Under a Wartime Sky
Page 24
But he’s such a long way away, she thought to herself now as she clambered off the ferry, remembering how he never managed to avoid getting his feet wet. The last time she’d been here at Bawdsey, he’d been here too.
The weight of her kit bag made fast walking impossible, but she deliberately took her time walking up the long driveway from the ferry, allowing the Manor to emerge slowly as she rounded the bend. Pausing at the bridge over the River Jordan, she took a few breaths to calm her nerves before lifting the pack once more.
At the front porch she paused again. This would be the first time she had ever entered the building through this doorway. She was no longer a servant. She belonged here, had a right to enter. A duty to enter.
She knocked once, twice and then tried the handle, a ring of heavy iron which turned surprisingly easily. The wooden door gave way, and she was inside. The cavernous hallway was deserted. She put down her pack. To her left was the great wide staircase. Ahead of her, double doors stood open, leading into the great hall with its panelled walls and balcony above. The old out-of-tune piano was still there – she wondered whether Vic was able to practise wherever he was these days. Beyond that, she knew, was the Green Lounge, where she’d served tea for Winston Churchill.
It felt good, like coming home.
After a short exploration she found herself in the open doorway of a large room panelled in oak and lined with leather, and knocked. ‘Come in, come in,’ came a female voice.
‘ACW2 Motts 526843, reporting for duty, ma’am.’ She saluted and clicked her heels as crisply as the thick carpeting would allow.
‘At ease,’ the woman said, moving forward to shake her hand. ‘Section Leader Bartlett. Good morning, Motts. Bit nippy on the ferry today, I expect?’ She tipped her head towards the window and the panoramic view of the estuary.
‘I live round here, ma’am, so I’m used to the weather.’
‘Very good, very good. You have been at Stanmore, I understand? Interesting?’
‘Very interesting, ma’am.’
‘I expect you to tell the other recruits all about it, when you can.’ She turned back to her desk, running her finger down a list of names. ‘Now let me check. I believe you are . . . yes, here we are. Room fifty-four, White Tower.’
‘Yes, ma’am. And thank you, ma’am.’
‘I suppose you’re aware that it’s only in the past couple of weeks that WAAFs have been brought back since we were evacuated at the start of hostilities?’
‘Indeed, ma’am. I am delighted to be back here again.’
‘When were you here before, Motts?’
‘I was an assistant cook here, before the war, ma’am. I was brought up in Felixstowe and my parents still live there.’
‘Excellent. Then you’ll know your way around already.’
‘I’m afraid we never strayed far from the kitchens.’
‘Mess facilities in the Manor are only for officers these days, I’m afraid. You’ll be eating in the cookhouse across the way, in the old stable block. It’s plain fare, but there’s plenty of it. I suggest you find your room, make yourself comfortable and then head over for lunch, twelve-thirty. Afternoon briefing is in the hall here, two p.m. sharp. Then you’ll get your detail, and you won’t have a moment to think. It’s all go out there.’
Kath wandered through several corridors, up and down short flights of stairs, encountering a couple of dead ends and having to retrace her steps several times before finding number fifty-four.
For some reason she’d imagined that all the rooms in the Manor would be of baronial proportions, and was sorely disappointed to discover that she was in what must have been part of the servants’ quarters: a whitewashed cell with high, narrow windows like arrow slits into which five double bunk beds, five cheap plywood chests of drawers and a single wardrobe had been awkwardly squeezed, given the cramped dimensions of the room. Only one of the beds, a lower bunk closest to the door, remained unmade. Standing on tiptoe to peer through the window, she could see the courtyard below. Now she understood. The room was in one of the towers, which accounted for its odd hexagonal shape.
At least it’s not a corrugated iron hut, she thought to herself; and the bathroom was just along the corridor, not across a damp field. She made up the bed, covering the thin, hard mattress with one of the blankets under the bottom sheet – a trick she’d learned from the early days of her induction. She unpacked her kit into the only drawer that remained empty, took off her jacket, kicked off her shoes and lay down, trying to calm her nerves.
The weeks at Stanmore had been an eye-opener, bringing home even more forcefully the critical importance of accuracy in reading and reporting what hundreds of WAAFs around the country were trying to interpret on their fuzzy screens and sometimes temperamental equipment. The success of Allied raids and the lives of hundreds of flyers were entirely dependent on it.
Would she come up to the mark under pressure? Would she manage to keep calm, to analyse carefully, to stand her ground, to trust her instincts? Apart from a short experience in Devon and the mock scenarios in examinations, she had never been properly tested. She might have been, as the officer at Stanmore said, one of the best at the theory tests, but now she would have to prove she could do it in practice.
She’d hoped to meet Marcia at lunch, but her friend was nowhere to be seen. When she enquired, one of the other WAAFs explained: ‘She’s probably on duty, or asleep. We’re all on different sites and watches.’
‘Do you ever get a chance to socialise?’ Kath asked. Oh yes, you got thirty-six hours off every four days, they said. And there were dances in the hall every Sunday evening.
‘Plus, if you get the chance to go to one of the USAF dos, go for it,’ one girl said. The others laughed knowingly. ‘The drink and grub they lay on is incredible,’ she added.
‘The music is cracking – real bands, you know, jazz and stuff,’ said another.
‘Need to be good at fending off wandering hands, though,’ warned a third. ‘There aren’t any women on USAF bases, so those fellas are pretty hungry.’
That afternoon the eight ‘new girls’ received their briefing instructions before being given a tour of the site. Bawdsey, having been the centre of research from the very beginning, had more types of equipment than any other, all for different purposes and all known by confusing acronyms such as CHL (which could detect aircraft inland as well as out at sea) and K (for low-flying planes and shipping).
The watch system started with a night shift beginning at eleven and ending at eight in the morning, after which you got the day off and started again in the evening at six. Next day you covered the afternoon from one o’clock till early evening, and the day after that you were on the morning shift till lunchtime. Once again, they were reminded, there was to be no work talk off shift or outside your own site, not even with friends.
At the end of the tour and briefing, Kath was invited to give a brief description of her time at Stanmore, sensing from their questions the admiration and even envy of her fellow recruits. At the end, everyone clapped. ‘Thank you, ACW2 Motts, that was most interesting,’ the leader said. ‘You are very fortunate to have experienced the most vital part of our operation, first-hand.’
She started her first shift that very evening, at the CHL site.
By midnight she had already been on duty for an hour, and her eyes were telling her that she should have taken a proper nap that afternoon. Three large RAF raids had been to Germany earlier in the evening and while many had returned, there were now a number of stragglers on their screens. Some were obviously in difficulty; judging by their heights some were already dangerously low and liable to ditch into the sea. She plotted them continuously, praying that they would make it to the coastline and ready to alert the air-sea rescue instantly should they disappear.
At one-twenty she saw the start of a new track, a faint blip at 115 miles. She found the bearing and pressed the button for the grid reference. It was just off the Dutch coast
, she calculated. She switched to the height aerials, pressed more buttons. Height twenty thousand feet. She studied the blip again, estimating forty-plus aircraft, and passed the information through to the plotters, who would send it on to Stanmore. Soon afterwards it was confirmed: identification HOSTILE Track 153. Stomach churning, she took more plots. The range was now a hundred miles, height unchanged, and she could see there were more than sixty of them.
Most of the RAF planes were now in, but one had disappeared from her screen twenty miles from the coast. Sending the urgent alert, she visualised the air crew scrambling out of their sinking plane, perhaps looking around for the others, praying that they all managed to get into their dinghy and that air-sea rescue was able to find them.
She turned back to the hostile blip, now estimating seventy-five-plus aircraft, apparently heading straight towards Suffolk. How vulnerable we are, Kath thought, so visible and right on the edge of the coast. The plotter at the table at the other end of the room said grimly, ‘Been nice knowing you, girls.’ But there was no time for being scared. She took two more plots. The blip was fading, indicating that they had veered south-east, probably heading for London. The information went through to Stanmore.
Soon enough, RAF fighter crews would be scrambling from their beds, running across darkened fields and into their planes; ack-ack teams would be getting their range, and Londoners would be wearily making their way into air-raid shelters and underground stations, facing yet another disturbed night ahead.
Turning quickly back to the ‘tube’ screen, Kath detected a new blip at three miles heading away from land: two aircraft, or possibly three. The double V showed they were friendly. At eighteen and twenty miles out they began stooging around, back and forth, round and round. Must be the air-sea rescue looking for the ditched crew.
Her eyes were burning. Two hours was quite long enough to focus on that fuzzy screen, and it was time to swap places. She moved across to work at the plotting table and then, at the next swap, to take her turn as ‘teller’, passing information through to Stanmore on the telephone. She imagined the frantic WAAFs at Stanmore, rushing between phone and table, the hubbub of shouted instructions, the serious faces of the top brass observing from the balcony above as the raid headed for London, and prayed that Mark was not already in the fray.
And so the night went on. At first light their screens burst into life, filled with large blips all moving towards Belgium and Holland. ‘It’s the Yanks,’ someone said: the USAF taking off from their new airstrips, en route for Germany’s war installations. The screen was soon a solid mass of blips from zero to thirty miles.
‘That’ll be a sight for sore eyes,’ the shift supervisor said. ‘Take it in turns to take a quick dekko.’
It was the noise that struck them first, the persistent roar of low-flying heavy aircraft. But the sky was empty. Then, from the west, came hundreds of them in great ordered flocks, filling the sky as far as the eye could see, some low, some higher up; and now, as they watched, starting to pass over the coastline and heading out towards the continent. It was an impressive sight, enough to make your heart race. Was Mark up there, heading out on what would undoubtedly be a dangerous mission? Was he looking down on his home town and wondering when, or whether, he would ever get back here? Kath’s eyes filled with tears, her thoughts in a turmoil of pride and terror.
Someone beside her whispered, ‘Go get ’em, boys.’
‘Second that,’ she said.
At the end of the shift they headed for the cookhouse, but the dried-up toast and grey-looking scrambled egg made from powder looked unappetising, and Kath felt too tired to eat. The excitement of witnessing the extraordinary might of the combined RAF and US air forces had kept her going on adrenalin for the last hour, but now all she wanted was to get to bed and sleep.
‘Kathleen Motts, as I live and breathe. You’re here at last! How come? I thought you’d be running the war by now.’ It was Marcia, glamorous as ever, heading back from the cookhouse with a gang of three others, as Kath made her way towards it. ‘We’re just coming off shift, sweetie, and heading out for a drink or several across the water. Want to come?’
‘Sorry, I need to grab a bite before my shift,’ Kath said.
‘Shame. We’ll have to catch up later. What room are you in?’
‘Fifty-four.’
‘Great – not too far from me. I’m in eighty-two,’ Marcia shouted as she dashed away down the corridor. ‘See you soon.’
After coming off shift again in the early hours of the morning, Kath crept into her room. In the light from the corridor, she saw that four of the bunks were occupied with sleeping figures. On her own, there was a note.
Hello sweetie. I’m so delighted you’re here, after all. Why aren’t you running the world from HQ any more? Did they sack you? Can’t wait to catch up but it looks like we’re on clashing shift patterns right now. Next Saturday evening we’ve been invited to Martlesham – the US base. Absolutely NOT TO BE MISSED! Write it in blood in your diary and bribe someone to swap shifts if necessary. Kisses, M.
24
The work of Vic and his team had been turned upside down by the arrival of the US air force.
He and another British research engineer were paired with a couple of American scientists and sent all over the country visiting newly built USAF bases. Their job entailed making sure that ‘friend or foe’ transmitters and receivers were properly installed into hundreds of newly arrived Flying Fortress bombers and other aircraft, and that AI, the air interception equipment that allowed aircrews to follow the flights of other nearby aircraft directly from their cockpits, was working correctly.
The work was pressured and exhausting, demanding all of Vic’s powers of diplomacy, but the living conditions and meals were more luxurious than anything he’d ever experienced. Once they’d accepted that he wouldn’t eat their delicious-smelling crispy bacon, hamburgers and hot dogs, they came up with plenty more to satisfy his taste: proper eggs cooked all ways, pancakes with maple syrup and, for lunch or dinner, plenty of fresh vegetables along with the crispiest chips – or ‘fries’, as they insisted on calling them. Their ice cream was simply out of this world.
American scientists and engineers were assigned to each development team, and they had only weeks to make sure that all of their systems were co-ordinated. He didn’t take to them at all, at first. They were so loud, and so bossy, so certain their way was right. For a start, it seemed inevitable that they would have to adopt the new American term RADAR – for Radio Detection and Ranging – even though it just seemed like an overblown version of their own acronym.
The Yankee dollars were very welcome and their research budgets quadrupled overnight, but it took time to get used to each other’s way of working. The best way of dealing with them was as he’d done with other overly confident characters like Frank: let them have their big bluster first, getting it out of the way, after which he would quietly but insistently point out the flaws of their argument. It didn’t make him especially popular, that he knew from experience; but it earned him respect and, more importantly, it saved time.
The other trial, of course, was dealing with their questions about his origins. One of his teammates, Randy (short for Randolph, but Vic couldn’t trust himself to say it out loud for fear of sniggering like a schoolboy) said quite bluntly that he’d been surprised to find Vic working alongside ‘white folks’.
‘Back home, the blacks are segregated, even in the military.’
‘Segregated? You mean, kept apart by law?’ Vic was aghast.
Randy explained it was only in some states where seating on buses, schools, swimming pools and working areas in factories were divided into ‘black’ and ‘other’.
‘But why?’ Vic gasped.
‘Gee, it’s so normal I don’t really know why, and never asked. That’s the way it’s always been, so I guess folks feel more comfortable that way.’
‘White people feel more comfortable, you mean?’
But for all the constant company, Vic was lonely.
Most of all, he missed Kath. That day in Lincoln glowed in his memory; his hand could still feel the imprint of hers as they’d walked together, and he could still taste the astonishing sensation of her lips meeting his as they’d waited for her bus. His heart seemed to ache in his chest when he thought of her, and he felt sure this must be what they called ‘falling in love’. But did she feel the same about him? He longed to see her again, to reassure himself.
By now, he felt sure, she would have had her post-training week’s leave in Felixstowe. With Lizzie’s words about persistence ringing in his ears, he had written several times to Kath’s home address. He’d received nothing from her apart from a brief note thanking him for the lovely day in Lincoln.
He told himself to be patient. In these troubled days everyone was on the move, sometimes with only a few hours’ notice. No one could be sure of where they might be posted next.
Another week went by. Surely by now she would be at her first real posting? His requests for leave had thus far been refused ‘due to operational priorities’, but he was certainly due some time off, and hoped to use it to visit Kath. But where was she?
And then, on the very same day, two envelopes arrived in his pigeonhole. The first was addressed in Kath’s rounded, generous hand.
Dear Vic,
Thank you for the two letters, which I picked up from home when I came back on leave a week ago. I’m sorry for the long silence and hope this reaches you now that you are doing so much travelling. Still I am sure your work is interesting, as ever, and you are achieving yet more great things!
You won’t believe it but I’m back here, where we first met. The place is full of memories and reminders of the times we had here. Not that I’ve had much time to think, trying to get used to the crazy shift patterns and feeling dog tired most of the time. Also, the weather is so miserable I haven’t been able to get out into the gardens. Our favourite walk is out of bounds anyway, covered with barbed wire and the rest, as you can probably imagine.