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Adventures in the ATS

At the beginning of the war I was living in Croydon with my parents. I was 19, and I very well remember that first terrible air raid siren on the Sunday the war began. At first nothing much happened, but fairly soon I was called up. It was with a government department in London, so I travelled up by train every morning. I had no idea what I was doing, nobody explained it to me or seemed to be in charge of me. That went on for quite a while, a year or eighteen months, and then suddenly to my horror I got called up again. I was still living at home. My mother was doing her best to cope with rationing and the blackout and so on, and my father was a fire lookout or something of that sort, and he used to go off several nights a week.

Then the air raids began. We had an air raid shelter built in our back garden with a concrete bunk on each side and a well in the middle. My father had one concrete bunk and my mother had the other, and I had to deal with the well in the middle. It went on night after night. Across the road from us there was a little suburban railway line with a small halt, and just beyond it was a tunnel, with a Bofors gun in it. Whenever the Germans came over it used to nip out of the tunnel to fire at them, and then back into it again. One day — it was practically broad daylight — a German plane came over so low that we could see the crew. That’s something I shall never forget. There were barrage balloons all around.

As I say, I was called up again. It was the summer — I should think it must have been 1942. If I hadn’t waited to be called up but had volunteered, I could have had my choice of the women’s services to go into, but because I waited I had no choice. So I went off by train to Guildford with a couple of other girls, and we were met there by a lorry which took us to our billets. I was in the ATS. I used to say that in the ATS there were three vital things to look out for in your billets. One, that you had access to a telephone, two, that you had an iron and three, that there was hot water. After I had settled in I rang up my mother and she asked me to wait a minute while she went out and turned off some milk she had on the stove, and I burst into tears. I wanted to be home.

The training at Guildford lasted about three weeks, and mostly we had to do the most awful chores, like cleaning things out (we won’t mention what), and square bashing. It was midsummer, and we had to wear these terrible thick stockings and very heavy shoes, marching up and down on the parade ground. While we were at Guildford we were asked what we wanted to do in the ATS. I was offered the choice between radio operator and driving, which I preferred. So we were sent to a driving school which, strangely enough, was in this part of the country — a place called Hawksley Hall, near Chester. We were moved from Guildford in what seemed like the middle of the night — I well remember coming through Shrewsbury station in the dark. You’ll never believe this, but on the platform there was this very handsome man dressed in what we used to call those teddy bear fur coats, and it turned out to be the film actor Anton Walbrook.

Anyway, we finally arrived at this Hawksley Hall. The staff lived in the house and we were billeted in purpose-built huts. It was winter by then: we had been issued with greatcoats, and we used to say that at night the cockroaches used to put on our greatcoats and walk up and down our beds. We did our driving training there — I remember one girl being told to drive straight ahead over a roundabout, and doing just that.

When I had passed my test, I was posted to a REME unit in Kent which was itself attached to a searchlight regiment whose headquarters was in Bromley. Whenever a searchlight went out of action they had to send for the REME, and two officers and a sergeant, with me as driver, would drive out to see to it. Off we used to go in the middle of the night, in the middle of an air raid. The men on the searchlight site would all have gone to bed, and if I wasn’t needed to hold a torch, I used to go and sit in the cookhouse and look to see what they’d got in their cupboards.

One night I was sent out alone. The officer who should have come with me could have been severely reprimanded for that because the driving was very difficult with our headlamps masked. On this particular night, with no one to help with the navigating I wasn’t sure where I was. I could see the searchlights from the other sites criss-crossing the sky with the air raid going on, and there I was driving down these country lanes looking for the particular site where I could deliver a piece of equipment to the sergeant in charge of the site. I think that was about my most hair-raising night of the war. Then we were involved with the V1s and V2s. With the V1s they used to say ‘Praise the Lord and keep the engine running’, because as long as the engine was running you were OK: if it stopped, you’d had it.

Once I had to drive into London from Bromley, where we were stationed, and for some reason I was given a three-ton lorry to do it. There were no synchronised gears in those days — you had to double-declutch. I was driving this three-ton lorry around London and I never did get the hang of changing gear. The engine was so powerful that it managed in top gear even though I was only creeping through London.

In my early days at Bromley, I drove a Utility truck — we used to call them ‘Tillies’ — and mine was nicknamed ‘Panting Annie’. Then towards the end of the war we left Bromley and I was posted to Aldershot where we drove fifteen hundredweights. In the Army, between the first of October and the first of May, you drained your radiator every single night. You could be having a heatwave but you still had to drain the radiator, and you didn’t dare not to.

In Bromley we lived in a block of flats that had been commandeered by the Army, not in huts, and they were really quite civilised. But we still had the awful Army beds with the mattresses that were known as ‘biscuits’, though we did have proper sheets and pillows and blankets. The officers used to spend their time working out the exact way we had to fold our bedding.

I didn’t do too badly for leave. I remember once I was given a 48-hour pass when I had just been posted to Bromley. I wasn’t at the block of flats yet but at a headquarters which was out of Bromley somewhere in another big house that had been commandeered, and which I had only seen in the daylight. The end of my 48 hours came and I left it till the very last moment. It was dark, and when I got to Bromley station I had no idea where the headquarters was, and wondered what to do now. There was a pub there, so I pushed aside the blackout curtain over the door and went in. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife — it was full of men, all smoking. I wasn’t used to pubs, and there I was, all alone in my uniform. I asked if anybody knew where the headquarters was. There was much deliberating till one chap piped up and said Yes, he knew where it was. Now, sixty years later, you would never dare do this, but this perfect stranger said he knew where it was and would take me, and I thought nothing of it. I was so afraid of being on a charge if I was late back from leave. And all was well — even though he took me by a short cut through a cemetery! You’d never dare do it now, would you?

One of the jobs we had to do at Aldershot was to go to the Officers’ Mess and pick up the meals for the day. It was really quite a pleasant duty because there were all these Army cooks making delicious gorgeous things like chocolate éclairs and, if you were lucky, you might be given one. The meals were all put into metal containers in the backs of our trucks, and you had to drive fairly carefully to avoid spilling them. There was one of our drivers called Madge who just didn’t bother about this, and on the days she was driving, the officers had to go short of soup, or coffee, or whatever it was, and the first thing Madge had to do afterwards was to get the hosepipe out and hose the back of the truck so that it was all decent. The barracks was at the bottom of a hill in Aldershot, and I think it was Madge who was driving wildly down this hill one day and overtook an elderly cyclist and immediately turned left in front of him. The poor old chap fell off his bike and was out cold on the ground. The barrack hut we were in looked out on the hospital where he had been taken on the opposite side of the barrack square, and we could see the barracks chapel. We used to say to Madge ‘There’s a light on in the chapel’, and she would say ‘No, don’t tell me! It’s him, I know it’s him!’

This story was collected by Laurence Le Quesne and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action desk on behalf of Margot Sugden and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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