Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (11 page)

Our job was to get it into the squares or plugs before it was pressed into shape. There was no music or radio to listen to while you were working. You had to concentrate completely on what you were doing because you were working processing machines. One of the supervisors showed me how to work the machinery on my first day. I soon got the hang of it.

The gun cotton would be handed to me in a small container; it was a fine powder, not quite the consistency of flour but near enough. I’d put a funnel into the machine and shake the stuff in until it was filled. Then I’d close the lid on the machine, push the handle to press it and the gun cotton would come out in an oblong shape as a block, about two inches deep.

Then these blocks would go into a tray to be carried over to a pressing house where it was weighed and pressed into shape. Some of the blocks would make little round shapes
and these too went over to the pressing house. After that, in the drilling room, holes would be put into the blocks and the cores and then they were dipped in acetone, in another section, for protective coating. Then these were dispatched and became part of the detonator assembly for depth charges and other explosive devices.

We were all told we had set targets to achieve on each shift. Whatever the target was, it had to be achieved on that shift. Sometimes the forewoman would come up and ask you to do ‘a bit extra’. You just had to get it done. God help you if you didn’t keep the girl in the pressing house going.

I’ll never forget Annie, the girl in the pressing house; she was a cracking worker, a big girl and an absolute gem. She’d stand there, hands on her hips waiting for us to fill up the trays. ‘WHAT THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU DOING?’ she’d yell at us. At first, I was a bit worried about Annie’s yelling. Then I got it. We all wanted to do our best. She just happened to be an extremely hard worker. In fact, she kept us on our toes.

They really didn’t tell you too much. You didn’t even know where these things that we were making were going. We just knew that what we were making was something related to depth charges. In fact, what we were doing was making explosives for the mines being carried by the submarines. You didn’t have any real sense that it was dangerous work in the beginning. But then, after I’d only been there for a few days, something happened that surprised me. The danger man came over to me. He had spotted something I’d completely forgotten to remove – a small Kirby grip in my hair.

‘Ooh sorry, forgot to take it out,’ I told him. Then I got a
bit of a shock. I wasn’t expecting to hear what he said next: ‘You’ve not been here long, so I’ll let you off. But do it again and you’ll be suspended.’

I was mortified. Then I realised just how dangerous anything metal, no matter how small, could be. One little spark and we could all be dead, every one of us, burnt to a cinder. Stories about the danger would go round all the time, as I soon discovered. One day, in the canteen, a girl told me how someone had been cleaning a big machine with a brush. Somehow, a single hair from the brush had got into the mechanism. It caused one spark and whoosh, everything went up, though the girl didn’t know for sure if any workers had been killed.

Then, after a few months at Bishopton, I came in one day to start my 2 to 10pm shift. It was a lovely day. I was on my way to the changing room. For some reason, I had a library book in my hand. The next thing, I heard a huge explosion and the book flew up in the air and hit the ground. One of the underground cordite houses had just gone up. The rumour we heard later was that two or three people were killed. But even though you couldn’t see a thing, it brought it all home to you: these explosives really do kill. And we’re working with them; anything can happen. You never did find out why or what happened that day. They kept all those sorts of things, that information, close. We didn’t work in the area, so it was nothing to do with us. You just had to get on with what you were doing.

Mum started working in the gun cotton section after me. If we were on the same shift, sometimes we’d go in the canteen together; that was the one place where we’d all let off steam. The food was nice: soup, steak pie, about a shilling
for a hot meal. I don’t know if they were allowed a little bit more, but it was always plentiful. No desserts, mind you, thanks to sugar rationing.

The canteen was very sociable. The men would come in from the machine shops and a big group of us would sit there, playing cards. The radio would be playing, Joe Loss, Henry Hall, Betty Driver. I’d always join in when everyone started the singing. We used to sing a lot. Your time in the canteen depended on the shift. On day shift you’d get a break at 12 noon; you’d get an hour. There was no point in leaving the factory, and anyway, you weren’t allowed out until your shift ended.

There was one time I remember when the machines were shut off and we all stopped work completely. I was on night shift and a call came through, then the sirens went off. We were all told to leave and go straight to the changing room. All the lights went out around us and somehow we had to make our way to the changing rooms. It was so, so scary. Then we had to stay there, praying for the sound of the all-clear. Mum was working night shift too that night, for some reason.

Of course it was frightening, hearing the drones of planes overhead with no idea where they were heading. That particular night, I realised afterwards, the entire factory had shut down, though luckily, that night, the German planes didn’t do any damage. We’d already experienced that terrible time in March 1941, the two nights when the German bombers attacked the Clyde shipyard and bombed Clydebank. I’d been at home both nights. My dad just plucked up little May from her bed and rushed us all into the Anderson shelter.

It’s funny what you remember. May was only two at the time and she seemed fascinated by the reflections of lights coming through the small space under the door of the shelter. We could hear it all because the River Clyde runs through the middle of Blantyre on its way to Glasgow, so the bombers were using the area as a road map. Sure enough, in the morning, when we came out after the all-clear, we found the remains of a spent flare in the garden. [The Luftwaffe dropped flares, attached to a tiny parachute, for target illumination and marking at night.]

Dad was an air raid warden, just along the road from us. He had to go to Clydebank immediately afterwards. I’d never seen him look so shaken when he got home. Afterwards, I went with Mary to have a look. It was tragic to see those houses reduced to rubble, some of them with their sides sliced off, so all you could see were wrecked rooms, the pictures still on the walls, the furniture hanging in midair. Later we heard that a German reconnaissance plane was shot down on its way back from the raid. The story was that the plane was loaded with film. When it was developed, there were very clear pictures of the Bishopton plant. I never wanted to stop and think about what could have happened if that plane had made it back to Germany with those photos.

In a way, because you had to keep your wits about you working with the machines, having to concentrate, that helped; it stopped you thinking too much about all the terrible things that were going on. And we all helped one another there. You had a lot of work to get through, but there was always someone around to help you if you needed it. Working with a really nice bunch of girls made all the difference.

Mary – I wound up calling her ‘Cordite Mary’ because there were so many Marys at work – and I were young and lively; the war definitely wasn’t going to stop us from going out. Strangely enough, you felt safe as houses if you did have to walk around at night. There’d be men in uniform walking back to their billets. Or the air raid wardens would spot you and tell you to hurry home. If I went to a dance near home at the Co-op Hall in Blantyre, my dad would stand and wait by the door at the dance – to walk me home.

Depending on shifts (you could get a late pass sometimes for your shift, if you had a good enough reason) we’d sometimes go dancing in Glasgow, to Green’s Playhouse, dancing to Joe Loss. Or we’d go to theatre in Glasgow for variety shows at the Kings, the Alhambra or the Pavilion. Sometimes it was Mum and I going to the pictures at the Doolkit, the local Blantyre cinema: George Raft, Anna May Wong, Richard Tauber, Bing Crosby, Deanna Durbin. Oh, I liked my musicals.

The working hours didn’t leave a lot of time to go looking for boyfriends, mind you. I’d had my first-ever date, a young man from Blantyre who was in the RAF, but he wasn’t my type. But it was at the La Scala Picture House, in Hamilton, where I met the love of my life one night in 1942. I was 20 and it was a few months after I’d started at Bishopton. I was there with Cordite Mary, as usual. Just as we were walking towards our seats, someone whistled at us from the seats behind.

Of course I turned round and saw two young uniformed blokes grinning at us like mad. I must admit, I gave them a dirty look. But once we came out after the film, Mary nudged me. There they were again, the same two young
men, smiling at us. I would have held back, but not Cordite Mary. ‘Come on, let’s see what they’re like,’ she urged me. It turned out they were both in their twenties, in the Royal Army Service Corps.

‘I’m Fred and he’s Jack,’ one said, pointing to his friend who had the most wonderful, piercing blue eyes; you couldn’t miss them. ‘We’re stationed in Hamilton, near the race track. Er… can we walk you home?’

I still hesitated, despite the piercing blue eyes. Then Cordite Mary gave me another nudge. ‘They’re alright,’ she hissed at me.

She was right. When he left me at my front door, Jack had already asked me out to the pictures and I’d promptly said yes. He was my first proper boyfriend. I told Mum and she insisted on meeting him, of course. By then, I’d found out more. Jack had been called up in 1940. He was from down south, a place called Aldham in Essex. He’d trained at Felixstowe then he’d been posted up to Scotland.

I knew Jack for about three or four weeks before he was posted overseas. Much later, when I’d told him how his blue eyes were the first thing I’d noticed, he said
his
first thought was ‘she’s got nice legs’. But once we started courting, he didn’t like me wearing short skirts! Jack ended up being posted to North Africa, then Italy. We’d manage to write. Sometimes you got the letters, sometimes you didn’t but in November 1943, just before my 21st birthday, we got really bad news. Jack was missing. He was a driver. He was driving a brigadier and a major in southern Italy when they were stopped by German gunfire and captured. Somehow, one of the two men’s wives had managed to get a letter to Jack’s mum to tell her he’d been reported missing.

As you can imagine, I was very upset. But I kept telling myself: ‘He’ll be alright. I know he will.’ Even when the postman turned up one day to hand me a pile of letters I’d written to Jack that were being returned to me, I still clung to the idea that ‘missing’ meant that. It didn’t mean ‘gone for good’, I kept telling myself – though of course it did for many women, back then.

At work, most of the other women had husbands away in the Army, so we’d always be comparing notes, what we were hearing, whether letters had been coming through. One or two of the older ones were very reassuring.

‘Look, he was with a brigadier and a major. He’ll be ok, Margaret,’ they told me. In fact, that was exactly the case. When the Germans captured them, one of the officers pointed to Jack and said: ‘He’s my batman’. [The term ‘batman’ means personal servant to a commissioned officer.] So he was ok.

In January 1944, my mother got good news from the major’s wife. She’d written to say all three men were in Germany as PoWs. Jack was alive! I’d lived in perpetual hope – and my optimism paid off. Though years later, Jack told me that being a prisoner-of-war was so bad, if it hadn’t been for the Red Cross food parcels, he didn’t know what he’d have done. Those parcels, distributed by the Red Cross to prison camps in Germany, were a lifeline. They didn’t contain much – some tobacco, a bar of soap, a tiny packet of tea or a tin of sardines – but they made the difference.

So those last 18 months of the war weren’t too bad for us. Jack was alive, that was what mattered, though the winter of 1944/45 was an exceptionally harsh one. You’d often go out in the morning with socks over your shoes, to protect them,
and it was a real slog getting to work, especially if you were on the early shift. But somehow you’d get there and do your shift. And in our section, we were lucky compared to the women working in cordite, which was so dangerous.

When the news came through that the war was over, my group, ‘A’ shift, were the last to leave. I finally finished work at the factory in October 1945. The factory itself stayed open, but we women had to pack everything up. We wore these enormous greatcoats they’d supplied us to pack up. And although everyone was relieved that it was all over, there was a bit of sadness at saying goodbye to the girls. In spite of it all, we’d had some happy times together, and that helped get us through it all.

That spring, I’d got the best news of all from Jack’s mother: he was on his way home. He’d already asked me to marry him in one of his letters. I’d written back and said: ‘As long as you don’t think you’re making a mistake, Jack.’ Sometimes I’d get a couple of letters and then a few months would go by and nothing… so when I heard the news he’d be back, I was really over the moon.

Oh, how happy we were to see each other again that day in April! Jack wasn’t very well. He had a skin disorder and other health problems. But we were officially engaged in May 1945 and my parents were very happy about it all. My gran liked him so much; she would never hear a word said against him!

On 22 December 1945, not long after I’d turned 23, we got married in the church in Blantyre. My little sister May was bridesmaid. It was a bitterly cold day. I had to go to Edinburgh to get the wedding dress because they were so hard to come by. Lots of girls I knew had to borrow wedding
dresses because they were so difficult to find. But I found a lovely long white slipper satin dress with a white silk veil. I even had a bouquet with pink and white carnations.