The Bomb Girls (18 page)

‘We're all getting bitter and twisted,' said one woman from the cordite line.

‘More like worn out and weary,' Lillian grumbled.

‘I wish the government would stop treating us like kids,' Emily said, sipping her strong scalding tea. ‘We don't need to be told we're doing well because we know we're not.'

‘That's not true,' Elsie answered staunchly. ‘Since the
Americans have come in, we've got Hitler on the run and –' She stopped short when she saw Lillian's face fall at the mention of the Americans. ‘Sorry …' she stammered. ‘I didn't mean to upset you, pet. Talking about the Americans, like …'

Lillian smiled bleakly.

‘Forget it, Elsie.'

A yawning canteen worker cleared and wiped down their table.

‘Heard the good news?' she asked.

‘Hitler's dead?' Emily said hopefully.

‘No, nearly as good,' the canteen girl replied. ‘ENSA are coming to the Phoenix.'

‘ENSA?' Elsie stumbled over the initials.

‘Entertainments National Service Association,' Emily explained. ‘Singers, dancers, comedians, whatever, they travel around the country entertaining the factory workers. It's supposed to be a morale booster.'

‘That's nice,' said Elsie sweetly.

‘It's hit and miss,' said Lillian, sucking hard on a sweet. ‘Some folks say ENSA stands for “Every Night Something Awful”!'

‘You never know,' said a pretty, though tired-looking girl at the next table. ‘It might be Frank Sinatra or Gracie Fields.'

‘We should be so lucky!' snorted Lillian.

Frank Sinatra wasn't available, but the Phoenix girls were thrilled when they heard the news that one of the nation's sweethearts was coming to the Phoenix to entertain them.

‘GRACIE BLOODY FIELDS!' Lillian yelled. ‘She's
a local lass too,' she babbled on excitedly. ‘Lives just down the road in Rochdale.'

‘She'll cheer us all up,' said Emily brightly. ‘She's a real bonny fighter!'

‘Just so long as she doesn't sing too many sad songs,' Lillian said on a lower note. ‘ “Count Your Blessings” or “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” would just about break me apart at the moment.'

‘And Arthur Askey's coming too,' said Elsie with a smile, referring to the cheeky little comedian. ‘He makes me laugh, even if he is a bit naughty at times.'

Lillian playfully threw a box of matches at Elsie.

‘Anything would shock you, little Geordie girl!'

Elsie threw the box back.

‘I'll have you know I'm a married woman!' she replied archly.

The anticipation of having a star coming to visit the Phoenix lifted the munitions girls briefly out of their drab, uneventful lives, and Gracie didn't let them down.

She turned up in a big open-topped car wearing an evening dress, diamonds, a fur stole and make-up, even though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon. The Bomb Girls, who'd been given a few hours off, greeted her with loud cheers, whistles and clapping. Beside her, Arthur Askey waved and smiled whilst exuberant Gracie blew kisses with both hands. The girls followed the star into the canteen, where, on a makeshift stage, her songs and laughter took away their woes and worries for a while.

‘Thank you for having me, ladies!'

A roar of appreciation went up.

‘We'll have you any time, Gracie!' a woman in the audience shouted.

‘There's not much difference between us,' Gracie continued. ‘I might look posh with all mi flash diamonds,' she laughed. ‘But I come from Rochdale, just down't road.'

Another roar of appreciation went up.

‘Like you Lancashire lasses, I'm not for giving up. We'll keep on going until we've won this war and trounced Hitler!' Gracie declared.

The cheers and clapping from the ecstatic workers nearly shattered the window panes.

‘Yeah, we'll show 'em, Gracie!'

‘Lancashire folk are fighters and we don't let folk down, do we?'

‘NO! NEVER!' cheered the munitions girls.

And with that Gracie launched into ‘Sally, Pride of Our Alley', followed by many of her popular songs: ‘Roses of Picardy', ‘When I Grow Too Old to Dream', which did indeed make Lillian sob, ‘Sing as We Go', and more.

Then, to everybody's joy, she said with a wink and a laugh, ‘And now I've got a song especially for all you lasses working round the clock making weapons for our lads at the front.'

Raising her voice to the rafters, Gracie sang the ‘Thingummybob' song, which brought the house down. Giggling, Elsie grabbed Emily's hands and skipped up and down like an excited child.

‘Em, we're the girls who drill the hole that holds the ring!' she cried.

Emily laughed as she sang her own version of the song.

‘Bomb Girls work the Thingummybob!'

As Gracie curtsied and blew kisses the two-hundred-strong audience begged for more.

‘Join in, girls!' she yelled.

Laughing and clapping, the workers sang along with Gracie who, after the song finished to a rousing cheer, was replaced by Arthur Askey.

‘Hello there, playmates!' he cried as he bounced onto the stage where he reduced the girls to hysterical laughter with his saucy jokes and slightly smutty anecdotes. Gracie reappeared for the finale, and there wasn't a dry eye in the house when she sang ‘There's a Boy Coming Home to Me'. Then she finished with a rousing recital of ‘Land of Hope and Glory'.

A few hours of laughter, camaraderie and singing energized the workforce. Filled with renewed hope and energy, they waved Gracie off and returned to work with smiles on their faces.

‘I'm proper proud to be one of the girls that drives the rod that turns the knob!' Elsie joked.

‘Come on,' laughed Lillian for the first time in weeks. ‘Let's go and work that Thingummybob and bring the bloody war to an end!'

It was shortly after their excited return to work that Lillian, hurrying to the toilet in the middle of her shift, slipped and fell on the damp factory floor. It was a nasty fall and she lay sprawled face down on the grimy floor, groaning as she tried to get up. Horrified, Emily and Elsie, who'd seen their friend fall but couldn't leave the line for fear of unfilled bomb shells rattling down to the packing department, called for help at the tops of their voices:

‘HELP! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!'

Ironically it was Malc of all people who went to Lillian and helped the white and trembling girl to her feet.

‘Come on, cock, come and sit down,' he said gently.

Lillian smiled gratefully as he put an arm around her waist and led her into the canteen where he went to get her a mug of hot, sweet tea.

‘That was quite a fall. How're you feeling?' he asked as he set the tea down in front of her.

‘I don't feel quite right,' she admitted as she rubbed her belly.

‘Take it easy, get your breath back,' he urged.

But when she'd finished the tea Lillian insisted she was fine. She rejoined the cordite line and dutifully finished her shift, looking very pale.

It was only when she, Elsie and Emily returned to the digs in the dark that Lillian discovered she was bleeding. For all of Elsie's and Emily's efforts to keep Lillian calm, to keep her lying down with her legs up, Lillian lost her longed-for baby. There was no comforting the devastated girl; all words were lost on her as she sobbed and sobbed.

‘It was all I had of Gary. It was our baby!' she cried hysterically. ‘Now I've got nothing left to live for,' she wailed.

Her sad loss sent her spiralling into a deep depression. Nothing Elsie or Emily said helped or comforted Lillian, who looked and behaved like she'd given up on life.

‘We've got to get her to a doctor,' Emily insisted. ‘She needs professional help.'

Elsie simply nodded. What she didn't say was that she needed to see a doctor too. It wasn't unusual to miss a period – long shifts and a poor diet often caused erratic menstrual cycles – but missing two periods meant only one thing. Elsie was sure she was pregnant, but now wasn't the time to share her joyful news with anybody.

As Agnes travelled nearly two hundred miles from Pendle to Cambridge, she had plenty of time for thought. Her initial reactions of shock and total disbelief were slowly being replaced by joy and a rising excitement.

‘My Stan's alive!' she said to herself incredulously. ‘My husband's alive.'

The further the train rattled south and the closer she got to him, the more Agnes's elation was tempered with anxiety. What was he like now? What horrors had he been through, what privations, what abuse and pain had been inflicted on him?

She closed her eyes as she tried to recall Stan before he was captured: handsome, tall and lean with thoughtful brown eyes and a shock of dark curls, just like Esther. He had been a gentle, thoughtful lover, a wonderful, adoring father, a man who always put his family first. She smiled fondly as she allowed herself, over the long journey, to remember the first time she'd seen him – well, heard him, actually.

They'd met in the dark at the Rex picture house in Walthamstow, east London. Agnes had arranged to go with a girl friend to see
The Wizard of Oz
, but the friend had backed out at the last minute so Agnes, mad about Judy Garland, went to the Rex on her own. Self-conscious that she was sitting alone, she studiously avoided eye
contact with anybody in the packed picture house, fiddling awkwardly with her ticket till the lights went down. Half an hour into the film, just as Dorothy and Toto were embarking on their journey along the yellow brick road, a nudge on her arm made Agnes jump in fright.

‘ 'Scuse me,' said a tall man nodding towards the empty seat on the other side of Agnes. ‘May I?'

Agnes stood up to let him pass then breathed in so that no part of her touched the arm of the chair on which his elbow was resting. During the interval she got to her feet and dashed to the Ladies, and only returned to her seat when she heard the music playing as the film recommenced. Sitting down, she completely ignored her neighbour and stared intently at the screen.

‘I bought you an ice cream,' he whispered as he handed over a rather sloppy choc ice to Agnes, who blushed.

‘Sorry,' he said with a low chuckle. ‘It might have melted a bit.'

At the end of the film, when Dorothy is finally back home, reunited with Aunty Em, Agnes surreptitiously wiped away a tear.

‘Real tear-jerker, eh?' said her neighbour as he offered her his neatly ironed white handkerchief.

‘Goodness,' Agnes laughed as she accepted the hankie. ‘You're a man that thinks of everything.'

At that time Agnes was a typist in a London insurance office and Stan was a bus driver. They met several times afterwards, always at the Rex in Walthamstow, then they started courting properly. With the war looming, Stan didn't waste time with an engagement; he asked Agnes to marry him and shortly after their registry-office wedding
Agnes fell pregnant with Esther, who was the light of their lives. On his first leave home, even though the Blitz was at its height, with constant aerial bombing taking out more than a million homes and forty thousand lives, they'd had a rapturous time together. The sight of Stan waltzing round the kitchen with baby Esther held in his arms and singing Gracie Fields' ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World' had reduced Agnes to tears of laughter and giggling Esther to hiccups. It was an image of family that lonely Agnes would treasure in the hard months to come.

All too soon those happy days ended when Stan was reported as missing in action.

Strange to think that Stan never knew his child had developed polio, the debilitating disease that had taken her away from home to be nursed by strangers. Agnes shuddered as she thought of all they had been through as a family, then she straightened her shoulders as she came to a firm decision. She was determined that Stan would know nothing of Esther's illness until she knew for certain that he could cope with such a terrible shock. The poor man had been through enough, and more bad news could wait.

It grew bitterly cold as the train emptied out and night fell. At Ely station Agnes couldn't believe the landscape, with the black fen peeling away towards the horizon, which was streaked orange and crimson from the huge golden sun setting over unending flat fields.

By the time she got into Cambridge she was frozen to the bone and weary with travelling. With the college gates locked for the night the streets were empty, and she hurried along, following the instructions she'd been sent to
get to Addenbrookes Hospital, where Stan was being treated in a specialist POW convalescence unit. It was far too late to visit her husband so Agnes checked into a nearby B&B, where the landlady offered her a hot-water bottle, a mug of cocoa and a Spam sandwich. Exhausted physically and emotionally, Agnes collapsed into bed, but sleep didn't come. She lay awake till dawn, listening to the college clocks all over the city chiming out the hours, wondering with fear in her heart what tomorrow would bring.

It was far worse than Agnes could ever have imagined. When she walked up to her husband, who was sitting in a metal upright chair staring blankly out of the window, Agnes barely recognized him. Skeletally thin, with livid scars on the parts of his body that were exposed, his hands, face, forearms and neck, he sat with deep lines etched in his once-happy and smiling face.

‘Stan … darling,' she whispered as she approached.

As he continued to stare out of the window, Agnes thought he hadn't heard her. Crouching before him, her face on a level with his, she waited for him to drag his gaze from the falling autumn leaves littering the hospital garden. When he did turn he looked straight through her, as if she simply wasn't there.

With her heart breaking, Agnes swallowed hard and repeated herself.

‘Stan … darling,' she said as she gently laid a hand on his bare arm.

At her tender touch, Stan went hysterical.

‘NO, SIR! I did nothing. As God's my judge I never touched your food.' Struggling with demons, he was
thrashing the air as if trying to free himself from an unseen grip. ‘No, no, please no, not again,' he cried as he flung himself out of the chair and lay grovelling on the floor where he inched forward to kiss her feet in abject supplication. ‘Please, I beg you, not again.'

With tears streaming down her face, Agnes tried to lift her husband, to stop him begging, to stop his pain, but she was powerless. In his frenzied fear Stan's strength seemed double her own, and no matter how she tried she couldn't release the grip of his hands around her ankles.

A nurse, hearing Stan's sobs, came to the rescue.

‘Not to worry, Stan. Just a bad memory,' she soothed as she calmly helped him to his feet.

Looking wild-eyed, Stan stared at her healthy pink face and kindly blue eyes. He trustingly took her hand and dumbly allowed her to guide him back to bed.

‘Just a bad memory,' she repeated. ‘Let's get you back to bed for a nice little sleep.'

Left alone and quite devastated, Agnes went in search of the doctor, who said bleakly, ‘It will take time.'

‘How much time?' Agnes asked.

The doctor shrugged; he clearly had no more idea than she had.

‘Years, sometimes less. It depends on how quickly his memory returns. The more time he can put between his experiences in the POW camp and the present, the better.'

From inside the doctor's glass-fronted office, which gave a view onto the ward, Agnes could see Stan lying wide-eyed on his narrow hospital bed.

‘And what if his memory doesn't return?' she asked.

The doctor shuffled the files on his desk before replying.

‘In some cases we've found electric-shock treatment effective.' As Agnes's eyes flew wide open in alarm, he hastily added, ‘It's our last resort. Of course we're trying to rehabilitate Stan with drugs and therapy, but so far neither has had much effect. We're hoping that spending time with you may bring back memories of happier times before the war, before his capture.'

‘What's the best thing I can do for Stan?' Agnes eagerly asked.

‘Take him out, talk about your life together, your family, anything that's not related to his war experience.'

‘Can he walk far?' she asked.

The doctor nodded.

‘Yes, but you'll have to guide him as he gets quite shaky – and be warned, he doesn't like crowds.'

‘When can I start?'

‘No time like the present,' the doctor said with a hopeful smile.

In the beautiful autumn sunshine, with gold and russet leaves falling around them, Agnes, arm in arm with Stan, walked along King's Parade, where students in flapping black gowns hurried in and out of King's College, but Stan hardly seemed to notice. Thinking he might prefer to be off the busy high street, she led Stan down winding medieval lanes, across a looping bridge over the river and onto the Backs. Here she sat Stan down on a bench, and from a flask she'd brought along with her she poured him a cup of tea. Stan took the tea and held it in his trembling hands, but he didn't drink it.

‘Listen to the birds,' Agnes urged as blackbirds, thrushes and robins warbled in the treetops overhead. ‘And look at the cows!' she exclaimed as she pointed to a cluster of cows grazing on King's Meadow.

Seeing Stan's bewildered expression made Agnes realize that the whole excursion meant nothing to him; he might have been sitting in the sunshine on a bench in a bucolic part of England but he wasn't registering any of it. A punt drifted by, full of laughing students who waved as they passed.

‘Look, Stan!'

With Stan remaining totally impassive, Agnes abandoned all attempts at trying to distract him; instead she tried to jog his memory by talking of their happy courtship.

‘Remember when we first met at the Rex? We went to see
The Wizard of Oz
.' She laughed as she recalled the moment, then began to sing their favourite song from the film, ‘We're Off to See the Wizard'.

Dropping the tea, Stan suddenly jumped to his feet. Thinking the song had jogged his memory, Agnes jumped up too.

‘We used to sing it together walking home from the picture house,' she reminded Stan, who began hurrying away along the river path past Queens' College. ‘Stan, wait!' she called as she grabbed the flask and dashed after him.

To her horror, he walked straight out onto the busy main road.

‘STAN!' she screamed as a car, mercifully going slowly, screeched to a halt and missed hitting Stan by inches.

The furious driver leaped out and started yelling at both of them.

‘What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?' he bellowed.

At the sound of his angry voice Stan buckled at the knees and fell to the ground where he covered his head with his hands as he curled into a foetal position.

‘I'm so sorry,' Agnes gasped. ‘My husband's not well.'

‘I can see that,' said the shocked driver. ‘It's a wonder he's not dead!'

Once he'd driven away Agnes bent down and tried to lift Stan to his feet.

‘It's all right, love, he's gone. You're safe,' she said as she smoothed his black hair, now heavily streaked with bands of grey.

Tears streamed down Stan's haggard face.

‘Take me back to my cell. Please, get me out of here!' he begged.

Back on the ward an agitated Stan was put to bed and injected with a tranquillizing drug that sent him into an immediate deep sleep. Agnes sat by his bed, holding his hand as he ranted in his sleep.

‘No … no … don't hit me,' he whimpered as he tossed and turned. ‘I don't know, no, not again …'

Stroking his hair, Agnes tried to calm her husband, who, twitching and shivering, finally slipped into a ragged, restless doze.

‘It's all right, my love, you're safe now. You're home, and we'll look after you. Nothing to worry about, just rest … shh …' she soothed as the light faded and night set in.

Depressed beyond words, feeling like she'd done more harm than good, Agnes braced herself for her final visit to Addenbrooke's Hospital before she had no choice but to return, for the time being, to her war work. She wished she could stay, but would try to get back for another visit as soon as she was allowed leave. With her heart in her mouth and her stomach churning, she walked down the long ward to say goodbye to Stan. She found him sitting in the same old metal chair, staring out of the same window at the falling gold and ochre leaves.

I leave him just as I found him, she thought hopelessly.

‘Stan …' she whispered.

She didn't make the same mistake of touching him; she just hunkered down so she was on the same level as him.

‘I've got to go.'

Stan remained impassive. Holding back the tears that threatened to engulf her, Agnes waited patiently, until she got cramps in her legs from crouching so long.

‘What the hell am I waiting for?' she muttered angrily to herself. ‘A miracle like you see in the pictures? Stan rising and taking me in his arms and us walking off into the sunset! Snap out of it, Agnes, and leave the poor man alone. You've done no good here.'