Kathleen jumped up from her seat, smiling, but the man put his hand out to stop her. ‘I’m afraid I can’t pass you, though,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
‘You’re too thin,’ the doctor replied. ‘The minimum for the WRNS is six stone, and you’re a few pounds under. I’m sorry.’
He turned and walked away with his clipboard under his arm, leaving Kathleen utterly gobsmacked. She had passed all the fitness tests, she had proved her worth. Yet for the sake of a few pounds her dream of serving in the Navy had been thwarted.
Dejectedly, Kathleen returned home and began preparing the baby’s dinner, staring longingly out of the window at the sea.
4
When Jessie wrote to tell Jim that she’d volunteered for Anti-Aircraft Command, he was concerned. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’ he replied anxiously. The idea of his diminutive fiancée working on an enormous ack-ack gun, trying to shoot German planes out of the sky, sounded both absurd and distinctly dangerous.
Jessie wrote again, explaining that she wanted to do something tangible for the war effort – something that she could see was really making a difference. She hadn’t signed up for the Army just to be stuck behind a desk.
As it turned out, however, before Jessie was going to be allowed anywhere near a gun she first had to spend a whole month studying the theory behind her new trade. She and her friends Olive and Mary were soon on their way to Arborfield Camp, near Reading, for an intensive ack-ack training course.
Arborfield was a permanent Army camp, much bigger than the barracks at Leicester where the girls had done their basic training. When they arrived they were marched straight to the stores and issued with battle dress for their new roles in the field.
Jessie had never owned a pair of trousers before, and putting them on for the first time felt strange. But even more peculiar were the long johns the girls were given to wear during long cold nights on the gun-sites. Then there were thick woollen men’s socks that were far too big for Jessie’s size-three feet, and leather boots with gaiters that had to be polished every night. It was beginning to seem as if the Army really was turning the girls into men.
The girls were told they would be forming a new ack-ack battery known as 518, joining a regiment that already included three other mixed-sex batteries: 483, 484 and 485. They were to train alongside male gunners who were also fresh recruits – the Army made sure not to mix girls with seasoned soldiers, who they knew might be more prejudiced against the sexes working together.
But even so, some of the men at Arborfield had low expectations of the women. ‘You wait – there won’t be a girl in sight when the guns go off,’ one of them predicted, as they all sat down to dinner in the mess hall.
‘We’ll see,’ Jessie replied confidently. She had already come to realise that much of the male bravado around the camp was just that. Soon after arriving at Arborfield, the new recruits had been inoculated against tetanus and typhoid, lining up in alphabetical order with their hands on their hips while a medic worked his way along the line. Since Jessie’s surname was Ward she’d had plenty of time to watch as half a dozen men fainted at the sight of the needle, while the female recruits had barely batted an eyelid.
As Jessie got to know her fellow ack-ack girls she discovered that many of them had good reasons for wanting to shoot down German planes. That night, as they made up their beds in their Nissen hut, they shared the reasons they had volunteered for the guns. A small, sparky corporal called Elsie Windsor explained that she had been a parlourmaid in Coventry during the Baedeker raids. ‘I saw the planes going right over our house,’ she said, ‘and there was no sound of gunfire. I just couldn’t understand it. Why were we sitting there and taking it without putting up a fight?’
A Liverpudlian private called Lily, meanwhile, had been inspired to enlist after she was bombed out for the third time and her fiancé was taken prisoner by the Germans. But the saddest story of the night came from a girl called Gladys, who told the others about living through the terrible Hull Blitz. She and her family had been sitting round the fire one evening when their house had suffered a direct hit – the next thing Gladys knew, she was in the middle of the road, with her mother’s corpse draped across her legs and her baby nephew dead in her lap. ‘That’s why I’m doing this,’ she told the other girls bitterly. ‘For revenge.’
As the girls talked, Jessie noticed a pretty blonde private in the bunk next to her who was pulling at the thread in some embroidery. ‘That’s nice,’ Jessie told her. ‘I’ve been working on one too.’ She pulled out the tablecloth she’d started, and they compared notes.
After a bit of chat, the girl introduced herself as Elsie Acres. ‘So why did you join up?’ Jessie asked her. ‘Did you lose somebody too?’
‘My fiancé and my brother, both at Dunkirk,’ Elsie said sadly.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Jessie replied, feeling a little guilty. There she was with a fiancé lucky enough to have been rescued twice on the way back from France, while this poor girl had lost two people at once.
‘Well, there are plenty worse off than me,’ Elsie said thoughtfully, as she went back to her embroidery.
The next day the ack-ack course began in earnest, and the girls began wrapping their heads around the fundamentals of optics, magnetism, wind thrust and geometry. Although compared to boys their age they had generally been taught little mathematics at school, the instructors, who were used to classes of men, made no concessions. Jessie had always been top of her class, but even she found it a struggle to keep up.
Once they had got to grips with the theory, the girls learned about the different roles they would be performing on the gun-site, as well as the equipment they would have to use. On the lawn outside the classroom hut, Jessie had noticed a large metal device mounted on a rotating base. The height-and-range finder, as it was known, was an 18-foot-long horizontal cylinder, from which two eyepieces protruded like microscopes. The girls were told that the strange contraption was used to determine how far off an enemy plane was.
Then there was the Sperry predictor, a large black box covered in dials, knobs and levers, which, by rotating to follow the target, was capable of calculating the correct length of fuse so that a shell would explode as close to a plane as possible. Finally, less high-tech but no less important, were the Bar and Stroud binoculars used by the sharp-eyed girls selected to work as spotters. These required little instruction to use, but they had to learn about the optics all the same.
The only jobs on the gun-site that girls weren’t allowed to perform were actually loading and firing the guns, thanks to a Royal Proclamation which expressly forbade women from combat roles – so that was where the men of the battery came in.
Aside from the technical training, the ack-ack girls spent hours every day on aircraft recognition, learning to distinguish between the tiny silhouettes of dozens of different German planes. Each night, Jessie and Elsie Acres swotted up for the next day’s lessons together, testing each other over their embroidery.
And while their brains were getting a workout, their bodies were subjected to the rigours of the military as well. There was daily drill practice, and physical training sessions at the crack of dawn each morning.
The men and women at the camp exercised together, which wasn’t always easy – at five foot one and just seven stone, there was little chance of Jessie successfully performing the ‘wheelbarrow’ with a male partner she could barely lift off the ground.
The PT instructor was a prim and pretty corporal by the name of Birchett, who was perhaps a little too fond of her airs and graces. Her favourite expression was ‘Over and up, girls!’ and she delivered it in shrill, clipped tones which always inspired giggles.