Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (16 page)

I was born at the Gamekeeper’s House at Dalskairth on the Dalbeattie Road, at the foot of a long wood. I was the
second daughter; my older sister Donna was born two years before. Two other sisters, Jean and Alison, came after me. My father, Charles Welsh, delivered milk. He’d get the milk from his sister Agnes’s farm at Lochfoot and then he would go round selling it off the back of a van.

He had a big metal container with two handles and a spigot to run the milk out. We had the only vehicle in the village. My father was a big, handsome man but he could be a bit naughty, going drinking with another milkman on the other side of town and then driving home the worse for wear. He had a habit of buying animals from the market just before it was finishing for the day. Once he came home with a van full of hens. He told my mother, Alice, he felt sorry for them.

We lived in a village house with no running water, a loo up the top of the garden and coal fires with a great big chrome fireguard. My mother would grow cresses and trumpet shaped flowers. One day, a bee got into my little puff sleeve and my dad ran out, ripped it open and the bee flew out. It’s the little things you remember, your dad to the rescue.

We had another child living with us as time went on. My older sister Donna had to get married at 18, just before war broke out. Her husband wound up being captured at Dunkirk and was a PoW for five years. So later on, little June, their daughter, came to live with us all. Our school in Lochfoot village was just three houses up from our house. The headmistress was divorced: the village people had never heard of divorce then and they didn’t take well to her. Yet she was a good headmistress.

Many of my childhood memories were of playing in the
Franky Wood, beside the Lochfoot Loch. We’d take old cooking pots down to the loch to wash, and we’d pick raspberries. I’d run home, get some sugar and we’d make raspberry jam, storing it in old meat paste jars. At other times I’d wander off and they’d be looking for me – only to find me fishing in the loch with a homemade fishing rod. I remember catching perch. The men used to catch big pike, a very rough fish. I still remember watching one man cut the pike open and seeing a dead moorhen inside.

My working life started in 1937 – in service. I’d passed my bursary exam that allowed me to go to the High School in Dumfries, but I left at 14 because my mother had found me a job. In fact, I often dreamed of being a nurse. But you had to do what your mother told you.

I started in service the day after I left school at Newtonairds House, a big house belonging to Douglas Menzies, a sheep farmer in Australia. The cook, who was ready to retire, trained me in lots of dishes. As the new scullery maid, I’d sit on a high stool beside her and learn. My first job, something I’d never done before, was to pluck 10 pigeons. ‘Don’t tear the breasts’ I was warned. ‘They’ll have to be pot roasted to go upstairs whole’. Needless to say, feathers were everywhere.

The dinner service they used in the big house was trimmed with gold. So I had to be very careful when I washed it and put away. As well as learning how to prepare the family’s food, I’d have to take the dinner trays along to the lift at the precise time and collect the empty ones when I took the sweet up. I’d have to look after the servants’ hall too, set and make their porridge in the morning and their meals during the day. Sometimes you’d help yourself to the leftovers.

I worked there for over a year; then I went to another big house, Barjarg Tower, a very old house that went back to the 16th century. The Tower was about l4 miles away, so I had to cycle there and back. I was both scullery and kitchen maid, which kept me busy all the time; I also had to scrub the whitewood chairs and tables in the servants’ hall every week. And I was still making the servants their meals and serving them.

When war broke out in 1939, evacuees from Glasgow were sent to stay in the house. It was all very confusing for everyone. The staff were moved from the servants’ rooms to the gentry’s changing rooms to make way for the evacuated people. In the end, though, the Glasgow people went home. They hated it in the big house out in what to them was the middle of nowhere.

One day, I went into my room and found that two older housemaids had written ‘slut’ in dust on my mirror. I cycled home that evening and told my mother I wanted to leave. Not long after, I was employed at Comlongan Castle, near Gretna, working for the Earl and Countess of Mansfield. They’d just got a new kitchen maid who knew nothing. Within a few weeks of starting there, all the staff, including me, had to go down to London to work in their town house in Cadogan Square. I still remember my high scullery window. I’d be working away, looking at all the people’s feet going by on the pavement.

The war was starting to have an effect on everyone’s lives. One day, the butcher’s boy who came to deliver told me they were building air raid shelters everywhere. He had one at the bottom of his garden, he said. It felt so strange being so far from home. London was so big and scary, let alone thinking
about the war. One night, the kitchen maid, who came from Carlisle, told me she’d had enough. She was leaving. Did I want to go with her?

That was enough for me. With our little cases packed, we slipped out of the door the next night. We went to stay the night with her sister who lived in London. The next day we were on a bus to Carlisle, and eventually I got home to Lochfoot. My mother was disappointed but pleased to see me. She’d had a telegram from the cook saying I’d run off. But I was really happy to be home.

My dad was too old to be called up. An old woman in the village got me a job in a hosiery factory. At 17, I was the youngest one there, making woollen gloves for the Forces. You made khaki for the Army, blue for the Airforce and navy gloves for the Navy. It was quite intricate work: a machine knitted the base of the glove and then you had to pick on so many stitches for the thumb and work out how many stitches for each finger. I got quite good at it.

But then, out of nowhere, something bad happened. At work, I started having these terrible stomach pains. The forewoman at work sent me off to the doctor. It was appendicitis. And unfortunately it had burst, so I needed a life-saving operation: peritonitis had set in. After the operation, I had a month in a convalescent hospital. There were soldiers there who had suffered snipers’ bullets when they were on assault courses.

Once I got home, war work was on my mind: no one was talking about anything else now. It was 1941 and I’d turned 18. I’d seen the ATS convoys in Dumfries and I’d watched the girls in their uniforms and thought, ‘Oh, I’d love to be one of them.’ Yet when I told my dad about this, he wouldn’t hear of it.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a job at ICI, like your sister Donna.’ Donna was already working at ICI Drungans munitions plant near Cargenbridge, helping make gun cotton. I was still quite fragile from the appendix operation, but I went to the labour exchange anyway, and it was decided that they would give me a ‘light’ job in the cotton teasing department at Drungans.

That was my first job in munitions, while I got up my strength. I did it for about three months. We worked with big bales of cotton, feeding the wads of cotton into a machine that tore it up, a mechanical process. When it was close enough to fluff, we had to pack it all into three-foot-square metal boxes. Then we’d have to place the boxes onto trollies to be collected by the girls who worked in the nitrates section.

It was lovely and warm in the teasing department. Even when we’d finished our shift, we wouldn’t rush out; we’d lie down on the floor, enjoying the warmth. And sometimes we’d all start singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’.

I soon got used to the journey to work. We were picked up at 6am by a small utility bus, with slatted wooden seats, to get us there for the 7am to 3pm shift. By this time, I’d already decided I wanted to work in nitrates. You got double wages – which meant I’d earn about four times as much as I’d got in service. That, to me, was fantastic riches. I’d see the nitrates girls coming through in their wellingtons and rubber pinnies, coarse trousers and a bonnet with a wide band to tuck their hair in. It wasn’t as comfy as the cotton teasing uniform, the trousers and woollen jumper with drill shoes we had to change into when we got to the factory each day but of course nitrates was completely different – it
was dangerous work. I knew that. But I still wanted to work there.

What we had to do in nitrates was soak the cotton in big pans of nitric acid. You had to move the cotton around with a sort of prong to make sure it was completely saturated. Then you had to put stone plates, three inches deep, on top of the punched cotton in order to press the acid out. Then water would be run on top and the acid would drain away.

We worked on a production line. You’d press pan after pan, making the cotton brittle enough to turn it into gunpowder. This was heavy work, so we had to work in pairs. I’d put an armful of cotton in to soak and my neighbour would punch it. Sometimes, cotton with acid on it would come up and splash your face, so you’d get acid burns. And the acid would get onto your clothes, burn your bra, which would wind up in holes.

If it did burn your face, you’d have to run to the medical room and the nurse would put acriflavine [an antiseptic powder] on the burn for you. Then you’d be sent straight back to the huge shed area where we all worked. It was an enormous area, probably big enough to house 24 double-decker buses.

They kept a big barrel of water in the shed. This was because of the acid, in case someone got badly burned. If that happened, they had to throw themselves into it, to save their skin. But usually, the acid just splashed you in the face and you’d have to run like billy-o to get the stuff onto your face to calm it down. The ends of our fingers were always covered in little potholes where the acid had got to them.

I made some really good friends at Drungans. We had fantastic camaraderie. One friend, Sadie, her husband was in
the RAF. She stayed with her parents and little girl for the duration of the war. The other ladies on our shift came from all over the area, wives and daughters mostly, from mining families: Ayrshire girls from the Nith Valley, Thornhill, Kelloholm and Kirkconnel. A lot of the girls from Dumfries were sent to work in the munitions in Dalbeattie, at the cordite factory. Sometimes, if we finished our shift early, we could all go and have a shower at work. We didn’t have a bath in our house, so that shower was a luxury to most of us.

In the canteen, we’d all sit there listening to Churchill on the radio, saying, ‘Today we lost a ship with 200 sailors’ and when it was that kind of bad news, we’d all feel dreadful. Thankfully, Sadie’s husband came back from the war but there were people from our village that didn’t return. You were always conscious of the war. We’d cheer up, of course, when we had the entertainment they laid on for us, like the concerts from ENSA in the canteen at dinner time. And we’d often sing and play the piano in the factory after we’d had our evening meal. We kept ourselves cheerful that way.

One night, it was shepherd’s pie in the canteen and I put a forkful in my mouth and went, ‘Oo, this is a funny taste.’ But I still ate the lot. Then one young girl – I don’t recall where she was from – said: ‘Paraffin food, paraffin food.’ And she was right. It turned out a farmer had sent in a bag of potatoes where paraffin had been spilt all over them. But there were no ill effects.

Sometimes you’d get home from your shift and your skin would itch really badly. You could hardly sleep. But you couldn’t take a day off or lose your work; you just carried on as usual. It was hard, heavy work, pushing the big trolleys of pressed cotton through to the steam room, where it was dried
and turned into powder. It was physical effort all the time. There were times when we worked so hard, we’d work in our sleep: my sister Donna and I would throw our arms around and hit each other in our sleep – we were still working!

When my shifts permitted, I’d go to dances in the village. My mum would play the piano and we’d have concert parties where everyone would sing and dance to the ‘Trolley Bus’ song (‘clang clang clang went the trolley’) or ‘Lily Of The Lamplight’ (‘Lily Marlene’). I had a wartime boyfriend too for a short time: Tom Hicks, he was in the Royal Yorkshire Signals. Tom was a good dancer and a great skater when there was ice on the loch. But then he got sent abroad. We managed to write once or twice. Then he met a girl while he was abroad.

One day, I was at home, sitting at my mother’s sewing machine, taking up the hem of a coat. I had flat metal curlers in my hair. Then my sister Jean came running in.

‘Margaret, someone wants to meet you.’

Jean’s boyfriend had turned up at our house with another boy.

So there I was, outside our home, still with the metal curlers in my hair, being introduced to Roland, age 19, same as me. A nice-looking fellow, he was a farm worker, so he hadn’t been sent off in the Forces.

‘Are you coming to the dance Friday night?’ he asked me.

You bet. I cycled to the dance that Friday, me in my nice new dress and shoes, my holey bra, burns on my face covered with acriflavine (which turned the burn brown). But my war wounds didn’t seem to matter a bit to Roland. Soon, we were seeing each other all the time. My parents were a bit worried about it all at first. I was only 19, after all. On our
first date in the town they even watched us meeting up to go to the pictures, standing far away enough that we couldn’t see them, my mother told me later. But he soon won them round.

The routine at work was one week night shift, one week day shift so going to the Saturday night dance depended on your shift. But no matter what, you had to be in by 11pm, my dad said. Donna’s husband was a prisoner-of-war and my dad would get angry with her if she came home late.

As far as I knew, there were no serious accidents in the factory. But you also had to work with a constant threat from the fumes from the acid as well as the burns. If a tiny bit of water got into the cotton treated with acid, the pan of acid and cotton would catch fire. Thick yellow smoke would fill the shed and go up through the slatted roof. When that happened, we all had to rush outside. And if it was your pan that caught fire, you’d have to lose your bonus payment. The security was extra tight, too: you’d be searched coming in and going out to see if you were carrying cigarettes or matches. But our attitude to it all was, well, we’ve got a job to do. We were helping make the ammo for our boys to fight in the war. And the thing was, even though the job itself could be dangerous, we didn’t feel it was as dangerous as fighting at the front. I was really proud that I was doing my bit.