Sam longed to defend her sex and her uniform, but for once caution won out over pride and she managed to swallow back the hot words she itched to speak. There were some men – older men in the main, like this one, but not always – who refused to accept that women had a vitally important role to play in the war. No one could be in the ATS for very long without hearing at least one of the crude insults that were bandied about as to the purpose of the women’s uniformed service.
‘Done any stores work before, have you?’ The captain shot the question out at them.
‘We were told we’d be working as stenographers, sir,’ Sam informed him.
‘Stenographers! What in the name of God is the War Office doing sending me stenographers? This is a barracks, not ruddy Whitehall. I’ve got two battalions to keep equipped, never mind the rest of them the War Office has seen fit to land us with. A stenographer is as much use to me as a pea shooter is to a Spitfire pilot.’
Sam could hear Mouse’s audible indrawn sob, but she was made of sterner stuff and automatically she stiffened her spine and straightened her back.
‘Come with me.’ Captain Elland threw the order at them, turned on his heel without waiting to see if they were following him and marched into the sour-aired gloom behind the desk at such a pace that they were almost in danger of losing sight of him.
Down between rows of rough shelving stacked with clothing and equipment he led them, finally coming to a halt outside an open doorway behind which lay a space more the size of a cupboard than an actual room. In it was a single desk with a chair either side, a typewriting machine and a telephone. The desk itself was stacked high with piles of paper. One single bulb illuminated the windowless and almost airless room On the wall opposite the door Sam could see what looked like a plan of the stores, individual buildings listed by number and the separate rows of shelving within those buildings listed by letter.
‘Right,’ said the captain, indicating one of the thick piles of pieces of paper. ‘These here are the sheets that come in whenever we get a delivery. No driver leaves my yard until his delivery has been checked off, and if I find you letting them go before you’ve done that you’ll be on a report so fast your feet won’t touch the ground. Once it’s checked off, the stuff has to be taken to its appropriate storage area, and then once it’s there, it gets checked again, and only then do you put the list in this pile here,’ he indicated another pile of papers, ‘so that one of my lads can check you’ve got it right. Then you make a copy of it and you put one copy at the end of the shelving the goods are on, you put another copy in the file marked Shelving Number whatever, and you give my sergeant a copy so that he can give it to me, and heaven help you if I find out that all these lists don’t tally up when I do my checks. Anyone coming into the stores for anything, no matter what it is, has to sign for what gets taken and you have to put a mark on the lists to show what’s gone. Savvy?’
Savvy? Of course she did! Sam gave him a seething look of indignation as he turned away from them, her face burning a dark angry red when she heard him mutter insultingly, as he walked away, ‘ATS. Bloody officers’ groundsheets, that’s what they are!’
Sally knew that a lot of the girls didn’t like working the night shift, but she didn’t mind. For one thing it meant that she could have time during the day to be with her boys, and for another it meant that she could bargain for extra nights off when she needed them to sing with the Waltonettes, by offering to do other girls’ night shifts.
The changeover of shifts meant that there was the usual hectic busyness outside the factory, with those women arriving for work pouring off buses that were then filled up by those waiting to leave.
‘War work, I’m sick of it,’ one of the women on Sally’s shift grumbled as they changed into their overalls and got ready. Sally, like most of the women with longer hair, covered hers with a turban to keep it safely out of the way of the machinery.
‘It could be worse,’ Sally to her cheerfully. ‘We could be working on munitions.’
‘Aye, and if we was we’d be earning a fair bit more, an’ all.’
‘Oh, give over moaning, our Janet, will yer? You was saying only the other day as how you felt sorry for them as worked on munitions and that you’d never do it no matter what you was paid on account of the danger and ending up with yellow skin.’
‘Oh, that’s typical of you, Zena Harrison,’ Janet sniffed. ‘If you wasn’t me cousin I’d have a few sharp words for you, that I would, allus picking a person up on everything they say.’
‘’Ere, you lot, you’ll never guess what I just heard when I was coming past the medical room.’
‘Well, I’m telling you, Wanda, if it was some gossip about some daft lass going crying to the nurse of account of her having been doing what she shouldn’t with some chap …’ Zena started to warn, but the other woman shook her head and laughed.
‘No, it’s nowt like that. They had some new girls in there waiting to have their medicals and I heard this one saying as how she was scared she wouldn’t be able to give a urine sample like you have to, and blow me if the woman next to her in the queue doesn’t pipe up loud and clear, “Don’t worry about that, lass. You can have some of mine, ’cos I can piss for England.”’
Sally could just imagine the reaction of that stuck-up new doctor to their conversation. His wife wouldn’t have to work in anything so common as munitions; if she did war work it would be something refined and ladylike like being in charge of a group of WVS women. Just thinking about the way he had looked at her and the boys was like peeling a scab off an unhealed wound, her emotional reaction immediate and sharply painful.
The others were still laughing. The girl who had told them the story shook her head and asked them all, ‘Anyone going down the Grafton tomorrow night, only I fancy a bit of a night out?’
The other two girls shook their heads whilst Sally didn’t say anything about the fact that she would be singing. She didn’t want them to think she was trying to show off or that she was getting above herself. Not that she kept her singing a secret, she just didn’t want to be accused of boasting about it. But the thought banished her anger about the ill-tempered doctor. An evening spent singing with the Waltonettes was something to look forward to.
Their work over for the day, the ATS girls crowded onto the bus that would take them back to the school.
‘So how did it go then?’ Hazel turned round in her seat to ask Sam and Mouse.
Immediately Mouse’s eyes filled with tears and she shook her head, unable to speak, leaving Sam to explain tiredly, ‘We thought we were going to be doing office work, Corp, but this Captain Elland who we’ve got to report to had us walking miles up and down the shelves, checking off what was on them against a list he gave us. He wouldn’t even let Mouse go to the lavatory until her break-time. Then this afternoon he had us unpacking boxes of Durex to make sure that none were missing.’ Sam’s expression betrayed her feelings.
‘Oh, one of those, is he?’ Hazel commented knowingly. ‘You do get them – the type that doesn’t approve of women in uniform, so they have to try to show us up. That kind, is he?’
‘That’s him to a T,’ Sam confirmed. ‘Luckily there was this decent sort there as well, a sergeant with the Royal Engineers.’
‘A decent sort, was he? I see, and good-looking as well, I’ll bet,’ Lynsey teased her archly.
But as their transport stopped outside their billet for the girls to get off, Sam wasn’t in the mood for banter. The captain had infuriated her and bullied poor Mouse all day, sharpening Sam’s temper to a fine edge because army rules meant that it was impossible for a mere private to ignore the commands of a captain, no matter how badly that captain was behaving.
‘He