Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army

by Jacky Hyams

  I was 18 and two months when I was moved into the pellets section. Most of the girls who’d started working in textiles were moved into pellets; it was a way of easing you in. At 18, of course, the money went up; one of the big reasons the girls round here went into the arsenal was the chance to earn much better money than you got in a shop or in service. I don’t care what anyone says, the main reason Bridgend was so popular with the people working there was the money. I knew of a few girls working in the munitions section of the arsenal who earned more than their fathers. They didn’t dare tell them, of course.

  It was dangerous work, though we didn’t know it. The first work I did in pellets was to paste and wrap the pellets. You were given a piece of paper with a fluted edge both ways, a pot of paste and a paintbrush. At first, it was a round pellet, about an inch long. It was a bit like wrapping sweets; you pasted first and wrapped each pellet in the paper. Your hands got really mucky. The stuff came off in your hands as you wrapped it. You’d get bored out of your mind doing this, of course, but what you didn’t realise at first was that at a certain point your hands would be yellow by the end of your shift.

  You had to wear the same caps and uniforms you’d been making in textiles: a white coat, a belt and a white cap with a red band in front to indicate your shift. It was mucky, boring and repetitive work. But moving into pellets meant more money. You started work at 2pm and you’d finish about 9.30pm. If you were lucky, you got a half-hour break in the enormous canteen, a cup of tea, some chips or a sandwich.

  It was noisy too. Tannoys were always going. Sometimes you’d start singing, as a means of keeping the boredom at bay. But it wasn’t long before I asked if I could be moved. You can only do something like that for so long, pasting pellet after pellet and winding up with yellow on your hands all the time. So they moved me – to the stemming shop. Here, the job was to fill up rubbery things with powder from a container. We had no idea what they were used for; you did these things but you had no real inkling what they meant because you didn’t ever see the end product. The powder went from a container into a box. Then it went into a large machine, with a drum at the top. My job was to pour the powder into the drum, pull the handle and then the powder came through a funnel into this rubbery thing. I think this was something that was needed to light up something else to make an explosion. It wasn’t an explosive material as such, but of course, the powder was in the air all around you, so when you finished your shift, the powder had stuck to you.

  And you were yellow. You were foolish if you didn’t get that turban on first. In those days, we nearly all had long hair. You’d put your hair up in a round ring stocking top, tuck your hair into it and it helped keep the curls going. Then you could put the turban on over it, and over that came your cap. If it was possible, you’d put another turban on over that to protect you from ‘The Yellow’.

  If the powdery stuff got into your hair, it would change colour. Even if you had a little bit of hair showing, that was it, it became discoloured. If you were blonde or ginger, it went green. Black hair went red. You tried your best not to let it happen but there were still times when you’d get a little bit on your face.

  The problem with the yellow was, whatever you did, it wouldn’t come off. While you worked with it, you’d come home yellow. It would go through your clothes and onto your body. During the night, if you perspired, you’d find the yellow all over the sheet. It was so bad, you’d think you had jaundice. Away from the arsenal, you could always spot someone who worked in pellets. They used to call us ‘Canaries’.

  My mother could never get the sheets white. She always hung our sheets behind the house; she wouldn’t hang any of those sheets for the neighbours to see, or anybody walking by on the road. Everyone had their own tip or bit of advice on how to get rid of the yellow, though it never seemed to work. One idea was to soak a little bit of bread in milk and try to dab it off with that when you got home. If you were daft enough to believe that, you’d try it – once. Or someone at work would come in and say: ‘Cold tea gets it off.’ So you’d go home and wipe cold tea over your face. It didn’t work but it made you feel better to try. They did give you cream to rub into your hands and face; it was in a blue pot. I think it was Evening in Paris cream.

  Going out to a dance could be a problem because of the yellow, not just being called a canary but because in the electric light at the dance hall, it just looked like you were bronze, sunburnt. One night, at a dance, one of the boys said: ‘Here she comes, she’s alright in this light. But you want to see her in daylight.’ Then another guy in the same crowd just hit him. I watched him sliding down the wall.

  But my attitude was: there was a war on, and this was our way of helping win it. I now had one brother in the Army and one in the Air Force. If we didn’t do this job, who was going to do it? They had to have things to fight with, didn’t they?

  There was only one way out of pellets, and that was to tell the doctor at the arsenal that you had a rash. So you’d tell him: ‘I’ve got a rash, I want to go off the section.’ Most of the time, all you’d get back was: ‘Oh you can’t have a rash with this powder. Go back to work.’ That would get your gander up. ‘Get your glasses, look at this,’ you’d say. Then, if you were lucky, he’d sign you off the pellets section. But you couldn’t keep making a fuss all the time; then you’d get known for it. You could only do it once.

  There was one doctor at the arsenal; we called him ‘The Butcher’. He always had spots of blood on his coat. Years afterwards, I ran into him and he recognised me. ‘Oh hello, Betty,’ he said. ‘Oh hello, you were the butcher,’ I said. I took great delight in telling him that.

  Being yellow didn’t stop the men from coming on to you. There were mainly women working in my section at the arsenal but there were a few men, mostly men who had come out of working in the collieries because they had chest problems. They weren’t physically fit or desirable but they’d still come on to us girls. I suppose with so many women around them, they couldn’t help but try.

  They weren’t very romantic about it. They’d come up to you and say: ‘Are you someone’s budgie?’ which really meant ‘Are you sleeping with anyone?’ Or they’d offer to help walk you to the toilet – the place was so huge, there were lots of doors to get through to get to the toilet. Then they’d sneak in the budgie question at the same time. I’d make it very clear where I stood. ‘Do you think for a minute I want a reject in this place when I’ve got lots of handsome men up at the aerodrome? No way!’

  It was true in a sense. If you were working on a night shift you couldn’t do much at night but when we were on days, my sister and I would go out every night: pictures, first house, then to a dance afterwards. We’d even go to Porthcawl to a dance and then walk home. It was a five-mile walk but we didn’t mind.

  You’d dance with the boys in uniform – Army, Navy, Airforce boys. Sometimes when I was on day shift I’d be walking home from work on my own and you’d find boys on the road who were totally lost; you’d have to guide them to the turning for their camp. Then they’d turn round and shout: ‘Are you safe, miss?’ They wouldn’t move until you shouted back yes, you were ok.

  But there was no hanky panky. To me, hanky panky was out of the question. I had my reasons to keep myself as I wanted to be. I went out with one Airforce lad; he’d come to the house for a cuppa and all of a sudden… he was gone. You couldn’t make any plans with anyone in that situation, what with people coming and going all the time. Some of the girls I knew were free and easy but at the end of the day, the men would take what they could get – leaving the girl with the consequences.

  There were some Americans in the area, of course. I met some nice ones. But that was all there was to it. Sometimes the first thing a guy in uniform would say was: ‘I’m married, this is a photo of my little girl,’ so you could be friends, sit down and have a chat with them. And they’d want to talk about their family back home.

  I liked the friendship of it, rather than the courtshi
p; I was always more for men as friends. I did go out with one American, a tall handsome sergeant in charge of transport. He’d send me and my sister a van or a lorry to collect us from work if he couldn’t make it.

  At home, we were very lucky with rations and food. My mother would barter, mostly with eggs or vegetables, if she wanted some sugar or butter. There was a lot of that through the war. If there was any meat available, the men had it. They were doing hard, manual work, after all. We had our vegetables in the garden, so you could pop them into your sandwiches – peas, beans, carrots, potatoes – or you could swap them with someone who wanted to swap a bit of ham.

  At one point, they moved me from stemming. A whole lot of us were moved to actually making more pellets – more yellow. Then, we were moved to making pellets out of different explosive powders – but no yellow. We’d have to work a press and there was a thick wall between the press and us. That way, if anything exploded, there was protection for us. But luckily, we never had any accidents.

  The arsenal itself was never bombed, but Kenfig Hill, my area, a few miles away, was. It happened during the day and I was at work. My dad and his gang were working on the railway line when they were machine-gunned from the air. Luckily, no one was hit. But my dad picked up a bullet and brought it home, much to my mum’s annoyance.

  One time, the Americans organised a huge ‘do’, a social ‘thank you’ to everyone. The dance was such a big deal; I even went to the hairdressers after my day shift. I had it hanging down in ringlets, rather than the usual swept-up style. When I got to the social, everyone ignored me. So I ran to the loo, combed it out and when I came back, everyone clapped and cheered. So I didn’t bother with the hairdressers again.

  But at these dances there was never a chance for any of us to really talk about what we were doing. You’d just dance and enjoy the evening. But suddenly, after that social, all the Americans had gone from the area. Where we lived, no one knew about D-Day, the Normandy landings. Maybe people on the coast had some idea – they must have – but all we knew was, our American friends had gone. It meant something big was happening but it wasn’t until the D-Day news came through that we realised just how big.

  At work, they moved me again to the cordite section. That was very different. I’d describe it as like playing around with a big bar of soap. We had to weigh it and then cut it to a certain length. You would have to put a protective strip on top before the cordite went into a metal container of a rocket; you couldn’t damage the cordite.

  When they moved you to another section, you wouldn’t know a soul. The Bridgend arsenal was so huge; you’d have to start all over again with the new girls you’d be working with. One vivid memory is walking into the cordite section canteen for the first time. There must have been a hundred people sitting there. Not a familiar face in sight; a bit nerve-wracking.

  ‘Over here, Stormy,’ shouted one of the men.

  I didn’t know him, but ‘Stormy’ was my nickname at the arsenal (because there were five girls named Betty in my section) and he was obviously taking the opportunity to chat me up.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said to myself.

  ‘I can cope with sitting on my own.’

  And sure enough, I spotted a girl I did know at a table.

  They must have thought I was a good worker because towards the last year of the war, I ended up in another section, making the rockets they fired from the Typhoon aircraft. Some of this was a little bit daunting. To make the rockets, you went into a hole in the floor and you were more or less buried in the hole. Only the top of your head was showing, just level with the floor. In front of you on the floor was a big umbrella type of construction, like the ribs of a big umbrella. The rockets were put on each ‘rib’ and our job was to fit the nose cones. Apparently, the men were too big to actually go into these holes, so it was only the girls that could do the job.

  By then, of course, I had a different perspective on it all. With the various jobs I’d had handling powder, I didn’t know who was going to use them. But with these rockets, you knew they were destined for the RAF to use. Like a lot of the girls, I had brothers in the Forces. So I’d think: ‘Well, at least they’ve got the ammunition to fight.’

  Of course, you had strong feelings about it all. You couldn’t help it. On the bus home, the bus would go along the Bridgend by-pass and by the side of the road there was a prisoner-of-war camp; it was called Island Farm. In March 1945, 70 German prisoners-of-war had tunnelled their way out of the camp. At one stage, there were high-ranking German officers there; they still had their uniforms, their jackboots, even their medals on.

  By then, of course, the war was drawing to a close, but we’d seen the state of our boys starting to come back from the prisoner-of-war camps. It really annoyed me to see those German officers still in their uniforms. They still had their batmen to help them, while our boys were in ribbons. They took away our boys’ identity. Yet we didn’t do it to them.

  I could never accept that, for some reason. It just seemed so wrong. Why the hell were they allowed to keep everything, while our boys could not? I’m not a vindictive woman by any stretch of the imagination, but that one thing made me so angry. Why? My mother would always say ‘The war’s not over until the boys are home’, so it didn’t register with us that everything was going to finish so soon. Jack was in the Middle East in the Army for five years, Bob was in the Airforce; little Joe was too young to fight.

  For us, at the arsenal, when it was over it was over. The war in Europe had finished, we’d had VE Day and one day at work we were told: ‘Don’t come back tomorrow, you’re finished. Here’s your pay.’ It was a bit of a shock because we’d all wound up in textiles, tidying up in those last few weeks. Now they were handing us a note that said: ‘You’re unemployed now’. It did feel like you were just being cast aside. And you didn’t know what would happen after that, you’d got so used to having regular work. All you could do was hope that something better would come along.

  At first, you’d just go to the dole office once a week, to sign on for your 21 shillings. Then, one day, I turned up as usual and they handed me a green card, saying ‘Go to the Don’, a hall where they’d started up a new factory in Kenfig Hill. ‘What was involved?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you work there 8 till 6pm with an hour for lunch. The pay is 18 shillings a week.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not doing that. Eighteen shillings a week for a job when you get 21 shillings from the dole.’

  ‘Look, you can’t refuse,’ the woman at the dole office said.

  ‘Try me,’ was my retort. Again, it didn’t make sense.

  The arsenal itself had stopped production but other firms there took over the sewing machines. So I wound up going back to the arsenal as a machinist in 1947. I’d applied to be a machinist but they decided they wanted me to work as an examiner, checking other people’s work, making raincoats, cycle capes, sou’westers, wet weather clothes. I worked there for a year.

  There were things I missed about my wartime work, despite ‘the yellow’. The friendships made the difference, really. During the war, you had targets. There was no money for us for meeting that target. You’d have the odd day when everything went wrong, so the other girls that worked with you on the bench would make up your target for you. In that respect, it was very friendly. You stuck together and helped each other out if you could.

  In 1948, I left work completely. My mother was ill; she had terrible shingles from waist to knee. She couldn’t sit or stand. I’d wind up painting her skin for her, using a feather with a purple thick liquid; this had to be painted onto her skin every day to dry up the sores because they started off as open blisters.

  A year later, my dad died. He was 64. He planned to retire that December. He had a sudden haemorrhage. I’d been to the hospital to see him and went to my sister-in-law’s at Port Talbot to wash and change. He died while I was there. My mother went to pieces. I couldn’t leave her for any length of time, so I stayed at
home, looking after her. Joe was at home too, at first; then he married and left home.

  In August 1953, I went for a family day trip to Porthcawl. On the way back, a group of us, including little Leonard, our ‘evacuee’, now l4, went for a drink. A man started chatting to my sister Nancy. It turned out he knew her from schooldays. His name was Ivor. He lived in Kenfig Hill, the other side of the railway line from us. The next day, I popped out for some shopping and when I came back my mother said: ‘There was someone looking for you, name of Ivor.’

  Ivor was 35, seven years older than me; he’d been widowed after the war. I didn’t know any of this until about three weeks after he’d come to our house. We literally bumped into each other in the village.

  ‘Ooh, I’ve been looking for you,’ he said.

  My attitude, it has to be said, was a bit ‘take it or leave it’ but he insisted we go to the pictures that same night. And that, for us, was the beginning. We married in March 1954 and we were together for over 50 years until he died, age 87. He had dementia and I looked after him myself for nearly six years. I did work again, as a home carer, for about 20 years while Ivor was alive. And I enjoyed that too.

  When he went, it was either give up or go on. And I did, somehow, go on. A lot of my old friends had died by then, so I got out and about again and made new friends. We didn’t have children. There was no clear reason; it was just one of those things. I have nieces and nephews – Joe had five children – and if I pick up the phone and say ‘come’, they’re here. We’re still a close family.