Under a Wartime Sky

by Liz Trenow

  Even though Ma kept herself busy catering for the WRVS, at home she was often tearful, especially when they heard the drone of bombers flying towards Europe. With binoculars it was possible to see distant dog-fights taking place over the North Sea. The worst shock came later in August, when German planes dropped sixteen bombs onto the town centre, destroying houses and the signal box near the station. The train Pa was working on had just left for Ipswich. Although no one died, several people were injured. It was another very close shave.

  She wrote to Vic:

  Just to reassure you that although we’ve had a couple of air raids, and some damage to the town, we are all still safe here. I still long to join up as a WAAF and feel that I’m actually doing something useful but for the moment my parents won’t even consider the idea, so I’ll just have to wait till there’s a call-up and they won’t have any choice but to let me go.

  At Christmas, Mark was given a couple of days’ leave. He gave little away, saying only that his work was exciting and of course he would stay safe. But later, when he and Kath stayed up late, she asked him. ‘I suppose you were just flannelling the parents earlier?’

  ‘Can’t have them worrying even more than they have to,’ he said, cracking open another bottle of beer.

  ‘Aren’t you terrified, most of the time?’

  ‘Just for a few moments, when the call comes, yes, I’m bloody petrified. But when we’re flying there’s never time to think about it, and when we’re back on the ground we’re either partying or asleep. That’s my life.’

  ‘Have any of your friends been killed?’

  ‘Of course; some of them close friends.’ He lit another cigarette, and blew an expert smoke ring towards the ceiling. ‘But you can’t dwell on it. You just have to get on with it and do your job as best you can. There is no other choice. The idea of Germany taking over our country is unthinkable, so if I die, it will have been in the best possible cause. The strange thing is that even though we face death almost every day, I’ve never felt more alive.’

  Kath envied him so much: his sense of purpose, his certainty that the Germans would soon be sent packing, his faith in British aircraft and technical ingenuity. She longed to follow his example, to do something useful, to experience that heightened sense of being alive. All her closest friends were having adventures, and her own life seemed to be on hold.

  Later that spring, the call-up for women began. Kath overheard one of the other air-raid wardens saying that if you volunteered, rather than waiting to be conscripted, you would be more likely to get the service you chose. Next day, she went to the Town Hall and signed up.

  19

  She didn’t break the news until after tea, when both of her parents were at home.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she began, heart in mouth.

  ‘I already know what it is,’ Ma said, putting down her knitting. ‘Norma saw you leaving the Town Hall this morning. Made a special point of singling me out after our shift. “Your girl gone to sign up at last, has she?” The sanctimonious witch . . .’

  ‘Shush, Maggie,’ Pa murmured. ‘You know her son was badly injured a few months ago?’

  ‘That doesn’t give her the right . . .’ Ma turned to Kath. ‘So, have you?’

  ‘I was going to be called up anyway, and I wanted to be able to choose. They’ve got vacancies in the WAAFs, they said.’

  Ma gave a little gasp, but said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll be posted somewhere nearby?’ Pa volunteered.

  ‘You know I’ll have to go where they send me.’

  ‘You might even bump into Mark.’

  Ma seemed to be studying her knitting with particular care.

  ‘We’ll miss you, sweetheart,’ Pa said, filling the silence. ‘But we’re very proud of you; aren’t we, Mags?’

  Ma came over to Kath’s chair, putting her arms around her and kissing the top of her head. ‘Just so long as you’re safe, my darling,’ she said, quietly.

  Three months later, after a thoroughly embarrassing medical examination declared her to be A-1, Kath’s call-up papers arrived. She was to report to an RAF base north of London, and a rail warrant was included, along with a precise timetable. Waiting for the connection at King’s Cross she met another recruit, smartly dressed and well made up, her auburn hair resting in perfect curls onto her shoulders.

  ‘Marcia Bonham; pleased to meet you.’ The handshake was firm and confident, her vowels posh, so it was quite a surprise when she told Kath that she’d been working in a factory, ‘making bits for bombs’.

  Kath struggled to imagine this educated, fashionable woman wearing factory overalls. ‘Why did you give it up?’

  Marcia smiled. ‘Not sure, really. Suppose I just wanted to be more in the thick of it.’

  If only I had an ounce of her confidence, Kath thought. ‘I hope you get what you want. I’m told it’s the luck of the draw.’

  ‘If I learned nothing else in the factory, it is that you have to be bold or you’ll never get anywhere. Men are successful because they decide what they want and go all out to get it. Women have been taught to hold back and think they’re not good enough, so we’re always lagging behind. We need to think and act more like men.’

  Kath laughed. ‘I hadn’t really thought of it that way.’

  ‘And if all else fails, we still have our special persuasive powers.’ Marcia cocked her head, gave a false smile and fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Works every time.’

  Kath’s first few days in the WAAF were a series of horrible shocks. Each time, she felt it could not get any worse.

  She’d been warned that they’d have to bunk up, but hadn’t expected to find nearly fifty others sharing a flimsy corrugated iron hut set in a field. The iron bedsteads were equipped with three two-foot squares of hard wadding (known to all as ‘biscuits’) that you had to jam together to make a mattress, a pillow stuffed with prickly straw and a single woollen blanket so heavy it felt like sleeping under lead weights. Everything was damp, the rain battered on the roof like gunfire and she barely slept a wink.

  On their first morning they were set an initial intelligence test. She found it nerve-racking, not knowing what importance they would place on the results when deciding your fate. At first the questions were easy, lulling her into a sense of false security, till she came across this one: Mary, who is sixteen years old, is four times as old as her brother. How old will Mary be when she is twice as old as her brother?

  Her brain froze as the seconds ticked by. She made a stab in the dark, discovered that it was wrong. Get a grip, Kath, just use logic. She wrote out Mary’s birthdays until she reached twenty-four. Yes, that was right. Phew. She hurried on.

  Which number logically follows the series? That was easy enough to calculate, using plus, minus, multiplication and division signs. Which of the following animals is the odd one out? Again, fairly obvious; a snake doesn’t have four legs. Except that the elephant is the only one with a trunk. She dithered before opting for the snake.

  How many of the smaller shapes can you use to fill the largest shape? Kath panicked, looking up over so many heads bent intently over their papers. Then she pulled herself together. The field with the hedges, she told herself, how to calculate surface area. She visualised Adam whispering, ‘Don’t panic, it’s simple if you just . . .’ Across the room she saw Marcia, also looking up. She smiled back. Think like a man, she said to herself.

  The rest of their induction went by in a whirl of instruction, marching, physical jerks and yet more form-filling. Kath ate well and slept more soundly than she had in months.

  One afternoon she accompanied a friend to the only public telephone in the camp. They joined the queue of recruits and watched as each girl entered the box, lifted the receiver, inserted her two pennies, waited and pressed button ‘A’, her lips just managing to form the words ‘Hello Mum’ before dissolving into tears. However much she longed to hear her mother’s voice, Kath was, for once, relieved that they d
id not have a telephone at home. Instead she wrote a letter:

  To be honest it’s hard going right now, but nothing worse than I expected [this was a lie], and we live in hope. I miss you, and home comforts, but I feel certain things will get easier as I get used to WAAF ways. We don’t yet know which ‘trade’ we’ll be given, but I’ll let you know just as soon as I get a more permanent address.

  There was just one final test to survive, the most important of all. The ‘trades allocation’ interviews would seal their fates for the rest of the war – and who knew how long that might be? Possibly years. There were three choices: becoming a Motor Transport (MT) driver; a batwoman, which, she gathered, involved being just an officer’s personal servant; or an RDF operator, which, following Vic’s advice, she’d set her heart on. But this was deemed a ‘Grade Two’ trade requiring a good educational standard and a sound knowledge of geometry, and she was by no means confident that she would make the grade.

  The alternatives just didn’t appeal. Her family had never owned a car and she’d never had any inclination to drive, so she reckoned that would count her out as an MT driver. But the thought of spending the rest of the war as a batwoman, making tea and shining senior bosses’ shoes, filled her with horror. Oh, the humiliation, and sheer boredom.

  Next day, crammed onto hard benches in a stuffy hut with nearly a hundred other girls, her head ached and somehow the big breakfast she’d consumed wasn’t settling. As she waited she took out her old schoolbook, glancing through the notes she’d made for her school cert exams, looking for nuggets of knowledge that might help her persuade them of her desirability as an RDF operator: how to calculate the surface area, arc length and areas of squares, polygons, circles and cones, the main theories of trigonometry and how vectors worked. The numbers seemed to swim before her eyes.

  In the interview room was a table with a single chair on one side and, on the other, a man and a woman who barely acknowledged her presence save for a curt, ‘Miss Motts? Sit, please.’

  She settled herself and waited.

  ‘So why do you want to be an RDF operator?’

  ‘Until the outbreak of war I was working at Bawdsey Manor.’ She saw their eyes widen, as she knew they would. It was a bold gambit and might backfire, but she’d decided to spin it anyway. Work at the Manor was always top secret, but Mark had told her that the name, along with that of Robert Watson-Watt, had become legendary.

  ‘I know almost nothing about what RDF is or does,’ she added quickly. ‘But I saw the interesting people involved in the work there, and that’s what inspired me to apply.’ She certainly had their attention. They shared a glance, and were now regarding her with the curiosity a biologist might give to a rare specimen.

  ‘Do you mind telling us a bit about what you were doing there, if it’s not confidential?’ the woman asked.

  There was no point in lying; she’d soon be found out. ‘I was working in the kitchens.’

  ‘So you’re a cook?’

  Kath’s heart sank, certain that her gambit had failed. ‘It was just an interim job, sir, after leaving school. But I have always been interested in science, especially physics and geometry.’

  He gave her a withering look. ‘I admire your confidence, Miss Motts. Let’s have a little talk about what you actually do know.’

  His first three questions were basic and she responded with ease. The fourth and fifth were harder, and she struggled before hazarding answers she felt by no means certain were correct. The final question foxed her completely.

  ‘Take your time,’ the woman said more kindly, pushing a notepad and pencil towards her. ‘Use this, if you like.’

  She took a breath, drew a rough diagram and added the numbers. They simply didn’t make sense. Then she realised: it was a trick question. ‘I think you have me there,’ she said, turning towards the man with a slight tilt of her head and a single, oh-so-subtle flicker of her eyelashes. ‘Because unless Pythagoras was mistaken, the hypotenuse should have been three point four, not three point eight – which would mean that the vector is . . .’

  He held up his hand to stop her.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Very good indeed, Miss Motts. I am sorry to have challenged you in this way – but you did so well in the intelligence tests that we just wanted to find out what else you could do.’ He glanced at his colleague, who nodded.

  ‘So I think I can say we are both fully persuaded that you are most suitable for RDF training. Congratulations.’

  20

  For Vic, the demands of work seemed to become ever greater and more urgent.

  During 1941 he had moved three times: first to Dundee, then to Dorset and now to just outside London. He was currently managing three teams working on extending detection ranges, refinements to ‘friend or foe’ systems and AI – air interception equipment that could be carried on the planes themselves, so they could detect the whereabouts of enemy aircraft without the need for sending signals back to land for interpretation. It was exciting, challenging and satisfying.

  And yet – he had to admit it – when not at work he felt lonely and dispirited, cast adrift in a world that seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces. Cambridge days felt like a lifetime ago; all his previous research into the potential of radio waves for his doctorate was now completely outdated. War had provided the unexpected bonus of driving scientific invention at a rate that could never have been imagined in peacetime. If he ever went back into academia, it would have to be from an entirely different starting point.

  His colleagues were a cheerful bunch in the main, but none of them came near to replacing the deep understanding of friendship he’d found with Johnnie, nor the surprising joy of human closeness he’d discovered with Kath. Although they were still writing to each other, he knew that the fragile links that had just begun to form between them would weaken still further with every month apart.

  His father had written to tell him that Auntie Vera had finally succumbed to her mysterious illness: ‘a blessing, really, an end to her suffering’. They’d ‘given her a good send-off’, but Vic was not to worry about him being lonely, because he had met ‘a lovely lady called Diane’ at the bowls club.

  It was this last nugget of news that filled Vic with the greatest unease. What did it mean? A delightful companion who would relieve his filial responsibilities, or a gold-digger after the old man’s fast-diminishing savings? He felt an urgent need to find out for himself, to reassure himself that his father, the only family he had left on this side of the world, was well and happy.

  When he went to Tunbridge Wells for Christmas, his worst fears were realised. His father introduced her as ‘my lovely new wife, Diane’: a short, rather tubby sixty-something, with restless energy and an innate ability to say the wrong thing.

  ‘Let me have a proper look at you.’ She clasped his shoulders and gaped at him. ‘Heavens above, your father did warn me, but I never realised you’d be so dark.’

  It transpired that they’d married at the registry office just two weeks before and Diane was now securely installed in his father’s house, and had already embarked on what she termed ‘brightening up the old place’. Both downstairs rooms were transformed: his father’s heavy furniture had been replaced with pale plywood cabinets, uncomfortable chairs and curtains in garish yellows and pinks that gave Vic an instant headache and the urge to run away.

  Where was the painted screen, and the coffee table with its brass tray engraved with elephants? The Indian ivory ornaments on the mantelpiece had been replaced by a parade of porcelain figurines: frolicking shepherdesses, kittens with red ribbons, even a ghastly, grinning Toby jug. Not a single reminder of Vic’s homeland, his childhood or his beloved mother remained.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d got married?’ he whispered when Diane went off to the kitchen to make tea.

  His father flushed. ‘She wanted to make it a quiet affair. We didn’t want to bother you, son. You and your important work.’

  ‘Wha
t have you done with your own things, the stuff from India?’

  ‘Oh, we sold it as a job lot,’ his father replied breezily. ‘Didn’t want any of that old-fashioned stuff, did you?’

  Vic bit his tongue. What else was there to say? It upset him to think of his father spending the rest of his days under the thumb of his new wife; but at the same time he felt mildly relieved that someone else would be there to look after the old boy. And whatever would he have done with that furniture anyway, without a home of his own?

  Diane emerged, bearing a tray with a flowery tea set and a plate of little shop-made cakes iced in pastel pink and yellow, matching the floral curtains. His father watched adoringly as she placed the tray onto the oval occasional table that now dominated the centre of the small room.

  ‘Isn’t she just the ticket? I’m a very lucky man, don’t you think?’ his father said, patting her on the bottom in a disturbingly over-familiar way.

  She giggled and gave him a noisy, sloppy kiss on the cheek. ‘Isn’t he such a dearie?’ she said. ‘It’s me who’s the lucky one.’ As she continued to coo and fuss Vic felt his stomach turning, and after tea he excused himself, claiming the need for fresh air.

  Dusk was already falling as he walked the streets of Tunbridge Wells. It was twilight, not yet time for the blackout. Through every window he could see glowing fires, Christmas trees twinkling with coloured lights and families with glasses in hand, trying to put from their minds for just a day or so the dismal realities of a country at war and in perilous danger of invasion.

  It began to drizzle and then to rain more heavily, but he hardly cared. In the town centre he encountered a beggar sheltering in the doorway of a closed shop, holding out a sign that read: Spare a penny for a veteran.