Bluebirds (58 page)

‘I used to be a clerk, but I've just re-mustered. I'm going to train as a flight mechanic.'

He stared. ‘A what?'

‘A flight mechanic.'

‘You mean, servicin' the 'planes an' all that?'

‘That's right.'

‘You're not 'avin' me on?' He was half-laughing, half-incredulous.

‘No. They're short of men, you see. So they're trainin' us.'

He whistled and shook his head. ‘Blimey! Don't say we've come to that. I flippin' 'ope 'itler don't get to 'ear of this or 'e'll know we're on our flippin' uppers.'

She forgave him because he meant no offence. And because he was so cheerful and funny the rest of the journey passed quickly. At Brindley Heath he carried her heavy kitbag off the train for her.

‘Strewth, what you got 'in 'ere, darlin'? The kitchen stove'n all?' He set it down on the wooden platform. ‘There you are, sunshine. Sorry I can't carry it all the way. Best of luck, an' if I ever go in one of your 'planes
you make sure you tighten all them nuts.' He chucked her under the chin. ‘Keep smilin'.'

He waved to her from the window and gave her a thumbs-up and a cheery grin as the train drew away.

She swung the kitbag up, staggering under its weight, and went to ask a porter for directions to the camp. She could barely understand a word he said, but set off up a steep hill in the direction of his pointing finger, burdened like a mule with her kitbag over her shoulder, her respirator slung across her chest and her helmet and folded gas cape on her back. It was very cold and getting dark and halfway up the hill, just as she was beginning to wonder if she would manage to make it to the top, a farmer came by with a horsedrawn cartload of potatoes and stopped to give her a lift. She clambered up thankfully beside him. When she told him, too, that she was going to train as a flight mechanic on aircraft engines he laughed even more than the soldier on the train.

‘That's a good one! I'll come'n be a pilot!'

He set her down near the camp entrance and she could hear him still chuckling to himself as the grey horse clip-clopped off down the road.

RAF Hednesford was on high ground – a bleak and windswept place surrounded by a high wire fence that made it look like a prison. There were rows and rows of camouflaged Nissen huts, curved like hen coops. The WAAF huts were a mile from the main gates. There were thirty girls to each hut with a corporal in the small room at the end, and most of the Nissens leaked whenever it rained. The walls and windows streamed constantly with condensation. There were linoleum floors, tortoise stoves giving off a meagre heat, and double bunk beds without ladders. Winnie, allotted a top bunk, had to scramble up and jump down and when she was lying in her bunk her head came unpleasantly close to the curving tin roof. The only comforting thought was that it was the end, and not the beginning of winter.

She was given another embarrassing medical examination and an undignified Free From Infection inspection for fleas, lice, scabies or any other catching diseases. Then she was issued with trousers, a battle dress top, RAF overalls and a black beret, like the one that she had worn before there were WAAF caps. The trousers, she soon discovered, itched horribly.

Most of the other girls in her intake had come straight from initial training and had been in all kinds of civilian jobs before joining up. A few, like herself, had re-mustered from other trades. The girl in the bunk immediately below hers was called Hilda. She came from Lancashire and had just completed her initial training at Morecambe.

‘It was hell,' she told Winnie cheerfully. ‘Square bashing up and down the sea front in a force ten gale, with everyone looking on and criticizing us. Then PT in our blackouts with half the old men in Morecambe leering at us. And the landlady at our billet was
evil
! She'd had the RAF before, you see, so she didn't want us. We weren't like her nice boys. “I don't want you, but I've got to have you,” she told us. “So you'll behave yourselves.” She had a great long list of rules pinned up on the wall: wipe your feet when you come in, no noise, no singing, in bed by 10.00 p.m., windows open whatever the weather, bedrooms left spotless in the morning . . . Oooh, she did make our life a misery! Some of the girls cried every night. We had to pay her five shillings a week and she half-starved us! Three tinned plums on a plate for our tea and two slices of bread and butter. That's all we had. The kitchen was down in the basement and the food would come up in one of those little lifts. Rattle, rattle, rattle it went and the tinned plums would appear and we'd all
groan
 . . . We had to go down and do the washing up afterwards too. Insult to injury.'

‘It sounds dreadful,' Winnie said.

‘We were all
miserable
. Mind you, one or two of the girls deserved a bit of chasing. I never knew people could be so dirty. Filthy habits some of them had. They never
washed or changed their clothes, dirty STs left about . . . And they didn't know how to eat at table. One girl broke her bread into her soup and ate it with a knife and fork. It takes all sorts, I suppose. You're Engines, not Airframes, aren't you? Like me. That's good.'

Apart from the WAAFS, there was a large intake of RAF trainees, including some Poles and Czechs, and a large contingent from the Fleet Air Arm. Most of the men seemed amused by the presence of the WAAFS. A few were dead against them. None expected the girls to reach the same standard as themselves, or to be capable of the same workload.

To begin with the Engine and Airframe mechanics attended classes together. They learned about metals, how to file and make simple joints, how to handle tools and to identify all the different types of screw heads, bolts, hammers, hack-saws, chisels and files. They were introduced to precision instruments and taught the basics of riveting and simple carpentry. Then they separated. The Airframe trainees went away to learn about the complicated structure of modern aircraft, while the mysteries of the internal combustion engine were explained to the Engine mechanics, starting with a simple motor cycle engine.

‘Right now, who can tell me what this is?'

The RAF sergeant instructor pointed with his stick at a part of the section of motor cycle engine on the bench in front of him.

Winnie put up her hand. ‘It's a cylinder.'

‘Correct.' The stick moved on. ‘And this?'

‘A piston.'

‘Correct again. Well done. A cylinder and a piston. Both very important parts of the internal combustion engine, as I am about to show you.' The instructor tapped with his stick again. ‘If you introduce a mixture of petrol vapour and air into this cylinder in the ratio fifteen parts of air to one part of petrol, compress it and ignite it with an electric spark then the temperature and pressure rises
and the
piston
is forced down the cylinder. I want you to learn and remember four magic words: Induction, Compression, Power and Exhaust.'

He went on talking about revs and strokes and conrods; about the combustion chamber, crankshafts, inlets and outlets; about swept volume and clearance volume, mixture, magnetos, Top Dead Centre and Bottom Dead Centre, valve lag and valve lead, compression ratios . . . The technical words, strange to most of the trainees, were already familiar to Winnie from everything that Taffy had taught her.

Her first sight of a Merlin engine out on a workbench thrilled her. At last she was going to be allowed, not only to touch it, but dismantle parts of it and reassemble them back into their places.

The class instructor, watching her working away happily in her beret and outsize RAF overalls, with grease streaks on her face and dirt under her fingernails, put her down as a natural. It was rare in women in his experience so far and he was still trying to get used to the idea of having them in his class. They were painstaking and conscientious, he had discovered, and very thorough, and they had some advantages over the men, like small hands and lots of patience, but they did not usually have that inborn feeling for engines that was far more than mere competence. He smiled at Winnie and she smiled back. Pretty with it, he thought drily. Even rarer.

Winter began to turn very slowly into spring. The long, hard training absorbed Winnie completely. She scarcely noticed the changing weather, the bad food, the awful conditions, the ill-tempered hut corporal who was always shouting
‘Move!'
Her absorption in her work led her to fall down on other things. When it was her turn to polish the brown linoleum in the hut, which showed every mark, the corporal was never satisfied. And at Kit Inspection she was frequently reprimanded by the WAAF officer. A WAAF sergeant would read aloud from a list as the items laid out on her bed were checked.

‘Coat, great, one. Overalls, blue, two. Gloves, knitted, one pair. Panties, three. Knickers, three. Vests, WAAF, three. Shirts, poplin, three?'

Winnie pointed nervously. ‘One there, one on and one in the wash.'

‘Collars, poplin, six. Skirts, two. Slacks, blue, one. Stockings, lisle, four?'

There were only three pairs and the Section Officer was seriously displeased.

‘Last time you had lost your housewife, Jervis. If you can't find them, they'll have to come out of your pay.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

She was not careless in her work, however. Her notes and diagrams were models of neatness and accuracy and the other WAAFS often copied from them. When they were studying in the hut in the evenings Hilda would sing out from her lower bunk,

‘I can't make head or tail of this. Let me see your diagram, Winnie.'

‘Which one?'

‘The Hurricane fuel system. And the oil system too. Mine are both in a mess and I can't read half what I've written.'

They were tested every week on what they had been taught and if they failed more than once on a test they were taken off the course. As time passed, faces disappeared from the classes.

Winnie and Hilda rehearsed questions and answers with each other.

‘Give me one disadvantage of a single carb, Hilda.'

‘Hmm. Hang on a mo. Oh, yes, I know. It doesn't atomize or emulsify fuel.'

‘That's right.'

‘My turn to ask you. Let's see . . . what tools would you use to check the bore of a cylinder?'

‘An inside micrometer.'

‘That was too easy. What about this, then. Describe a Merlin coolant pump.'

Winnie said at once: ‘It's a centrifugal impeller pump bolted beneath the wheel case and driven from lower vertical drive. The pump is in two pieces. The lower half contains two coolant inlets, a drain tap and a Morganite thrust pad. The upper half contains two outlets, two lead-bronze lined bushes, a packin' gland, a gland nut and a grease cap. The gland prevents coolant leakage –'

‘All right, all right! You know it backwards. Now ask me something nice and simple.'

‘Where do you enter up fuel, oil and coolant after servicin'?'

‘Form 700. Ask me another one like that. It gives me confidence.'

‘Who's the last person to sign Form 700 before a flight?'

‘The pilot. Make it harder than that, Winn.'

Winnie turned the pages of her notebook. ‘All right. What's meant by high tensile steel?'

‘Steel that's capable of taking a tensile strength of fifty tons or more. Give me another one.'

‘Name two types of piston rings.'

‘Compression rings and scraper rings. Compression rings are to make a gas tight joint. Scraper rings to prevent excess oil passing the piston and going into the cylinder head. Now ask me something even harder.'

‘What can you tell me about superchargin'?'

‘Ouch! Well, I did ask for it. Hum. Well, here goes. Supercharging consists of supplying a greater weight of mixture to the induction system than would be induced by normal means, with the object of increasing the power output . . . OK? Now let's have a break before our brains get addled.'

Hilda fetched her ukulele from her locker and began to strum quietly, sitting on her bunk. It was raining hard outside, drumming an accompaniment on the Nissen hut roof. She was a good-natured girl with short, straight dark hair. Everything about her looked square. She had a square jaw, square-shaped hands and feet, but her
ready smile transformed her plain face into something near beauty. She had told Winnie all about her home life in Rochdale. Her mother had worked in a mill, her father on the trams. Hers was a northern town world of back-to-back terraced houses, cobbled streets, black pudding, jam and chip butties, chimneys, smoke, soot and Lancashire rain. Her childhood had been spent playing in the streets. She had scorned dolls and played cricket and football with the boys instead. At fourteen her mother had taken her along to the local factory to queue for a job. The factory made paper tubes for the cotton to wind on to. She had worked there for four years until it burned down. Then she'd joined the Civil Defence when war broke out and was put into the ambulance corps where she learned first aid.

‘I was doing that when I got a letter On His Majesty's Service, and that was that. I
had
to join up. I wasn't a volunteer, like you, Winnie, but I didn't mind. I liked the idea – specially when I found out I could train as a flight mech. That was a bit of luck. I was always playing with my brother's meccano set – I could build better things than him. He used to bash me for that.'

If she found book-learning more difficult than Winnie, Hilda was first class at the practical side. And she could play the ukulele very well indeed. The whole hut rocked and sang to her tunes. Winnie, lying with her arms behind her head and the dank tin roof inches from her nose, listened contentedly to her playing
Tiptoe Through The Tulips.
The camp was a dreadful place, so cold and bleak, and she had discovered that the high wire fence was a relic from when it had been a POW camp in the First World War, but she had never felt happier in her life. At last she was doing what she had always wanted to do and it was just as satisfying as she had always imagined it would be.