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One Woman’s War - The Beginning

When war broke out I was eighteen years old and living a pleasant life in a small town in the extreme south west of Scotland. Almost immediately we went to live in a cottage my grandmother owned further down the coast where my father thought we would be safer in case of air raids. Southern Ireland had refused to support the blackout regulations imposed in Britain and a minor panic was caused in Scotland owing to its West coast proximity, but no bombs fell on Stranraer, Glasgow or Dumfries; no German submarines were spotted in the Irish Channel. Life gradually returned to something approaching normal, and I was given a small job in our local Estate office, ( I left this after a few months as I could not stand being shut indoors for eight hours a day!).
Then the Territorials were called up and we had a goodbye party before they marched off with everyone waving their hands and calling ‘see you at Christmas’. Once more life went back to normal.
‘Normal life’ in our village was a quiet life. Older women were members of the Womens’ Rural Institute in the next — and much larger village —and ‘called’ on each other during the day to sit and chatter while they embroidered tray cloths, tea cloths and childrens’ clothes. while we younger ones rode horses or bicycles to go anywhere and according to the season played hockey and tennis and swam, sailed and held beach bar-b-queues, or danced the night away in someone’s large farmhouse kitchen.
I had a second small job by then, checking the butter fat content as the milk arrived at the creamery in the morning, This was great fun as I was merrily chatted up by all the young farmers as they delivered their churns. So for a year nothing changed.
Then quite suddenly it seemed, there was a war. First the evacuees came from Glasgow; mostly wild children with head lice, scabies and barely a change of clothing. The few clean and attractive ones were quickly snatched by the designated landladies. The remainder, all too conscious by now of their condition, huddled in bunches, comforted by the few pregnant and by now, outraged women who had also been evacuated. There we were, me a Guider, an even younger girl and three farmers daughters who had been excused dairy duty for the evening; none of us had ever seen a louse, a case of scabies or such God-forsaken scraps of humanity whose Glaswegian accents we could barely understand! But their pathetic tears for the mums and dads they had left behind begat our pity and we did our best to comfort them with hastily collected toys, biscuits and picture books before setting to with hot water, soap, ointment and fine toothed combs which had miraculously appeared courtesy of our District Nurse. By the time the ladies of the W.R.I. arrived with another collection of ‘landladies’ the children were clean, reasonably happy and ready to depart with their surrogate mums to start their new life. Many of these placements were very successful; few of the children were returned as ‘unmanageable’, and three from a chidrens’ home were adopted by their placement families.
. By March 1940 my group of friends was beginning to disappear. Four of the boys had been accepted for flying training in the R.A.F., one girlfriend had joined the A.T.S. another was waiting call-up to the W.A.A.F. At Easter I went to our nearest large town to visit my grandmother. She went with me to the recruiting Office where I signed up to become a Wireless operator in the W.A.A.F. and then accompanied me home to soothe my irascible parents
. ‘Don’t worry’ said my mother to my furious father ‘ she’ll be home in a fortnight. She’ll never stand the discomfort or the discipline’.
Because of a shortage of training facilities it was more than a year before I was called up, but that remark had wounded my pride and remembering it kept me from giving up during the horrendous six weeks of Initial Service training at R.A.F. Bridgenorth which started for me in the middle of May 1941. All our own clothing was taken into store to be sent to our homes and we were issued with Service uniform. The thick, scratchy underwear was bad enough in the summer weather, but the heavy, badly fitting shoes were beyond belief and at the end of a few days of drill and walking miles from one hut to another I could barely hobble. The food, though plentiful, was stodgy and badly cooked and the course of injections for various illnesses that might possibly lay us low was terrifying! I felt as if the young male medical staff were using my arm as a dart board and the fever and discomfort afterwards almost reduced me to tears. Worst of all was sharing a hut with nineteen, mostly uninhibited females. At the end of the first two weeks a number of the volunteers gave up and went home and the majority of the remainder were posted to their various units; but not those recruits wishing to be in signals; no one wanted us and there were still no training schools. I was wholly useless now; the Medical Officer finally agreed that I could no longer march and gave me a chitty of ‘excused drill’, some disgusting ointment to ‘toughen up my skin’ and a kind pat on the shoulder. I spent the next few days avoiding N.C.O.s in the Station Library. A week back on drill and we four prospective signallers were posted ; we danced around and hugged each other with joy; prematurely, it turned out; we still had no station, we were posted to a Holding Unit to that Happy Northern Holiday Town - Blackpool. Desolation!
Never mind, we said . “Think of the fun we can have in a Holiday Town “. Ha! Little did we know!

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