by Annie Groves
‘Bloomin’ heck!’ said Janet as she stepped off the train in front of Tilly. ‘She’s got a gob on ’er that would wake the dead. An’ I thought me mam could shout.’ Everybody laughed, but not for long as a heavy-set female dashed along the platform to the rear of the breathless gaggle of women who had just clambered off the train.
‘I am Drill Sergeant Bison and from now on I will be your replacement mother or your worst nightmare – it’s completely up to you.’
‘Sounds promising,’ said Janet, with her Liverpool accent who sounded so like Sally, and gave Tilly a friendly dig in the arm with her elbow. ‘She looks like a barrel of laughs, I don’t think.’
‘We weren’t told about the likes of her in the recruitment office.’ Tilly felt her spirits sink.
‘The only advice I was given, and that was by me mam, was not to sit down on strange lavatory seats.’
‘Why is that?’ asked Tilly, beginning to think she had had a rather sheltered upbringing. Janet was staring at her open-mouthed, her eyebrows pleated in confusion.
‘You know …?’ Janet said, rolling her eyes in a southerly direction. ‘You know!’
‘I don’t know.’ Tilly was just as confused, especially when she saw Janet shrug her shoulders before trying to put what she meant into words without sounding crude.
‘You know … down there …’ She nodded pointedly to the space below Tilly’s stomach. ‘There … you can catch things off lavvy seats … things like,’ she lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘VD.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Tilly said innocently.
But she was sure that was about to change when Janet said, ‘Oh wait till I tell yer … living near the Mersey docks you find out about things like that at a very early age.’ She gave a knowing raise of her eyebrows as she dipped her chin, all the time keeping her eyes peeled for nosey-pokes who might be listening.
‘Right, move along now,’ called the drill sergeant. ‘Lef-righ, lef-righ! No slacking at the back.’ Without another thought Tilly found herself falling in with the drill sergeant’s instructions to move her feet left then right, then left then right and giggling on a hop, skip and a jump as she did so.
‘This could be fun,’ she whispered to Janet as they fell into step beside each other. But their amusement was short-lived when they saw the huge khaki army truck waiting outside the little country station to take them to the training camp.
‘How are we expected to get into that?’ cried the blonde girl who looked like Dulcie and was called Pru. ‘I’ve got my new stockings on and I don’t want them laddered.’
‘Well, if you did you could climb up it and get into the truck,’ laughed Janet.
‘Until then, you can do the same as everybody else – hitch up your skirt, take the hand that’s offered to you and climb in,’ said the now fierce-looking sergeant. Pru gave a little sniff before disappearing behind the truck to remove her stockings.
‘I ain’t laddering these for no one,’ she said. ‘There are limits to how much a girl is expected to do for king and country.’ Tilly could only marvel at her impudence as the sergeant gave her a look that would curdle milk.
‘Oh we’ve got a comedian in our midst,’ said the menacing drill sergeant. ‘I like comedians, I do.’ But it seemed to have no effect on Pru whatsoever as she slipped out of her sling-back shoes, flung them on the flat-back, and, after hitching her skirt and taking the hands of two male soldiers who were already on the truck, she clambered aboard like she was born to it.
‘I bag the sack to sit on,’ said Pru, giving the drill sergeant a defiant grin. Tilly, wishing she had Pru’s gall, clambered on without a murmur and settled herself down before the rickety vehicle rolled and bounced along the country roads and she had to hang on to the sides for dear life.
They had been travelling a long time when someone started singing ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’, as dusk was drawing in, mainly, Tilly suspected, to allay the fear of the low-flying bats in the trees that lined the narrow lanes. When they reached the wide gates of the army camp, greeted by two women in army uniform who checked their credentials in minute detail, they all breathed a sigh of relief to be on terra firma again in one piece.
‘I wish they’d hurry up, I’m starving,’ said Janet, who waited at the back with Tilly and didn’t make a fuss. ‘I haven’t eaten a thing since my breakfast this morning. I feel as if I’ve been travelling forever, Liverpool seems like another country and I’m aching all over.’
‘That’s nothing to the way you’ll be feeling tomorrow night, Scouse,’ said the drill sergeant with obvious glee, ‘you’ve got to get through tonight first.’
Janet looked at Tilly and they both grimaced, each wondering what tomorrow would bring. They had missed the evening meal by three hours and after climbing out of the lorry into the blackness of the open countryside, Tilly found herself standing on what felt like a rough cinder road and by the light of the moon could just about make out two lines of single-storey wooden huts, which they were informed would be their billets for the duration of their training.
‘You, you, you and you over there,’ barked the drill sergeant, pointing to Tilly, Janet, Veronica and Pru. ‘Introduce yourselves to number one hut and you will be given further instructions.’
The four girls dragged their suitcases, which by now seemed considerably heavier, and did as they were told. Once inside they saw the thirty iron bunks that lined the walls of the hut. Tilly grimaced at the four thin unmade iron beds.
There was chill in the place and the round black stove in the corner didn’t seem to be throwing out much heat, Tilly noticed as her eyes scanned the long room where girls in various stages of undress were making beds, playing cards or lying on their bunks reading, or writing letters. All of them looked up when Tilly and the other three came inside.
‘Say hello to these four girls,’ said Drill Sergeant Bison, looking menacingly down the rows of beds.
‘Hello to these four girls,’ chorused the inhabitants of the hut, making Tilly smile.
‘Right, I’ll leave you to it. You are now confined to barracks for one week. You will have your vaccinations at o-nine-hundred hours, pick a bunk, settle down and be ready for roll call at o-six-hundred tomorrow morning.’
‘No one said anything about vaccinations,’ said Tilly, her heart sinking; she hated needles.
‘I’m being woken up at six a.m.?’ Pru exclaimed, her eyes widening in disbelief.
‘No,’ the drill sergeant smiled, ‘you are being woken at o-five-hundred. By o-six-hundred I expect you to have made your bed, stand at the end of it in readiness for kit muster and be available for roll call, then if everything is to my satisfaction you will go for breakfast, and by the looks of you slovenly lot it most certainly will not be, and in that case you will forgo breakfast altogether.’ Tilly noted the gleam of anticipated spats to come in the sergeant’s eyes.
‘I’m just in the little room at the back if you should have nightmares, girls. Lights out in ten minutes – good night.’ With that Drill Sergeant Bison left the room and the four girls looked at each other in dismay.
‘I’ll never wake up at five o’clock. That’s the middle of the night,’ Pru said, shoving a pillow into a white cotton case after choosing the bed near the door.
‘You will the second time,’ a voice from the back of the hut piped up. ‘Oh, and I’d advise you to go to the toilet before you get into bed because if you disturb anybody you’ll soon know about it.’
‘Where are the toilets?’ Tilly asked and was disappointed to find they were outside, across the road near the field that contained a rather unfriendly-looking bull.
‘I’m not going by myself,’ Pru said. ‘I’ve never come across anything bigger than a dog in my life and I ain’t arguing with that chap.’
‘Come on,’ said Veronica, the girl who’d been crying on the train but who seemed to have brightened considerably, and due to the fact that she’d hardly spoken si
nce they all met, nobody realised was from Scotland. ‘I’m used to bulls, I’ll take ye.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Tilly, ‘no point in us going in twos, let’s all go together.’
‘I’d take that red scarf off if I were you,’ said a girl further down the hut. Tilly hastily shoved the scarf into her coat pocket in the midst of girlish laughter. She wasn’t so sure she liked her new-found freedom any more and longed to be tucked up in her own bed sharing confidences with Agnes, especially when she saw the thin mattress and realised why all the girls had referred to it as a ‘biscuit’.
Tilly groaned; she had never had to make her own bed before, but then, what could be so hard about it? And she had never been as free as a bird before either. Somehow, she thought, this may just be fun!
‘If my mother could see me now,’ said Tilly, after being shown how to make a bed army style, whilst unfolding the rough grey blankets that had crisp starched sheets sandwiched between them, a pillow on top of the thin rolled mattress completing the little pile, ‘she’d be making this bed for me.’
‘If my mother could see this she’d be down the pawnshop hocking the lot,’ Janet laughed, making all the other girls smile. Tilly liked Janet; there was no side to her, what you saw was what you got from what she could tell. After making her bed and putting the rest of her belongings away she was settling down to write a letter to her mother about the events of the day when suddenly the lights went out. A collective moan echoed around the room and Tilly was left with her thoughts before drifting into an uncomfortable sleep.
In the cold grey light of dawn before the birds had even woken up, Drill Sergeant Bison flung open the barrack-room door, took a deep breath and emitted a thundering sound that seemed hardly feasible coming from a woman. Tilly wanted to tell her to keep the noise down but knew she would never be so bold.
Within moments every girl was out of her bed and jumping to attention on the frozen linoleum as Sergeant Bison marched up and down the narrow room barking orders that Tilly was sure she would never remember as she hopped from one icy foot to the other.
‘Slippers!’ Drill Sergeant Bison turned immediately to Tilly. ‘Keep still!’
Tilly almost fell backwards onto the bed as the words hit her full in the face. Slippers? she thought, silently shocked. Who did she think she was calling slippers?
‘You!’ Bison growled in a most unladylike fashion as if reading Tilly’s mind. After spending a fitful night on a hard thin mattress Tilly realised that the army didn’t look as enticing as it once did. And it was nothing like the glamorous posters.
She couldn’t wait to have some breakfast and write to her mother who, she knew, would be eagerly awaiting an update on how she was faring. However, Tilly was in for a shock when she discovered that they were confined to barracks for a week and prohibited from writing home for the foreseeable future. She then found that breakfast would not be consumed until every inch of the wooden hut they were now to call home was cleaned from top to bottom.
‘What, all of it?’ asked Janet, with a look of disbelief.
‘Every single inch,’ said the corporal, Tannaway, who had come into the hut to relieve Drill Sergeant Bison and looked surprisingly fresh and bright as if she had been up all night getting ready for this inspection. ‘I want the beds made to specific requirements, every surface cleaned until it gleams, the linoleum polished until you can see your face in it, every cupboard, every bedstead, dust-free and spotless in every area.’ She paused. ‘Any questions?’
‘Does this have to be done every week?’ Tilly asked. She wasn’t used to heavy cleaning, preferring to leave it up to her mum who was much better at it than she would ever be.
‘Every day! If that’s not too much trouble of course, Slippers.’ The corporal’s words were laced with a heavy inflection of sarcasm and Tilly knew that she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of this woman who looked as if she could eat you for breakfast and still look for another morsel.
‘I didn’t think she could hear me,’ Tilly said to nobody in particular, flipping her blanket the way she had seen her mother do it, deciding to keep her head down.
‘I can hear the grass grow, Slippers,’ said the corporal with obvious pride in her achievement.
‘Blimey!’ Tilly whispered. ‘Good job I didn’t say anything wrong.’ She soon realised that the drill sergeant had been a mild-mannered pussy-cat compared to Corporal Tannaway and set about doing the best she could in the time she was given.
At breakfast, they all sat at long benches to eat their meal, which was comprised of porridge, fish or eggs and toast, much to the surprised delight of many new recruits who had never seen so much food since the beginning of the war. Later they were lined up outside the medical hut to wait their turn to be inoculated against smallpox, tetanus and cholera, little realising that they might be spending the next few days fighting a fever whilst under Drill Sergeant Bison’s beady-eyed observation.
Then it was on to the supply hut where, being a wing of the army, they were provided with everything khaki, from elasticated bloomers and lisle stockings to big heavy greatcoats, issued by a corporal, whose trained eye was not skilled in the weights and measures department, judging by the enormous uniform offered to a pint-sized girl from Birmingham who was lost in a sea of material, and quite reluctant to part with her new clothing even though she was told that she could swap with someone who had a uniform more her size.
‘You forgot your “hussif”, Soldier,’ called the drill sergeant to Tilly. ‘Don’t you intend to do any mending or have you already got somebody to do your chores for you?’
‘Hussif?’ Tilly looked puzzled, realising that she would have to try to stay on the right side of Drill Sergeant Bison who looked as if she took no prisoners, before going back to the long desk where the supplies were given out and being handed a white cotton wallet containing needles, thread, spare buttons and other necessities.
‘You might think of it as a “housewife”,’ said the sergeant sweetly, handing Tilly two shoe brushes, a brass strip for cleaning her buttons and finally, balancing on top of the whole lot, a military respirator.
‘Guard them with your life, they are the essentials, you will not be supplied with any more, lose them and you die,’ Bison said without looking up and then shouted without preamble: ‘Next!’
There was a scattering of laughing girls all gauging their sizes when she got back to the barracks, swapping skirts and jackets as the ones they had been given weren’t the right fit, and in the commotion Tilly finally managed to accrue a whole uniform that was as near to her size as possible.
‘If I roll the top over it will be the right length.’
‘Just put a belt around the skirt and nobody will notice.’
‘Three square meals a day and I’ll soon fill this jacket …’
For the very first time in her life Agnes had a room all of her own and she wasn’t sure she liked it. Even in the orphanage she had shared with the other children or, later, with the servants who were employed to care for the officers in control of the establishment.
Pulling the bedclothes up under her chin, Agnes’s thoughts turned to Ted, and she let her imagination roam to the future day when they would be man and wife. She wondered what it would be like being married to Ted, and then she pondered – and where the idea came from she could not imagine – whether his mother would ever allow him to wed whilst she had breath in her body to stop him.
Agnes suddenly pulled the bedclothes over her head as if hiding from the thought she had the audacity to conjure up, like she did when she was a child and had voiced the longing to have a family and a home of her own and been laughed at for it.
Living here with Olive and the other girls was the closest she had ever come to having a real ‘family’ to call her own, although since Tilly left for training in the ATS Agnes felt as if she had lost a sister.
Tears stung the back of her eyes now as she recalled the nights she and Tilly would lie awake and discus
s what they would do when this awful war was over. Tilly would confirm her dearest wish to marry Drew and go and live in America, and she in turn would tell Tilly of her longing to live in a house in the countryside with geese and chickens being chased by laughing children.
It was a daft idea, she knew, but it was that dream which had kept her going all these years – and it didn’t look as if it would ever come to fruition, as Ted worked on the railway and there was no chance of having a house in the countryside when you had to drive trains around the underground stations, now was there? Nor a mother who would never contemplate leaving London, she supposed.
Sally was late home, as an unexploded bomb had been found near the hospital and they couldn’t leave until it was made safe, so she decided to make herself useful instead. If nothing else it would take her mind off worrying about George, whom she was missing dearly.
Closing the front door with her heel she took off her navy-blue nurse’s cloak and noticed a letter addressed to her on the highly polished hall table. It was from Callum.
He was in the South Atlantic fighting through blizzards as well as the blasted enemy. Sally shuddered. She could only imagine how difficult blizzards in the Atlantic must be. He was polite, as usual, asking how everybody was and letting her know that he missed little Alice and to tell his little niece he would bring her something nice when he got home. Whenever that might be.
A small pang of … what? Pity? Regret? Sally couldn’t make up her mind; but she had come to terms with her father’s relationship with Callum’s sister, her one-time best friend when they were both trainee nurses, and had reconciled herself to the knowledge she had treated Callum very badly when he brought little Alice to her last December.
Sally could not imagine life without her little half-sister now and with that realisation she knew she had to make amends with Callum too. A former teacher, he had initially stolen her heart when they first met and he even told her, on that Boxing Day back at her mother’s house, he shouldn’t have kissed her like that, calling himself the worst kind of cad because he didn’t then have anything to offer her. But that was then.
