Wartime Friends, page 13
It was going to be even more difficult for her to put off inviting her friend to visit her own home in Sheffield.
Twenty
The train journey from Lincolnshire back to Leicester took longer than it would have done by motor car, but then it was the only way the girls could travel. As, at last, they stepped off the train in Loughborough, they were surprised to see several other girls already on the platform.
‘Look,’ Beryl grabbed Carolyn’s arm, ‘there’s Noreen from Trowbridge.’
‘Oh yes – and I recognize one or two others too, but I don’t know their names.’
‘There aren’t many of us, though, are there?’
‘Come along, you two,’ Noreen’s voice rose above the general chatter, ‘we’ve been waiting for you. The troop carrier’s outside.’
The vehicle trundled along narrow lanes until it came to a stop in the centre of a small village.
‘Here we are,’ the ATS driver called out merrily. ‘This is our headquarters.’
As they climbed out of the back of the carrier, Beryl exclaimed, ‘A pub! You’ve got to be joking.’
‘It’s not a pub at the moment,’ their driver explained. ‘It’s been altered to fit our needs, but you’re all likely to be billeted in the village. Come on, I’ll take you in to meet our commander, Miss Everatt.’ She lowered her voice. ‘She’s a nice old stick if you toe the line, but don’t get on the wrong side of her.’
The new arrivals trooped into the building, expecting to see a little grey-haired old lady; instead, they were greeted by a woman in her late thirties or early forties, looking extremely smart in her well-fitting uniform and wearing a broad smile of welcome.
‘You must all be tired and hungry. Go and have a meal in the mess and I will see you after you have eaten.’
An hour later, as she stood before them, the commander explained what would be happening over the next few days. ‘Corporal Johnson will take you to your billets down the road. Try to get a good night’s sleep. The work you are here to do is very intensive, but also extremely important.’ She paused a moment and glanced around at the puzzled faces. ‘I can see from your expressions that you still haven’t been told what the work is.’
A murmur of ‘No, ma’am’ rippled around the room.
‘Have you all signed the Official Secrets Act?’ There was now a unanimous ‘yes’ before she went on. ‘What you will be doing is highly sensitive and most secret. You must not tell anyone – not even your families – what you are doing, or even where you are, nor must you talk to the locals about what goes on at Beaumanor.’
Carolyn breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness she and Beryl had said nothing about their posting at home.
‘You are now part of the War Office Y Group and you will be listening in to enemy messages in Europe and even as far away as North Africa. This, as you can imagine, requires monitoring twenty-four hours, seven days a week, so this is divided into four watches working in six-hour shifts on a three-week basis, but the times change each week. It sounds a little complicated, but you’ll soon get the hang of it. We do advise you to get as much sleep as you can during your off-duty hours . . .’ She smiled as she added, ‘I do understand you will need some leisure time, but please be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when you report for duty. I do have to fit in drill and PT from time to time, but I try to keep that to a minimum.’ She paused a moment and cleared her throat as if what she had to say now was a little embarrassing. ‘Our ATS girls are a relatively new addition here. Beaumanor was manned solely by male civilian operators, known as Experimental Wireless Assistants, until we began to arrive here last month.’ She paused again. ‘Some of the EWAs are, shall we say, a little less than welcoming. This is because – and I have to admit they have a point – our training has not been as good as it might have been. Some of the girls have had to go for additional training in Loughborough.’ She glanced around the room. ‘So, if this happens to you, don’t be upset. You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t passed the tests, but it might be that some of you need a little extra help to reach the standard required here. Once you start work, you must not discuss it with anyone other than the sergeant of your watch or the supervisor of your hut. Not even with me. But if you have any other sorts of problems, then you come to me or my officers.’
She then read out all the names and to which watch they were all assigned.
‘You’ll be working at Beaumanor Hall about a mile and a half away and will be picked up by troop carrier at twelve forty-five tomorrow for your first week of shifts, which start at one p.m. You will all be issued with a special pass, which you must carry with you at all times or you won’t be allowed in. Corporal Johnson will take you to your billets, which are all within easy walking distance from here.’
Carolyn, Beryl and Noreen had been assigned to ‘C’ watch and were also to be billeted together in a tall house with bay windows at the front. Carolyn and Beryl shared the first-floor front bedroom and Noreen had a smaller room at the back.
‘Still with iron bedsteads and boxes for our belongings, I see,’ Beryl said, as they glanced around the room. ‘But it’s a step up from a hut.’
Breakfast, they had been told, was in the mess back at the pub and they would have the morning to themselves as long as they were ready and waiting for the troop carrier.
‘Let’s have lunch,’ Carolyn suggested, ‘at about twelve, and then we’ll be ready for the transport.’
‘Good idea,’ Beryl and Noreen, who had now attached herself to them, agreed. The two friends didn’t mind. Noreen was a nice girl and fitted in with them. She didn’t seem to have made a particular friend at Trowbridge – or, if she had, that friend had not been posted with them here.
The following morning, they were driven to the hall in about ten minutes. There were three other girls on the same shift who were also from their billet. It seemed as if those who worked together stayed together, which made sense to Carolyn and Beryl.
‘Oh my,’ Beryl breathed as they clambered out of the back of the carrier. ‘It’s a stately home.’
One of the girls introduced herself as Judith and told them she was the sergeant of their watch. She laughed now at Beryl’s envious look at the big house. ‘That’s not where you’ll be working, though. The house was taken over by Military Intelligence and there are people who work there – admin, an ops room, directional finding – oh, all sorts of things we aren’t privy to, but we need to go round the side of the house to the huts in the field there. Come on, follow me.’
‘Not huts again,’ Beryl groaned.
But when they walked around the corner of the house and came out into the field it was to see several brick buildings dotted around the edge, some still under construction.
‘They’re being built to look like farm buildings – barns, stables or cottages. The walls are extra thick for blast protection, though I have to admit the roofs aren’t, so if one got a direct hit . . .’ Judith said no more but the newcomers understood.
‘That one over there’ – she flung out her left arm – ‘built to look like a cricket pavilion, complete with painted clock, is the teleprinter room where all our messages go initially. We’re in the hut over there that’s built to look like workmen’s cottages. D’you know, they even leave a couple of milk bottles outside to look like the place is lived in? Full in the morning and empty at night.’
‘How ingenious,’ Carolyn murmured.
As they walked across the grass, they glanced around them, seeing tall, thin aerials dotted around the area.
‘There’s just one thing I ought to warn you about,’ Judith told them. ‘I doubt we’ll get much more now – we’re well into spring – but when it snows, you mustn’t walk across the open spaces to get to your hut. Tracks might be seen from the sky.’
Automatically, they all glanced up as if expecting to see a plane appear out of the clouds.
‘What about like now?’ Carolyn asked. ‘I mean, if a spotter plane went over, it would look a bit strange to see a lot of figures moving towards the huts, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s a good point. Just hide amongst the trees if you hear one.’
Judith opened the door and ushered them into the set room. It seemed rather gloomy at first because the only windows were rather small and high up. There were two rows of twenty receivers down the long, rather narrow room. Thirty-six were in use, with four being left as spares. At the end nearest the door where they entered were two desks. A man sat at one and Judith indicated that the other was hers. The man, whom the girls presumed to be the supervisor, glowered up at them. ‘Ah, three more useless women, I take it.’
But Judith only laughed as she introduced him. ‘This bundle of laughs is Graham Lawrence. If you ever get a word of praise out of him, it’ll be like a gold medal at the Olympics.’
He gave an expressive sigh, gestured to a small room where they saw that they could hang up their outdoor wear and then, with yet another sigh of resignation, he pointed to the far end of the room and then at Carolyn. ‘You go down there. You’re to take over from Bill. I suppose you do know how to take over from an operator on a busy shift?’ Without waiting for her answer, he then allocated positions to both Beryl and Noreen.
‘I’ve got an ATS girl,’ Noreen whispered.
‘Lucky you,’ Beryl muttered as, with a determined expression, she headed down the room towards the corner opposite to where Carolyn was being sent.
Carolyn hovered near the man towards whom she had been directed. She was relieved to see that the set was very similar to those she had worked on at Trowbridge and even to the one Tom had at home. She breathed a sigh of relief. At least she knew how to work it. The operator was writing furiously, obviously in the middle of taking down a message. With his left hand and without looking up at her, he indicated two blank writing pads, both of which Carolyn recognized. One was the log sheet which she filled in as best she could and then she pulled the message pad towards her. With her right hand poised over the now familiar grid printed in red, she was ready to start writing. With her left hand she gently removed one of the headphones from the operator and pressed it to her own ear. She was lucky. It was a clear signal. Immediately, she began to write, her hand moving swiftly across the page writing down the letters in blocks of five just as they had been taught. After a while she became aware that the man had stopped writing and had torn off the top sheet of his pad beneath which was a carbon copy. He put the top page into a tray on the top of the wireless set. It was picked up almost immediately by a young ATS girl who, Carolyn found out later, was called a ‘runner’. Indeed, the girl scurried away, collecting other sheets as she went, before hurrying to the back of the room where she rolled them up and put them into a metal container which she pushed into a tube. This, Carolyn also learned later, was a pneumatic tube connected to the teleprinter room.
Carolyn continued writing without stopping for ten minutes, but then the wavelength fell silent. Although they hadn’t been taught much about tuning in at Trowbridge, Carolyn had learned it from her brother, so she reached up to the dial and gently turned it this way and that, trying to locate the station she had been listening to, or to pick up another.
She felt a gentle touch on her arm and turned to look into Bill’s kind, brown eyes. He was somewhere in his forties, she reckoned, with dark brown curly hair and a smile that made his eyes crinkle.
‘Don’t stray far from the frequency we’re on,’ he said softly. ‘I’m supposed to stay on it as much as possible.’ His smile broadened. ‘By the way, well done. You’re the best ATS arrival I’ve seen yet.’
‘Thanks. Will you tell the supervisor that? He greeted us as “three more useless women”.’
Bill laughed softly. ‘Take no notice of Graham Lawrence. He’s had to take a lot of flak from Station X – that’s where our messages go – for the work not being up to standard. It’s not your fault – or ours – that they haven’t quite got the training up to standard yet. We’ve had to send a few girls who came here to Loughborough for further training, but I can see that you won’t need it. What about your friends?’
‘They’re both about the same standard as me. The three of us passed out top of our group.’
‘Right. I’ll be off, then, as I can see you’ll be all right. I’ll see you around.’
Carolyn put the headphones on and began to listen in again.
Twenty-One
It was a busy shift and when the time came to hand over to the next operator, Carolyn’s head was buzzing, but she was happy. She didn’t think she’d made many mistakes – if any. She’d only had to leave two blank spaces during the whole of her shift. She and Beryl had sat across the room from each other the whole time but had not been able to speak. As they walked back across the field towards where the troop carrier would pick them up, Beryl said, ‘Whew, that was what you’d call a “baptism of fire”, wasn’t it?’
‘It was certainly busy. How d’you think you did?’
‘All right, I think. Luckily, the reception was good. I hate it when there are atmospherics and you can’t hear the Morse properly. I know we’re supposed to be able to cut out the hissing and whistling and concentrate on the Morse, but we’re bound to miss bits, and it’s not really our fault.’
‘Yes, mine was clear too,’ Carolyn said. ‘I’d love to know what the messages were, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, but that’s for the clever folk at this mysterious Station X to work out. Good luck to them, is all I can say.’ Beryl yawned. ‘Come on, let’s get back and see what there is for dinner.’
When they entered the mess, Noreen and Judith were already sitting at the table.
‘Hello, you two. How did you get on?’
‘It was hectic.’ Beryl smiled, sitting down on the opposite side of the table to the other two girls. Carolyn sat beside her.
‘I got put with a right grumpy sod,’ Beryl went on, ‘but he did have the grace to unbend a little when he saw that I knew what I was doing. Luckily, the signal was clear. He told me it was coming from North Africa.’
‘Bill seems nice,’ Carolyn put in.
‘Bill Graves. Yes, he’s lovely,’ Judith said. ‘Most of the men are OK but some are a bit frosty with us. They don’t like the idea of women coming here.’
‘I presume you mean the supervisor, for one.’
‘Exactly.’ Judith leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Though to be fair, he’s got a bit of a problem on his hands. Some of the first arrivals were pretty useless. You can’t blame the men for resenting us if we can’t do the job properly.’
‘That’s true.’ Beryl glanced up at Judith to ask bluntly, ‘Are you any good?’
Judith smiled. ‘I’m the sergeant of the watch, so I don’t actually do much intercept work now. But I noticed you, Noreen, were getting along fine.’
‘I’m not as good as these two, though.’ Noreen nodded towards Carolyn and Beryl. ‘Came out top of the class at Trowbridge, they did.’
‘Wow!’ Judith’s eyes widened. ‘That’s fabulous. How many words a minute do you do, then?’
Carolyn and Beryl glanced at each other, a little embarrassed now, but Noreen answered for them without any trace of resentment. She sounded as proud of their achievements as if they were her own. ‘Like I say, they’re good. About twenty words a minute, isn’t it, girls?’
‘That is good. If you can reach twenty-five words per minute, you’ll get a pay rise.’
‘Mm,’ Carolyn murmured, ‘but I expect we still won’t please Mr Lawrence.’
The girls would have been surprised, however, if they could have overheard the conversation taking place between Bill Graves and his supervisor at that very moment.
‘So what about the new girls who arrived today?’ Graham Lawrence asked. ‘Pretty useless, I expect.’
‘Far from it,’ Bill said. ‘John’s told me that the one called Hunter will be all right, given a bit of time to settle in, but the other two – Holmes and Morley, is it?’
‘Don’t tell me.’ Graham rolled his eyes. ‘They’re rubbish.’
‘On the contrary. Holmes, who took over from me, was excellent. About twenty words per minute and – as far as I could tell – accurate. John said the same of Morley, even though he admitted to being a bit brusque with her at first.’
‘I must admit,’ Lawrence said grudgingly, ‘all three of them kept their heads down all the way through the shift. And it was a busy one today.’
Bill hid his smile as he said casually, ‘You know, Graham’ – the two men had become friendly and now called each other by their Christian names – ‘I think we haven’t given these young women a fair chance.’ Tactfully, he included himself, even though he had never been a part of it. ‘We’re totally forgetting how tough we found it at the start. Some of us – and I include myself in that – were abysmal to begin with. But we worked hard and we gave ourselves time to learn. Given a bit more time, I’m sure all these girls – especially Holmes and Morley – promise to be as good as any man we’ve got on site.’
‘You surprise me.’ Graham was silent for a moment, feeling a twinge of guilt for his own greeting of the newcomers, before unbending a little to add, ‘But I’m pleased to hear it.’
That evening, Carolyn walked down the road to the small village shop, where there was a phone box, to ring Frank as she had promised. After their usual greetings, she said, ‘I haven’t got long, Grandad, and I can’t tell you where we are or what we’re doing, but Beryl and I are still together. We get a forty-eight-hour pass about every six weeks, so we might try to get over to see you then.’
‘Let me know if you want me or your uncle to pick you up anywhere and be sure to bring Beryl, unless she wants to visit her own family.’
‘I will.’ As she replaced the receiver, Carolyn was thoughtful. What she hadn’t told Frank was that she and Beryl had already discussed how they would get to the East Coast. Travelling there was difficult and protracted at the best of times and it was exacerbated by the war.
