bunch of spring flowers through the window. ‘Daddy and I have come to visit you!’

  Agnes stared at her daughter in joy and disbelief.

  ‘How did you get here?’ she gasped.

  ‘Daddy brought me,’ Esther replied. ‘But children aren’t allowed inside so I’ve got to stay out here!’

  Emily rushed outside to see Esther whilst Stan hurried into the hospital to kiss his wounded wife.

  ‘You never told me you were coming!’ Agnes cried.

  ‘I wanted to come as soon as I heard about the explosion,’ Stan said as he sat with his arm around his wife’s shoulders. ‘But Esther fell ill with a hospital tummy bug – constant sickness and diarrhoea – and I couldn’t risk passing that on to you, sweetheart, not in your fragile condition.’ He gently stroked her bandaged brow. ‘I tried phoning … Did nobody pass on my messages?’

  Agnes shook her head.

  ‘It’s been chaos in here since the accident,’ she said. ‘Never mind, you’re both here now,’ she said as she smiled tenderly. ‘Seeing the two people I love most in the world is the best medicine I could possibly have.’

  Suddenly Stan was deadly serious.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Agnes, something that’s going to affect all of us.’

  Agnes’s heart sank. Was it going to be bad news about him returning to Cambridge for further treatment? Or was it about Esther’s hospitalization?

  ‘Esther’s making great progress; she’s well on the way to recovery. So I’ve decided that as soon as she’s discharged from the hospital in Keswick I’m going to look for work round here. We’re going to come and be with you.’

  ‘Stan!’ Agnes spluttered as tears stung her eyes.

  ‘We’re all going to be together from now on,’ he concluded.

  ‘But …’ she said hesitantly, ‘if you’re discharged won’t you get called up again?’

  Stan’s dark eyes clouded.

  ‘No,’ he answered firmly. ‘I’ve looked into it, and my mental history exempts me from further combat.’

  Unable to throw herself into her husband’s arms, Agnes laid her head against his warm chest and wept.

  ‘Thank God,’ she whispered.

  Wiping tears from his own eyes, Stan said, ‘Come on, let’s go and see Esther.’

  Leaning on her husband’s arm, Agnes blinked in the bright spring sunshine as Esther approached her, then tears filled her eyes as she realized that her little girl was walking confidently towards her.

  ‘Look, Mummy, I’m getting better,’ Esther cried as she fell into her mother’s open arms.

  ‘Oh, my darling! My darling!’ Agnes sobbed with joy.

  Stan brought a chair, which he set under an apple tree heavy with pink blossom. Esther clambered onto her mother’s lap, where she made a daisy chain, similar to the one she’d made for her father in the hospital garden in Cambridge. Esther draped the flowers around her mother’s neck and laid a pretty crown of blossom on her head.

  ‘Queen of the May, the prettiest mummy in the world!’

  After a few days Stan and Esther went back to Keswick to finalize the details of their move and Agnes had an eye operation.

  Lillian had her stitches taken out and she returned to the digs, the first to be discharged from the hospital. Then she stuck to her word and immediately cut herself a Lauren Bacall fringe, which hid her scar and made her look even more sexy.

  ‘Wait till Gary sees my new look!’ she laughed excitedly.

  As Agnes’s damaged eye slowly healed, Emily worried about Elsie.

  ‘What will you do when you’re discharged?’ she asked when they were alone during her hospital visit.

  ‘Stop fretting, it’s all arranged,’ Elsie replied. ‘I’m going to live with Tommy’s mother and look after mi son.’

  Emily looked down at the damaged arm that wasn’t swathed in bandages any more but neatly plastered into a tight stump.

  ‘But … ?’

  Elsie answered the question before Emily could ask it.

  ‘Mi left hand’s all right and when this has properly healed,’ she waved the stump in the air, ‘I’ll get a fake hand fitted.’

  Emily bit her lip hard to fight back the tears; if Elsie was holding it together she damn well could.

  ‘I’ll miss working at the Phoenix and I’ll really miss living with you all in the digs, but I’ve missed my little boy,’ Elsie confessed. ‘I’ll be happy to spend more time with him.’

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ Emily said softly.

  ‘Eh! Don’t run away with the idea that you won’t see me regular, like,’ Elsie laughed. ‘Them Phoenix chip butties have a right big pull on me!’

  The Phoenix reopened a month after the explosion. The factory area that housed the bomb line had been b
lown clean away, leaving nothing but a shell, and the entire section had had to be rebuilt: walls, roof and a new concrete floor. Luckily the flames never reached as far as the loading sheds so the bombs stored there, so urgently needed on the front line, had been transported to airbases for immediate dispatch.

  When the Phoenix doors opened again Mr Featherstone welcomed the Bomb Girls back.

  ‘I know you’ve heard it before, girls,’ he said as they gathered in the rebuilt canteen. ‘But Hitler and his armies really are on the run and we need more bombs than ever – in our case especially so, since the forced closure of the factory after the blast reduced our productivity to zero!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Featherstone, us Bomb Girls’ll make up for lost time,’ said a stout woman in the crowd.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, ladies – there’s none finer than you,’ their boss answered with undisguised pride.

  ‘Back to work!’ called Malc.

  Determined to destroy the enemy once and for all, the indefatigable munitions girls returned to work, little knowing that in just a few days’ time their bombs and many thousands more would be needed for the D-Day landings on the coast of northern France.

  CHAPTER 33

  Capture

  It was a lonely and frightening existence for Alice and Robin after they successfully destroyed the vital railway link out of Marseilles.

  ‘We have to lie low till the heat’s off,’ Robin had said as they went their separate ways in the dark.

  ‘I wish we didn’t have to live separately,’ Alice grumbled one night as they dodged the night curfew in order to snatch five precious minutes together.

  Robin nodded as he nuzzled her soft warm cheek.

  ‘It’s tough, darling,’ he agreed. ‘But if my safe house gets busted at least the Gestapo will only find me and not you; it’s simply minimizing the risk.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said as she clung to him, dreading the moment when they’d have to say goodbye.

  Their instructions were clear: to blend unobtrusively into the community, to maintain communications with headquarters and to carry out their missions without being arrested.

  The most disappointing and frustrating thing was that communications, particularly their vital London link, frequently failed, which left not just Alice and Robin in the dark but every other Special Op too.

  ‘The bloody Germans are getting too clever by half,’ Robin told Alice. ‘Their technique for tracking down clandestine Ops is more sophisticated than ours. Go carefully, my sweet.’

  After Robin’s warning Alice kept her wireless communications to the barest minimum. Fearful that the Gestapo might randomly pick up her location, she exchanged messages with London only at pre-arranged times then rapidly stowed her wireless set in the kindling box.

  When her work was done there was nothing Alice could do but wait, and it was in the long boring hours that she decided to write a letter in encrypted code to Emily.

  ‘Nobody but a Special Op will ever be able to read it,’ she said into the silence of the flat. ‘But it’ll be the next best thing to talking to Emily and it might make me feel less lonely.’

  She sharpened her pencil, opened her small notebook and began to write.

  Dearest Emily,

  How are you and Elsie, Agnes, Lillian, Esther and little Jonty? I miss you all so much. I miss Pendle too, and who would think I would ever say that? I’m in the south of France, which, as you know from all my endless fantasies, is somewhere I always longed to be. Well, I’m here in Marseilles, not teaching French and reading the French classics but decoding and intercepting radio messages from agents in the field. My days at the Phoenix paid off and I’m told I can assemble a bomb quicker than any female undercover agent in the area!

  Not long ago Robin and I were given our first sabotage assignment; we were sent under the cover of darkness to blow up the main railway track out of Marseilles. I know I’ve handled detonators and explosives before, but laying a bomb in the dark with the Gestapo breathing down our necks was without doubt the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life so far.

  I don’t just fear for myself, Em, I fear for Robin too. I love him so much. He’s so clever and funny and brave and sexy. I can’t imagine life without him, yet here I am, employed in the most dangerous occupation, madly in love with a fellow spy. A foolish arrangement, given that life expectancy in the field can be less than six weeks and

  Her coded message was brought to an abrupt end when a blank piece of paper was slipped under her door; it was their pre-arranged signal to meet up. Alice stuffed the notebook under the newspapers in the kindling box, then quickly threw together a meagre picnic and waited for Robin. When she heard him down below in the courtyard ringing his bicycle bell, Alice skipped down the sweeping staircase with her basket. Hopping onto her bicycle, she set off with Robin, looking like the smiling young lovers that they were. They cycled out into the countryside where, instead of kissing and cuddling all afternoon, they planned their next explosion.

  ‘All we ever do is talk war and destruction,’ Alice moaned as they sat in a field full of swaying red poppies.

  ‘That’s why we’re here, my darling,’ he said as he gave her a kiss.

  ‘So, tell me, what’s our next assignment?’ she asked as she tenderly twirled the blond moustache he’d grown since they were dropped into France.

  ‘To take out a factory producing landing gear for the German Focke-Wulf 190 fighter,’ he replied.

  Alice stared at him thunderstruck.

  ‘What?’ she gasped. ‘Blowing up a major railway line was scary enough but taking out a German factory …’ She shook her head as words failed her. ‘What on earth happened to our original communications brief?’

  ‘I think the answer to your question, my sweet, is that, for some reason or another, there’s nobody on the ground apart from you who can handle explosives,’ Robin answered grimly.

  Alice fell silent. She didn’t need Robin to tell her that the Op she was replacing was probably dead or had been taken prisoner by the Gestapo.

  ‘The tide’s turning,’ Robin said. ‘We’re on the attack and London says hit ’em hard and where it really hurts.’

  Alice got straight to the point.

  ‘I’ll need more explosive material.’

  Robin nodded.

  ‘It’s been arranged. I’ll bring it with me.’

  ‘Who’s our contact?’ she asked.

  ‘One of the factory workers will guide us in,’ Robin replied.

  ‘When?’ she asked as she wondered if she’d enough explosive for such a huge job.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ he answered.

  ‘So soon!’

  ‘We’ll leave the city immediately after the attack – the place will be crawling with the Gestapo.’

  ‘Will we be together again?’ she whispered.

  ‘For a short time, yes,’ he replied, then he added, ‘Meet me at ten o’clock at the bandstand in the park opposite the factory.’

  ‘What about the curfew?’ she asked.

  ‘We can duck and dive around that; we’ve done it before,’ he said.

  Then, seized by a sudden urgency, he started to load up her picnic basket.

  ‘Sorry, sweetheart, I’m feeling edgy. Let’s pack up and go home separately.’

  Alice spent the next day nervously preparing for the attack. She had everything she needed: charger, detonators, some explosive, and Robin had promised to bring more. If there wasn’t enough to take out the entire factory there was certainly enough to blow out the central walls and that would bring the roof down. Either way it would have a disastrous effect on the production of landing gear for the Focke-Wulf 190 fighter, she thought with a smile.

  If Robin was right they’d be out of Marseilles by midnight and on their way to a safe house far away. Alice thought excitedly of the night train that would whisk them to safety.

  In the hours she had to fill before meeting up with Robin, Alice took out her not
ebook and continued writing her coded message to Emily.

  I often think of you in the digs. We had such happy times together. I wonder how you all are. Is the Phoenix still as busy? Do you still dance to Workers’ Playtime during your tea breaks?

  When I’m frightened I let my mind drift back home, and it’s always to the moors, rolling away higher and higher, with the sun beating down, or the snow falling. In my fantasy I’m walking with you right to the very top, where we stand just like we did as children, staring across the vast expanse of the Pennine Way with the wind lifting our hair.

  I love you, Emily. I always will.

  All my love,

  Alice

  When it was time to leave Alice once again buried the little notebook at the bottom of the kindling box.

  Wearing dark clothes and a cloche hat that covered her silver-bright hair, Alice left the flat. Avoiding the curfew meant scurrying through unlit back streets, hugging the shadows and freezing if she caught sight of a gendarme or, worse still, one of the Gestapo who patrolled the streets nightly. Alice carried a string bag of shopping, her ‘bomb bread’ as Robin jokingly called her explosive baguettes. Her pockets were stuffed with false identity papers and her false passport, which she hoped would protect her if she was caught prowling the streets during curfew hours.

  Robin was waiting for her behind the bandstand in the park.

  ‘The factory’s guarded by soldiers,’ he whispered as they crouched in the shadows. ‘We’ll have to hide and see how often they pass there.’

  Silently, they slipped through the park, ducking behind trees and diving into bushes until they were opposite the factory. Avoiding the floodlights at the front of the building, they crept towards the high metal fence that ran along the side. Robin nodded towards a dense oleander bush and they wriggled into it.

  ‘From here we can time how often the guard passes,’ he hissed into Alice’s ear.

  With adrenalin coursing through their blood, they watched one armed guard walk the length of the fence, and as he did so he crossed paths with another. They stopped to exchange a few words and light up their cigarettes then went on their way.