The Bomb Girls' Secrets

by Daisy Styles

  ‘I’ve always wanted to run my own dress shop,’ Violet confessed with a blush.

  ‘With a figure like yours you could be a model!’ Kit insisted.

  Violet shook her head. ‘Nice of you to say so, Kit, but I hate people staring at me,’ she admitted. ‘I’d rather be behind the camera than in front of it,’ she said with a modest laugh.

  ‘Have you ever worked in a shop?’ Gladys asked.

  ‘No, I’ve only ever worked in the records office in the local hospital,’ she answered; then feeling uncomfortable talking about her past, she quickly changed the focus of the conversation. ‘What about you, Kit? Have you got any secret plans, dreams you hope that one day will come true?’

  Kit’s eyes opened wide as she held Violet’s trusting gaze. How she longed to tell her the truth, to reveal her secret and speak openly and with pride about her son in Ireland. Instead she prevaricated with a joke and a smile.

  ‘I’d like to have enough money to buy a new pair of shoes!’ she answered.

  ‘Your turn, Gladys,’ Violet said, letting Kit off the hook yet knowing instinctively that she was keeping something back. ‘What’s your secret ambition?’

  Gladys’s dark blue eyes grew big and dreamy. Answering the question with a slow smile, she said, ‘I’ve been dreaming for years of creating my own all-female swing band.’

  Predictably, Kit, who loved just about every song on Workers’ Playtime or Music While You Work, cried excitedly, ‘You mean like Ivy Benson’s women’s dance band?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Gladys replied, then slumped as she added, ‘But how’s that going to happen now that I’m up here on the moors, working in a munitions factory?’

  There was a pause as Kit thoughtfully stoked the burning embers in the wood-burner before she added a few more logs. ‘You’re in an all-female bomb factory,’ she pointed out. ‘If there’s one thing you’re not short of at the Phoenix, it’s women!’

  Gladys stared at her friend as she took in what she was suggesting. ‘You mean audition for musicians in the factory?’

  Kit nodded her head. ‘Why not? You can’t be the only musician in the Phoenix.’

  Gladys sprang to her feet. ‘You’re right, Kit! You’re absolutely right! Why didn’t I think of that before?’

  Kit smiled with pride. ‘It just seemed obvious to me,’ she answered modestly.

  ‘I could put up a poster in the canteen asking for volunteers,’ Gladys continued excitedly.

  When Violet suddenly stood up and walked out of the room, Kit and Gladys turned to each other in surprise.

  ‘Did I say something wrong?’ Gladys whispered.

  Before Kit could reply, Violet returned holding her mother’s silver clarinet.

  ‘I can play this,’ she said awkwardly.

  Gladys and Kit gazed at her in astonishment.

  ‘You never said,’ gasped Gladys.

  ‘You never asked!’ Violet laughed. ‘I’m a bit rusty, but I’m sure I’ll soon pick it up.’ She gave a cautious toot-toot on the instrument, then smiled as she recalled the past before her marriage to Ronnie. ‘It belonged to my mother; she was a music teacher,’ she said with a proud ring in her voice. ‘She taught me how to play the instrument when I was a little girl.’

  Gladys flung her arms around Violet and hugged her. ‘We can practise together,’ she said, then she turned to Kit. ‘Have you got any dark secrets you’re keeping from us?’ she asked with a cheeky smile.

  Shocked by the question, Kit caught her breath, then realized with relief that Gladys was talking about music. ‘Well …’ she said cautiously.

  ‘Spit it out!’ Gladys urged.

  ‘I had to learn to play the drums at school,’ Kit admitted. ‘The parish priest needed a drummer for the Catholic processions and I got landed with the job.’ She laughed as she remembered. ‘To tell you the truth I really loved it. I felt so grand and important marching along banging the drum at the head of the processions.’

  Gladys shook her head in disbelief. ‘WHO would have thought there was so much talent right under one roof!’ she cried in delight.

  Kit raised her hands in alarm. ‘Don’t go running ahead of yerself, Glad,’ she warned. ‘I’ve not played in years – and I haven’t even got a drum!’

  Gladys paced the room, talking to herself. ‘We’ll need more players. Trombone, trumpet – and piano too.’ With her cheeks blazing, Gladys turned to her smiling friends. ‘You know something,’ she said breathlessly, ‘this could be REALLY good.’

  9. Edna

  Down in Pendleton, Edna Chadderton – a clever independent woman in her late forties, with arresting green eyes and a mass of curling auburn hair flecked with grey – was having a quiet smoke and a strong brew before she opened the shop doors for the Dove Mill customers to pour in for their dinners. She’d been giving a lot of thought to the Bomb Girls up on the moors, and as an astute business woman she realized she was missing a seriously good opportunity.

  Glancing at the row of numbers she’d jotted down on the back of a chip bag, Edna calculated that if she sold all 200 Bomb Girls a two-penny bag of chips every night, she’d make a pound and thirteen shillings. Sadly, the busy girls hadn’t time to pop down into Pendleton, which sorely grieved Edna.

  ‘One pound and thirteen shillings a night,’ she said as she bit the stub of her pencil. ‘Multiply that by five nights … that would bring my takings up to more than eight pounds a week.’ Pausing to stand up and light the gas underneath the cooking range, Edna muttered out loud, ‘I could make as much as ten pounds a week if any of them lasses splashed out on a potato pie or a pastie.’

  Watching the slabs of lard in the big pans break up like polar ice caps, then dissolve in the heat and start to bubble, Edna wondered how she could entice the Bomb Girls into town; then realized how slow and short-sighted she was and burst out laughing. ‘You silly bugger, they can’t come to you – you’ve got to go to them!’

  After a busy lunchtime opening, Edna washed down the range, mopped the floor and then closed the shop before heading to the only motorcar-repair shop in Pendleton. After a good half-hour of bartering with the manager, a lanky middle-aged man she’d known from her school days, Edna finally got what she wanted: an old blue van big enough to be adapted into a mobile chip shop!

  ‘Who’s going to drive it?’ the garage owner asked as Edna counted out her hard-earned five-pound notes.

  ‘ME!’ she replied.

  His eyes widened.

  ‘YOU?’

  ‘Whilst you lads were away fighting on the French battlefields, us lasses were working to feed the nation. I drove a tractor all through the last war when I was working as a Land Girl,’ she reminded him.

  ‘Yon van will be a damn sight easier than driving a tractor,’ the manager chuckled.

  ‘As long as it’s got gears and a steering wheel I’ll manage,’ Edna retorted with a confident smile.

  Two weeks later Edna set off in her new mobile chip shop for the Phoenix. Under her instructions a local carpenter, again another lad she went to school with, fixed up a worktop that could accommodate a neat little chip range. The carpenter had widened the side window so Edna could serve her bags of chips to customers, and he’d added an external ledge for bottles of salt and vinegar. Inside the van, there was a small sink that could be filled up with a bucket of water and a tea urn – wherever Edna went tea went too! With a pink-and-blue checked pinafore wrapped around her voluptuous body and her unruly hair stuffed under a turban, Edna boldly parked in the dispatch yard and, after announcing her arrival by ringing a hand bell, she lit up her range and started to cook. As the mouth-watering smell of frying chips drifted across the yard, girls hurrying home after finishing their shifts were drawn to the van like iron to a magnet. They smiled when they saw Edna, arms akimbo, standing behind her cooking range.

  ‘Best chips in Lancashire!’ she called out as she beckoned to the workers. ‘Tuppence a bag, scraps and salt and vinegar on the house!’

&n
bsp; Kit, who’d hurried to the van with Gladys and Violet, grinned when she recognized Edna.

  ‘You make marvellous chips, missis!’ she enthused.

  ‘Call me Edna.’

  ‘Thanks, Edna!’ said Kit as she handed over her twopence, then doused her chips in salt and vinegar.

  After the girls had polished off their supper, they lingered by the van, which was warm from the bubbling cooking range. Lighting up a cigarette, one of the customers remarked, ‘You’re new round here, aren’t you?’

  ‘New up here, mebbe,’ Edna replied. ‘But I’ve been running my own chip shop in Pendleton for nearly five years now.’

  ‘Did you drive up here especially for us?’ Kit asked incredulously.

  Edna grinned as she replied, ‘You know what they say? “If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain then the mountain must go to Mohammed.” ’ Seeing Kit’s blank expression, she quickly added, ‘I reckoned you hard-working girls wouldn’t have the time to come to my shop in town, so I got myself a van and came up here to fry chips just for you Bomb Girls!’

  ‘I hope you’ll come often,’ Kit said with genuine enthusiasm.

  Looking at her takings in a tin box on the worktop, Edna smiled as she replied, ‘I think you’ll be seeing a lot of me and my mobile chippie, lovie!’

  Edna’s original calculations had been based on visiting the Phoenix five times a week but because she enjoyed the company of the appreciative Bomb Girls, who looked forward to the sound of Edna’s bell ringing out her arrival, she got into the habit of driving to the factory nearly every night. As the weeks passed Edna’s mobile chippie standing in the dispatch yard in all weathers became a communal hub. It didn’t take the Bomb Girls long to realize that Edna dished out sound advice along with her chips.

  There was no doubt that working at the Phoenix increased Edna’s takings, but it didn’t take long for her to realize just how much she enjoyed the company of these big-hearted women. They made her laugh; they told her about their husbands, brothers, fiancés and boyfriends fighting on the front line in north-west Europe. With every passing week Edna’s affection and admiration for them grew.

  ‘I might not be building bombs but I’m feeding the brave lasses that do!’ she often joked.

  Little Kit loved Edna’s motherly warmth and humour. When she wasn’t working, she’d watch out for the blue van, and when she saw it approaching she’d smile and wave as she hurried out into the yard, eager for a chat with Edna, whom she instinctively trusted. It made Edna smile to see Kit with her silky black hair flying loose around her sweet heart-shaped face.

  ‘Can I help you tonight?’ Kit asked one evening as Edna poured the potatoes she’d previously peeled and chopped into the sizzling cooking range.

  ‘Haven’t you done enough already, filling fuses all day?’ Edna asked.

  Kit shrugged as she replied with an easy smile, ‘This is different – this is fun!’

  ‘Well,’ Edna said, grinning, ‘if you put it like that, how can I refuse?’

  So an easy pattern was established: Kit regularly popped into the van to help Edna serve tea or wrap up bags of chips in newspaper when her shifts allowed.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, little lass!’ Edna said fondly as they shared a cigarette during a lull one evening.

  ‘Honest to God,’ Kit enthused, ‘I enjoy your company – and your chips!’

  After she’d taken a drag on her Player’s, Edna said, ‘So where do you hail from, sweetheart? I can tell from that soft lilting voice of yours that you’re not from these parts.’

  Seeing Kit blush, Edna realized she might have overstepped the mark.

  ‘Sorry, lovie, you don’t have to answer – ignore me and my cheeky questions.’

  Suddenly seized with an overwhelming desire to speak of her son without shame or condemnation, Kit burst into floods of tears.

  ‘I trust you, Edna, more than I’ve ever trusted anybody, and I want to tell you my secret,’ she said unsteadily.

  Frightened of saying anything, Edna held her breath as Kit told her what she’d never told any living creature before.

  ‘I come from Chapelizod, just outside Dublin. Me and mi family live and work on a farm out there. I have a pig of a dad, a poor mammy who’s dying of the consumption and’ – she took a deep shuddering breath – ‘a baby.’

  Edna gently squeezed Kit’s trembling hand. ‘How old’s your baby?’

  As a slow smile spread across Kit’s face and her eyes glowed with pride. ‘He’ll be three months old in March.’

  Edna was visibly socked. ‘Three months!’ she exclaimed.

  The glow faded from Kit’s eyes as quickly as a light being turned off.

  ‘Mi da forced me to leave my son; he forced me to travel to England to work in the mills so that I could send money back to him.’

  Edna shook her head in confusion. ‘Surely you and the child’s father can refuse his demands?’ she asked softly.

  The colour rose in Kit’s pale face; crimson with shame she murmured, ‘The father is the landlord of the estate we live on; he raped me but mi da thinks I egged him on. As God’s my judge I never did!’

  Kit paused as Edna gently wiped her streaming face with a clean handkerchief. ‘There, there, my sweetheart,’ she said tenderly to the trembling girl.

  Determined to get to the end of her story, which she had bottled up for too long, Kit stared up at Edna with wild innocent eyes. ‘I always thought the thing that goes on between a man and a woman would be beautiful and romantic, like the songs and poems say, but that’ – she shuddered in horror – ‘that was a nightmare.’

  Edna softly stroked Kit’s long silky black hair. ‘And your father never once thought you were telling the truth?’ she said incredulously.

  ‘He always thinks the worst of me. But, for all the shame and humiliation, my Billy’s the loveliest child you’ve ever seen,’ she added passionately. ‘I could have spent the rest of my life kissing and holding him but’ – she concluded with a long sad sigh – ‘it wasn’t meant to be.’

  Edna took Kit into her arms and slowly rocked her back and forth. ‘You poor, poor girl,’ she whispered, almost in tears herself. After a few minutes she asked a question that had been troubling her. ‘How come you ended up here at the Phoenix, when your father sent you to work in the mill?’

  ‘I hated the mill, so I looked for other work,’ Kit said with a bleak smile. ‘Mi da knows nothing about my whereabouts, and as long as he gets mi wages every week he doesn’t care where I am or what I do,’ she added angrily.

  ‘And what about your bonny little lad?’ Edna inquired.

  ‘Da says he’ll keep him as long as he gets his money,’ Kit replied. ‘He doesn’t know that munitions girls get better paid than mill girls,’ she added with a wicked wink. ‘I save every penny I don’t send home.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘My secret plan is to bring my son to live with me in England.’

  Edna smiled widely as she nodded in approval. ‘Hold on to that plan. If you believe in something enough, it’ll happen.’

  Kit gazed hopefully at her friend. ‘Do you REALLY think that?’ she gasped.

  ‘I most certainly do!’ Edna retorted robustly.

  Smiling, Kit shook her head. ‘Nobody’s EVER believed in me before,’ she whispered.

  ‘Then it’s about time they did,’ Edna said as she rose to her feet and pulled Kit to hers. ‘Look at me,’ she commanded.

  Kit’s brown eyes locked with Edna’s green ones. ‘YOU CAN – AND YOU WILL! Repeat those words,’ she urged.

  ‘I can and I will,’ Kit responded shyly.

  ‘LOUDER!’

  ‘I CAN – AND I WILL!’ Kit almost shouted.

  As Edna hugged Kit, she could feel the girl’s sharp skinny bones through her overalls. Her heart ached for the tragic young woman whom nobody seemed to love or want. With a passionate expression, Edna caught Kit’s tear-stained face in her hands.

  ‘I understand about sec
rets, sweetheart,’ she said with an intensity that surprised Kit. ‘Don’t worry, yours is safe with me.’

  10. Gladys’s Launch

  On a blustery cold March morning in the steamy canteen Gladys gave Violet a sharp nudge.

  ‘Time to make the announcement,’ she whispered as she waited impatiently for the news to finish, then she boldly switched off the Bakelite radio before Workers’ Playtime claimed the air space. Standing on one of the canteen’s metal tables, Gladys tapped a spoon against her pint-pot mug.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, ladies,’ she called over the din. ‘May I have your attention for just five minutes?’

  Gradually the noise subsided long enough for Gladys to speak.

  ‘I’m looking for musicians,’ she blurted out in a nervous rush.

  ‘You’ve come to’t wrong place,’ a woman at a nearby table chuckled.

  ‘Try the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester,’ another cried.

  ‘Here me out,’ Gladys begged. ‘I want to set up an all-girls’ dance band, you know, like Ivy Benson’s,’ she explained.

  The name caught her audience’s attention; everybody loved Ivy Benson’s dance numbers, especially ‘Stardust’ and ‘I’m Getting Sentimental Over You’.

  Seizing the moment, Gladys quickly said, ‘I need women who can play the trumpet, trombone, piano, guitar.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ a woman guffawed. ‘You’ll be lucky!’

  Before ribald laughter drowned her out, Gladys cried even louder, ‘If you’re interested, meet me by the noticeboard during the next break.’

  The hooter recalling the girls back to work sounded, and Gladys stepped down from the tabletop.

  ‘Do you think anybody will turn up?’ she anxiously asked her friends.

  Violet giggled as she replied, ‘Let’s face it, a bomb factory’s not the likeliest of places for recruiting musicians!’

  ‘But it’s worth a go,’ said Kit hopefully.

  When Gladys returned to the canteen during the next tea break, she was met by two young women.

  ‘I’m Maggie Yates,’ the pretty redhead said. ‘I can play the trumpet.’