Bluebirds (28 page)

Corporal White inspected them. ‘Caps on straight, buttons and shoes shining, ties well tied, stockings straight . . . that's how it should always be. I said caps on
straight
, Gibbs, not on the back of your head like that. Potter, your hair must be off your collar at the back. Carter, there's no need to pull your belt in as tight as that.'

They paraded for the station commander. Palmer found this irksome in the extreme. He should have been pleased that the WAAFS had uniform at last but he still could not rid himself of the idea that it was unwomanly and the sight of them lined up before him in their new blue offended his eyes. The airwomen's version, he saw morosely, was even uglier than their officer's. God, what a horrible hat . . . and those shoes . . . He inspected them grimly, striding along the rows with his newly-promoted WAAF officer a pace or two behind him. It was Section Officer Newman now. She had been away on some administration course and, from the brief look he had given her, he thought she seemed a lot more confident. Rather different from the nervous girl who had stood in front of him on the day she had arrived.

He went down another row. Their numbers had swelled alarmingly since that time. More and more of them kept arriving and he had long ago resigned himself to the fact that they were here to stay. Another row. Christ, they were all shapes and sizes, sticking out here and there . . . it must be impossible to dress ranks . . . From time to time he paused, merciless in his fault-finding.

‘Those buttons aren't up to scratch, airwoman. That tie is badly tied. Those shoes won't do.'

Some of them quailed visibly at his approach and he was not displeased. He wanted them to be frightened
of him, or at least, have a very healthy respect. That way, they'd behave themselves. He stopped in front of a peroxide blond who eyed him back boldly.

‘Am I supposed to be inspecting you, airwoman, or are you inspecting me?'

She still returned his stare. ‘You're inspecting us, sir.'

‘Then keep your eyes straight ahead. And put your cap on properly in future. And don't belt that tunic so tightly. You're supposed to be wearing a service uniform, not a fashion garment.' He moved on briskly.

‘Those SD clerks seem to think they're a cut above the rest of us,' Maureen said with a sniff. She looked down the Mess table at the small group of WAAFS sitting together at the far end. ‘Anyone would think we'd got some sort of infectious disease, the way they keep to themselves. I don't see why they should be in quarters while the rest of us are out in huts. What's so special about them, I'd like to know.'

‘They're
Special
Duties, aren't they?' Pearl snapped. ‘It's all hush-hush. No use your looking sour about it, Maureen. It's not their fault.'

‘Well, why should they get off drill? I don't see what's to stop them doing that – like all of us have to do.'

‘Same reason as they've been put in separate quarters – they work in watches round the clock. They can't fit in with us and if they put us all in the same huts we'd be waking each other up all the time. You're just jealous, that's your trouble.'

‘They plot things on a big map in the Ops Room,' Sandra said brightly. ‘That's what I've heard, anyhow.'

Maureen cast another resentful glance down the table. ‘If that's all they do, it's nothing so wonderful. It doesn't make them any better than us and there's no call for them to be so snooty.'

Vera sighed. ‘But it s-sounds ever so exciting. I wish I could do something like that. All secret and important.'

Susan said: ‘Actually, I'm thinking of asking to be re-mustered to Special Duties myself.'

‘You
would
. Duchess.'

‘There's no need to be offensive, Pearl. I happen to believe that I'm capable of doing more than just cut up cabbages.'

‘What makes you think that?'

Anne only half heard the bickering. She was reading a letter from Kit under the table.

We've been on the move again recently and are billeted in the local cinema at the moment. It's full of bugs and stinks of garlic. Bit of a come-down from the last place where we lived like kings. We seem to exist on a diet of corned beef, tinned salmon and sardines here, though Villiers and I, and some of the other chaps, managed to have a pretty good meal in a café the other night – steak and chips and masses of vin ordinaire, which cheered us up no end. The weather's foul! The snow's all gone but it's wet and bloody cold. And the countryside round here's the dullest I've ever seen. Not a patch on dear old Bucks. No sign of any Jerries yet. Altogether, life's a bit grim and dull at the mo. I hope we'll be on the move again soon – out of this hellish place. Villiers sends his best. Have you come across old Latimer yet? Hope you're behaving yourself. Love, Kit.

She folded the letter up and put it away in her skirt pocket. Susan was leaving the table huffily and Maureen was still glaring at the SD clerks, or plotters, or whatever they were. For once she rather agreed with Maureen. Some of them
did
behave pretty snootily and Susan would get on like a house on fire with them. But not all. That tall, gawky girl, for instance – the one who had asked her the way the other day – seemed quite the opposite. She was sitting there now with the rest of them, eating her meal quietly, and looking rather out of things. As Anne watched, she somehow managed to knock her fork off her plate onto the floor. She bent down to retrieve it, red in the face, and went even
redder when she caught Anne's eye. Anne smiled and waved.

Virginia gave an embarrassed little wave in return. She recognized the girl at the other end of the table as the one who had come to her rescue when she had got herself thoroughly lost. She looked friendly – unlike the dark-haired one next to her who had been staring in such an angry way. She was uncomfortably aware that a lot of the other WAAFS thought they were a stand-offish group. The trouble was that they had been separated from the moment they had arrived at RAF Colston. The ten of them had been put into former sergeants' married quarters, away from the rest, and it had made for some bad feeling. Only two shared a bedroom and they had their own sitting-room, kitchen and bathroom. Pamela, who shared a room with her, came from London and her family lived in Kensington. She had been a debutante and talked a lot about the dances she had been to and of places like Ascot and Henley that Virginia had only read about. It was obvious after a few days that Pamela would much sooner have been sharing with one of the others who did know all about such things.

Her first encounter with a real Ops Room had been a bit of a disappointment. She had expected a tense atmosphere, a sense of drama, or, at the very least, some feeling of importance and urgency. Instead, it had all been very casual. The Controller up on the dais had been smoking and chatting with Ops B beside him, and the airmen standing round the plotting table had been doing nothing much at all. Some of them were looking bored. She had actually seen one yawning.

And nobody had been particularly pleased to see them. A few of the men had seemed amused by the novelty, but the majority had reacted coolly.

‘Look at it this way,' one of them had told Virginia, not unkindly. ‘If they sent
you
here, then that means they're going to pack
us
off somewhere else. Well, a lot of us are local lads, or we've got settled down here. We've got
families nearby and we don't want to leave them. No offence, but we'd sooner you hadn't come. And how you girls'll ever stand up to the night watches beats me . . .'

They had been told brusquely to put on headphones and to listen to the men and watch them. Instead of the magnetic-tipped rakes they had used in training, they were of plain wood and the trick of moving china arrows with them, instead of the tin ones, had to be mastered quickly. There were other differences, too. They had made mistakes, so that the men either crowed or criticized. At first there had been very little work for them to do. Even so, it was tiring. They worked in a five-watch rota and the night watch was unbearably tedious, as well as the longest. Twice as long. It was hard to stay awake from midnight until eight the next morning in an uneventful Ops Room where the silence was broken only by the ticking of the big clock on the wall or the occasional phone call to test the lines. The officers up on the dais dozed while the plotters sat huddled in blankets, fortified in their break by sandwiches and half-cold cocoa from an enamel bucket. Sometimes, when the Controller turned a blind and indulgent eye, they played a game with pennies to relieve the boredom, tossing them onto the table map and trying to get them in the centre of a square. On all watches they were allowed to pass slack periods knitting or sewing at their posts.

Virginia had begun a diary, recording each day, though at the moment there wasn't much to write down. Twice a week she wrote to her mother and she found these letters very hard to compose. She couldn't write about her work and she didn't think her mother would be in the least interested in hearing details of service life. She wrote a little about Pamela because the house in Kensington and the grand dances would be sure to please her; and she wrote about the netball games they played against teams of other WAAFS because that sounded all right too; and she wrote about Domestic Nights, station concerts, and about lectures, so long as the subject was suitable.
It was impossible to imagine what her mother would have thought about the lectures they had been given at the beginning on personal hygiene and dreadful, unmentionable diseases.

Mother's letters had been full of complaints. The rationing was ridiculous, the shopkeepers insolent, the blackout more dangerous than any bombs would be, the ARP wardens over-familiar and interfering and, worst of all, the house opposite had been taken over by the ATS who drilled up and down the road, making a disgraceful amount of noise.
And such common-looking girls! I can only hope those in the Women's Air Force are a better class. I wish you had joined the WRNS, if you had to join anything at all, though I shall never understand why you were so determined to go off and leave me, without any consideration for how I might feel. It seems to me that you are becoming more and more like your father. The girl you are sharing a room with sounds to be from a good background, so I suppose that is something to be thankful for, at least. Perhaps you could bring her home to tea one day
.

But that was one thing that she would never do – even if Pamela were ever willing, which she doubted very much. She had never forgotten the lesson of Molly. Molly used to sit next to her in class at the High School and she had once invited her home for tea. Mother had gone to a great deal of trouble for the occasion – setting the table with a lace cloth and matching napkins, with the best china and little silver cake forks beside their plates. She had made cucumber sandwiches and a sponge cake, served on paper doilies on the silver cake stand. Molly had wolfed down the tiny sandwiches in one gulp each. She had not used her cake fork and she had spilled crumbs all over the lace cloth. The tea had been one of the most painful experiences that Virginia could remember. Molly had obviously thought it all both strange and very funny. At school next morning, when Virginia had entered the classroom unnoticed, she had
found Molly loudly describing the tea to the other girls – the dainty sandwiches, the doilies, the cake forks – and giving an excruciating imitation of her mother to a sniggering audience. At home, her mother had criticized everything about Molly – her lack of table manners and polite conversation, her slovenly deportment, her common accent . . . Pamela would not be criticized for her table manners or her accent, but she would probably find Mother just as much of a joke.

No, she would never ask anyone home again.

The table in the scullery was covered by a mound of dead rabbits. Eyes glazed, fur dull, their forelegs protruded stiffly at all angles, like guns poking from a turret. There was a sickly smell in the air and the buzz of flies.

Anne looked at the pile in revulsion. A fly was crawling slowly and disgustingly over an open eye, another across a patch of blood-matted fur. Enid had hurried over to the sink where she was now making retching noises. Anne went in search of Corporal Fowler.

‘What are we supposed to do with all those rabbits?'

‘Skin 'em and gut 'em, that's wot yer s'posed ter do. Wot the 'ell did yer think they was put in there fer? I can't cook 'em with their bloody fur on, can I?'

‘We can't possibly skin them, or gut them. We haven't the first idea how to. And Potter has already been sick.'

‘Too bad. She'll just 'ave ter get used to it. I want all them rabbits ready to cook in a couple of hours.'

‘Well, you won't get them.'

‘You refusin' to obey an order?'

‘I'm saying that we can't possibly do it.'

‘Then
I'm
sayin' I'll 'ave you on a charge, Cunningham. This time you've 'ad it.'

Section Officer Newman wore a weary expression as Anne was marched, capless, into her office; she looked up at her more in sorrow than in anger this time. Anne kept her eyes fixed on the wall during the proceedings. Inwardly she seethed at the injustice and at the whole silly business of it all – a stupid courtroom drama over some rabbits . . .

Section Officer Newman tapped her Conduct Sheet on her desk. ‘You don't seem to have learned any sense at all in the time you have been here, Cunningham. You break rule after rule and now, on this last occasion, you actually disobeyed an order, which you have admitted. That's an extremely serious offence.'

‘I still don't think we should have been asked to skin and gut the rabbits, ma'am. It wasn't fair.' Beside her, she heard Sergeant Beaty draw an angry breath. She went on defiantly. ‘There was a huge pile of them and it was a horrible job. Corporal Fowler gave it to us on purpose. He knew it would make us sick.'