Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (12 page)

We had about a hundred guests at the Community Hall in Blantyre. It was a smashing party, all the girls I’d worked with on the A shift were there and I managed to have a two-tier wedding cake. We had a week’s honeymoon at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. Jack’s Aunty Mary owned a guest house, so we stayed there. Jack was a butcher by trade, but he was out of a job. He found work as a mechanic up in Scotland for a year or so, but although it was a bit of a wrench for me, we decided to move down to Colchester in 1947.

At first, we had to live with Jack’s parents, then he got a job working on a farm in Stanway, and there was a little cottage we could live in that came with the job, just across the road from where I live now. It had a nice garden, so we could grow our own vegetables. We even had a few chickens – and a lovely dog called Judy.

My son, Donald, was born in 1949 and three years later I went to work in a children’s home in Stanway. One of my friends looked after Donald in the day and during the school holidays they let me bring him with me. When Donald started primary school, I started working in a pub in Colchester. I started off cleaning and wound up as their cook for many years. Then I got a job in a local secondary school kitchen. Many years on, Donald taught there; Jack was an assistant caretaker and I was in the kitchen. I carried on working there until I retired.

Jack had been in pretty good health until his late seventies but he had a series of mini strokes and went downhill in the last couple of years of his life. He died in his sleep at
Colchester Hospital in March 2000, age 81. We’d had a wonderful, happy marriage for 55 years.

On the whole, when I look back to that time in munitions, I think we did a good job. What I could never understand was later on, you’d hear about the Land Girls or the girls that worked in aircraft factories but not very much about the girls who did the job I did. Where’s our medal? I do think we should have a bit of recognition. We were young, of course. So we did have the stamina for 12-hour working days – by the time you got home from your shift, that’s what you’d done.

But the work had to be done. If you didn’t do the work, you’d have been thrown out, no question. If you turned up five minutes late, you lost 15 minutes pay. You might have got away with it if your train had been late for some reason. But that didn’t happen very often. Was it fair treatment? I think it was the same for everyone. You had to know your job. You had to be 100 per cent responsible. And you had to be prepared to pitch in. The supervisor only had to say, ‘Oh we need extra’ and those girls would work like hell to get it done and out. There was no overtime in A Section – everyone just pitched in and worked that wee bit harder.

Have we lost that sense of being there for each other, helping each other out? I don’t think people are as dedicated to looking out for one other as they were then. There we all were, walking around there in the dark, in the middle of a war, bombs falling from the skies, lives upside down all the time. Nowadays – well, people are too scared to cross the road. You had neighbours then who’d run into your home and help you, whatever happened. Nowadays you might not even know who your next door neighbour is.

CHAPTER 5

IVY’S STORY: THE GIRL WITH THE LATHE

‘SHE SCREAMED THE PLACE DOWN:
SHE WAS COMPLETELY SCALPED’

Ivy Gardiner was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, in 1924. At 15, she went to work as a factory hand at Lever Brothers (now known as Unilever) at its Port Sunlight village complex in the Wirral, Liverpool. When production at Lever Brothers switched to munitions in 1940, she assembled jeeps and worked as a lathe turner, making undercarriages for bombers, until war ended. Widowed at age 52, after 29 years of marriage to her childhood sweetheart, Wilf, she has one daughter and two grandchildren. In 2012, Ivy was awarded the MBE (Member of the British Empire) for dedicating nearly nine decades of her life to the Brownie movement, which she joined as a five-year-old in 1929. This is her story:

Wilf and I were married just after VE Day. As a wedding present, my mother paid for us to fly to the Isle of Man – on one of the first planes to leave Liverpool airport after the
war. It was our first-ever flight, and when I looked out and saw all the guns along Liverpool Bay from above, it was a sharp reminder of what we’d all lived through.

‘Oh Wilf, thank heavens it’s all over,’ I said to my new husband, who was holding my hand tightly as we went up. Wilf just looked at me and smiled. And then I remembered that night when the German bomb came through the roof of the Ritz Cinema in Birkenhead and killed 10 people. The bomb had exploded right in front of the circle seats. Wilf and I had been there, in the circle, with all the other courting couples. But we’d ducked out, just in time.

The air raid siren went off and I’d leapt out of my seat immediately – with Wilf somewhat reluctantly trailing out after me. Now, I didn’t even have to mention that terrible night to Wilf. He knew exactly what I was thinking. ‘Oh, Ivy, we’ve been so lucky,’ he sighed. ‘Suppose I’d been daft enough not to follow you.’

Things like that you never ever forget. We’d all been desperate for war to be over. But the memory of it all, well, when you talk about it now, you think ‘did we really get through all that?’ Yet when you were doing it, you never thought about it at all. Not really.

My dad, Albert Reston, was in the Navy in the First World War and worked for a time at Cammell Lairds, Birkenhead, as a boiler maker. One of the ships he helped build came in recently into the Mersey. But after the war, he couldn’t get work. It was tough for us. My grandma had a shop, a general store and a coal yard; people would come to fill a bag of coal up for sixpence. I do remember that as a kid. I was the eldest. My brother, Ronald, came two-and-a-half years after me.

I was just nine years old when my dad died, in 1931. It was
very, very sad what happened. He got tuberculosis but not that bad, borderline. But for some reason, they chose him to participate in a drug trial in a convalescent home in Market Drayton, Cheshire. It was a place where they took people with TB. There were nine other people there, men and women. None of them were very bad.

The trial involved an injection. And my dad bled to death. My mother, Annie, never even got his death certificate until he’d been buried. She was left widowed at age 32, with two children. At the time we lived in Clawton, Birkenhead, in a terraced house next door to my grandmother. She watched over us while my mother went out to work. My mother took anything she could get. At one point she had three jobs, though she did get a widow’s pension: ten shillings plus five shillings for me and three shillings for my brother. Less than £1 a week. And the rent on the little house we lived in was twelve shillings and sixpence.

She worked so hard, my mum, she was exhausted all the time. Then one day, she just collapsed on the floor in front of me. I ran down to Grandma, her mother, and she made a decision: the best thing for us was to all get a house together. The house we rented had a sitting room and a bedroom for each of us, and my mother continued to work. In those days, if you saw a house you liked the look of, and you were ok to decorate it, you would tell the landlord: ‘This place needs decorating, so how many weeks’ rent can I have off?’

We moved around a lot in the thirties. We lived in about five different houses. One house in Eton Road, Birkenhead, was a very nice house; that’s where we were living when war broke out. The thing was, you didn’t envy others because no one you knew had anything in those days. I had lots of
friends. I went to every social evening the church put on. I really was a joiner. I joined the Brownies at five, the Girl Guides at 11, a long, long association. And I was a good runner, one of the best runners at my school, St Johns, a church school in Birkenhead. After that I went to Conway High. I didn’t pass the 11-plus; we were moving at the time we were doing it. So I left school at 14.

At first, I didn’t want a job. But then they put on a course at the college in Birkenhead to show you how to get a job, teaching you how to behave in the adult world, instead of just being a schoolgirl. One day, coming back from the course, I spotted an advert in the window of a florist shop: ‘Apprentice wanted. Two shillings and sixpence a week’. I got the job. I handed my mother the two shillings and got the sixpence back from her. That was my pocket money. By then, she was working as a waitress at weddings, that sort of thing.

I stayed at the florists for a year. I did learn – I was shown how to make wreaths, but the moss you used to make them with was full of ants. They’d crawl all over me. It was horrible. In the end, I’d go to bed at night and have nightmares about the ants. My mother had been quite keen for me to be a florist, but when she saw the state I was in she said: ‘Enough of this.’ And anyway, I’d already had a bright idea. Why didn’t I try to get an interview at Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight?

They were the biggest employers in the area and everyone knew it was a beautiful place to work, a purpose built ‘village’ where they really looked after the employees. If you got a job there as a youngster, you went from one department to another. They’d move you around; it was a huge place. And it only took 20 minutes on the bus to get there.

They took me. I started out working in the Lux flakes section. [Lux was a popular laundry and beauty soap at the time.] I worked on a machine filling the soap packets. The packets came along to us on a conveyor belt and we boxed them. You had to keep up with the machines. Then they sent me over to Bromborough Village, where they made Stork margarine. They gave you clogs to wear there because there was always water under your feet – because the machines were always being steamed. They told us we could keep the margarine that was past its sell-by date and couldn’t be sold. I’d be scooping it out of the carton with my hands; then it went in a big vat to be sent off for making soap. My hands were soon beautifully soft. The clogs were comfortable, too! After Stork, they sent me back to Lux Flakes again. I was still under 18 and they didn’t employ you fulltime until you’d turned 18. But being moved around got me used to working in a factory environment.

I was a few months off my 18th birthday when war broke out. By January 1940, just after my birthday, I knew I had to do something. Everyone kept saying the women’s call-up was coming at some point. I belonged to a youth club then and, of course, most of the boys I knew were already joining up. I had the idea in my mind that I’d go into the Army. That would be my war work. So I went down to the city centre in Liverpool to get all the forms to fill in and take home.

We’d already set up the cellar in our house in case of air raids. We’d set it up for comfort: single beds, a coal fire and blackout curtains, of course. There was even an electric cooker and taps for washing. So when the bombs started coming, we were ready, organised. We thought we could live down there if we had to.

When I got back from Liverpool that evening, I went down to the cellar. My family and some friends were already down there. One of my brother Ronald’s friends was in the Navy, another in the Army and my boyfriend, Wilf, was down there too, waiting for me. Wilf came from an Army family – all his brothers had gone into the Navy. But Wilf was deaf in one ear, so he wound up in a reserved occupation, as a fitter and turner for the Navy. He tried to get into the Army, he so wanted to make his contribution, like everyone else. But it wasn’t to be. Everyone in the cellar wanted to know where I’d been that day.

‘Oh, she’s been to join the Army,’ my mother told them.

‘Oh no! Not our Ivy,’ quipped my brother. ‘She’s not going to be an officer’s comforter.’

And they all roared with laughter.

Of course, I knew they were kidding. But it still frightened the life out of me, an innocent teenager. If you were called up for the Army, you wound up working in the kitchen. But if you joined the Army voluntarily, you could ask where you wanted to go. That was what I’d been thinking, anyway. Now I wasn’t so sure about it all.

The following Monday I went into work as usual and I was delivering letters to the foremen in each department. That was my job: take the letters round the different sections. In one section, I overheard some men talking. The printing shop was closing down, they said, and Levers was going to be doing war work. Munitions, they said. My ears immediately pricked up. I’d already decided the Army was not for me. ‘I can go there,’ I thought to myself. My mother was widowed; she needed my money. Most of the girls I
knew who were going into munitions were office girls with husbands away in the Army. Nice girls, not rough.

I was quite a shy girl. Yet that day, for some reason, I plucked up enough courage, as I made my way round handing over the letters, to stop and ask one of the nicer foremen if he thought I could start doing munitions work. ‘I’m 18 now,’ I told him hesitantly. He looked at me quizzically. Back then, you didn’t pipe up like that to adults, especially the bosses.

‘You’re a cheeky one,’ he said. ‘Ok, go and see Mr So and So.’

And that was how I volunteered to work in munitions. I started the following week. My first job was helping assemble jeeps. The jeeps would come into the shop unpacked, just the wheels and the undercarriage. Then we’d have to put the tyres on. Then you moved it around until the chassis came down and you put that on. Then you pushed it around again and you put the tarpaulin on.

You started at one end of the shop and at various different points you were putting things onto the jeep. Until the last stage, the greasepit. You greased underneath the jeep – you were shown exactly how to grease it all with a grease gun. Then you put the water into the tank, then the oil into the tank and then you were allowed to start it and take it outside the shop, where someone else took over and put the jeeps into rows.

In that section we were on day shift, 8am to 5pm with an hour for lunch. I was given a pair of navy blue overalls and you wore trousers underneath, which you had to buy yourself. There was a blue hat with a band on, to denote your shift, but you didn’t really need a hat while you were
working. There were some men also making the jeeps. But not that many, they tended to be men who were not fit enough for the Forces. There was just one older man in the store room. You hardly ever saw the foremen. Now and again you saw the managers.