“Did the officers have different food?”
“No, it was the same as our food but it was presented differently. While we used to have ours on big trays they used to have theirs like you would at home, on a small tray. And of course, they had officer’s stewards to wait on them and that. They [the Wrens] had to come to the hatch to get their own food. But it was good fun. And we made a lot of friends there.”
She had never before worked with a large group of women. “It was a big shock when I first went in and when I came out in 1946, I was asked to go back to the same place as I was in service [before the war] and I refused. I couldn’t go back to being a ‘one person’. So I went into catering and I’ve been doing catering all the rest of my life. I was able to do restaurant cooking, and they used to do outside functions, you know?
“Well just before I went to Lee [Lee-on-Solent] it was when one of our own shells backfired and went right through the mess room of the girls having their supper. And of course - one of our own shells, went the wrong way. Kind of came back, sort of thing. That was about a couple of months before I went there. And that was pretty horrific.
“After doing a day’s work, being called to staff, we had to do the firewatching as well, so I am off duty at 8 o’clock, ten o’clock the sirens would go and you’d have to get up all night. You were very tired at the end of the time but you just coped.
Everybody else had to cope. Yes, we had quite a bit of gun-fire, not a lot of actual bombs over Lee because it was Portsmouth and Southampton, we would only get plenty bombs on those two big places, we did get the occasional one but nothing very much.” Asked about gun batteries nearby, she recalled, “Oh, yes! They were all round.”
“It was more or less the Wrens there. ‘Cause, Fleet Air Arm was a part of the Navy you see, we were separate parts of the Navy. The Wrens worked with the Navy, it wasn’t until the recent years that they’ve been integrated with the Navy. Of course, they’re not called Wrens now. They’re Navy people, You make a lot of friends and friends I’ve kept over the years, I’ve still got one of my quarters assistants that I still write to.”
“What about food shortages? How did you manage in catering?”
“Well, one thing was that we used to be on rations the same as everybody else. And we used to have 94 girls I think it was - 94 girls to feed every day. I had seven pounds - this is one thing that’s always stuck in my mind - we had seven pounds of butter a week, no it must have been 80 girls because each pound of butter had to be cut into 80 squares, you were taught how to cut it, you see. I don’t know if I still could do it. We didn’t used to have fridges or anything. To keep butter cold, we used to have cold slabs in the larder; these were all very big houses with all the old-fashioned slabs and larders you see.”
“Meat - did you just put a grid thing over it?”
“Yes, yes. And milk? I think - the milk used to come every day. We used to have a churn…no, sometimes you used to have to go and collect the milk because most of it was tinned milk…used to have a lot of tinned milk. We used to keep the fresh milk just for tea, if they had cocoa or anything, that was all made with tinned milk, cocoa, coffee … No snacks between meals. ‘Cause the girls weren’t in the quarters a lot you see. They used to go out at work. They were more or less doing split duties and used to have certain times for meals, and they all worked in round their duty hours.
You never knew actually what they were doing, ‘cause all of us when we went into the Wrens had to sign this Secrecy Act. I remember one girl who did happen to say…she came in most upset one day and we said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Like ‘Aren’t you well?’ Like, asked after her, you know? And she said ‘No, I’ve just had some …’ She was the one girl, this time she told us, her mother had … she had been upset for several days, and she was still upset because she’d been home … and as she was home her mother had got the news that her father had been killed. She was the person in the signals office had taken the message that her own father had been killed - but she wasn’t able to go and tell her mother, even, because it hadn’t become official. So there was all that kind of trauma that a lot of them had to put up with, and no counselling services like they have today that are supposed to make things better, we used to help one another, more or less.
“D-Day, we could … The morning of D-Day we got up at half-past-four in the morning, ‘cause we had an idea that … we couldn’t go ashore, like, we could go out but you couldn’t go on leave. We were bound in Lee. But we got up at half-past-four in the morning, we weren’t supposed to but we did, and went down on the seafront and saw all the little ships go. It was a wonderful sight. Most of the families were either civilians or serving ashore, because you didn’t get many married people, and of course, the men, we wouldn’t know where they were.”
As with the soldiers on Hayling, social life seemed to have miraculously co-existed with the harsher realities of war.
“We were near Lee-on-Solent - where Lee-on-Solent aerodrome is. We were quartered all along the sea front and all the houses all round. We used to go into the base for pictures, NAFFI canteen and all that. We had lots of dances and social evenings and everything. Well, we went to the Old Time dancing and that and then we had … we used to have social evenings and singalongs in the Rec Room.
“On duty, it was all ordinary everyday cooking. You never really stopped. You used to have fun in between whiles, ‘cause you had to … to sort of have a laugh and a chase around and I chased a girl once because she’d sort of been cheeky, and I said ‘I’ll get you!’ sometimes, like you do when anybody rubs you up the wrong way. And I chased her and she slipped on the polished floor and sat on the top of the fire extinguisher and set it off! We were always up to mischief. I think you would have got fed up with each other … You had to sort of make a laugh of it.”
Different social strata were also brought closer together by the pressures of war-time. This is the tale of Wren Pat Balfour, born 1919
“Another thing which happened was, I was invited to supper with friends on North Shore and Mrs Crawford - she’s Admiral Crawford’s wife - said, ‘Are you going to the dance next Saturday?’ and I said, ‘No, I haven’t got a partner.’ So she said, ‘Captain Hasler, will you please find Miss Barton a partner?’ That was Blondie Hasler, the submarine man. So that’s how I met my first husband. He rang me up and asked if I would like to go to the dance and I said, ‘Yes, thank you.’
“He was away in the East for about three-and-a-half years, then he came back in 1944 and we were married three-and-a-half weeks later. Really a bit on the fast side! It lasted, we had two children. I still have them and they’ve each got two children.”
Of course, inevitably, for many, there was also the sense of being present at the outset of great historic events. Such a person was Mrs Kathleen Kearley, born 1923
Mrs Kathleen Kearley was interviewed about her service in the WRNS before, during and after D-Day. She worked at Fort Southwick, where the D-Day plans were made and orders prepared for Operation Neptune by Wrens who typed and Gestetnered [duplicated] them:
KK: “It was this hut 103 that we worked in. That’s where we worked out this fleet that went over….each ship that went over, all the landing craft. If any of them were sunk or damaged we’d have to write it all on this - on the cards,