Daisy's Wars (26 page)

It was like water off a duck’s back to Mae West, but inside Daisy she was still Background Daisy Sheridan from Heaton via Byker, who cringed as she lay in her bed in the darkness –
her old friend – and released her real feelings. To men like that she was no more than an object but she would never let them know how they made her feel. Never.

As the first call came in from a homeward-bound Lanc, she was recalling Celia’s anguish.

‘I never want to do it ever again,’ the girl had said.

‘Amen to that,’ Daisy thought. ‘Amen to that, Celia.’ Then she went back to work.

15

It was some weeks before Daisy and Eileen caught up properly with each other again, and by that time Eileen had been put through her truncated Radio Telephone Operator’s
training and was about to join Daisy in the tower. Celia had just returned from a leave with her husband that Daisy had assured her would make everything right, but it had ended in tears and,
naturally, it was Daisy she sought out.

‘How did it go?’ Daisy began brightly.

‘It was terrible, Daisy,’ Celia replied, her face a blank.

‘I just froze again. I tried not to, but I didn’t want him to touch me, and he got angry and shouted at me, then he made me.’

‘He “made” you?’ Daisy asked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He said I was his wife and he had rights, and he just made me do it,’ Celia said flatly.

‘Did you try to stop him?’ Daisy asked, her mind a mass of emotions.

‘I said I didn’t want to and Bobby said he didn’t care whether I wanted to or not, I’d have to, and if I didn’t buck my ideas up there were plenty of other females
who’d be happy to do it with him. He said there was something wrong with me; other women don’t mind, why should I?’ She sat silently on Daisy’s bed then looked up at her.
‘I think I hate him, Daisy,’ she said flatly.

‘Oh, it’s just how you’re feeling,’ Daisy said, trying to sound encouraging and worldly wise. ‘Remember how excited you were about the wedding? You didn’t
hate Bobby then, did you?’

‘Well, he didn’t behave like that then. I watched him the other night, you know, afterwards, and he couldn’t look me in the eye, and I thought “You bloody
coward!” ’

‘Celia, remember that Bobby’s being worked off his feet, he’s probably not behaving as he normally would, none of us are.’

Celia nodded. ‘I know that, I’ve been making every excuse for him, but none of them work. I hate him. He forced me, he knew I didn’t want to, Daisy, he’s supposed to love
me and he forced me. I’ve tried to pretend that it doesn’t matter, but it does, and now I just feel so angry and stupid for letting him. What kind of man does that to his own
wife?’

To any woman, Daisy thought, but didn’t know what to say. In defending Celia’s husband she was putting up defences Dessie could have used, and there was no defence.

‘Look, Celia, you’re not likely to be seeing him for a while, are you? So take this time and think it through, wait till you’ve calmed down and you’ll probably find that
it’ll work out. You’ve got off to a bad start, and no wonder, you’re not having a chance to have a normal married life, are you? When all this is over you’ll forget it ever
happened.’

Daisy didn’t add ‘like I did’, because she hadn’t.

She sighed, thinking of Celia’s husband. Odds on Bobby was just a boy, every bit as inexperienced as Celia was, who had no more than a general idea of what to do; a boy who belonged to the
‘have someone waiting’ way of thinking. He would have left home too early, though in years he was old enough for war, but he wanted to be looked after as he had been at home, with
regular sex thrown in.

Once, down in the pub, Daisy had overheard two airmen talking. The younger one was about to marry and the older one, who obviously regarded himself as the re-incarnation of Rudolph Valentino,
was giving him advice for his wedding night. ‘Just keep jabbing away and it’ll be all right,’ he said, in a leering way, and Daisy had turned round and thrown her drink in his
face. She could imagine Celia’s Bobby confiding in one of his colleagues that all was not as he had expected of marriage, probably after he’d had a few, and he would have been advised
to put his foot down, show her who was master, demand his rights. Daisy could almost hear it. And the boy had done it, of course, and look where it had landed him and Celia.

It was just like Fly Boys to think they knew it all when they didn’t, and then to pass on what they didn’t know to impressionable boys like Bobby. There was nothing Daisy could do
about that, she was on Celia’s side here, so she took her on a night out in nearby Nottingham to cheer her up, and invited Eileen to join them.

They had signed themselves out and were sitting at a little café they had found that sold pancakes and syrup, but only to Forces personnel.

‘Tell Eileen about the pigeons,’ Daisy ordered, to get Celia thinking and talking about something other than Bobby and their marital problems. ‘Something big’s just
happened in the world of pigeons, Eileen, you’ve got to hear this.’

Eileen looked at Celia, her eyes shining. She had heard about the pigeons but she didn’t really believe it.

‘I’m a pigeon handler,’ Celia stated.

‘Oh, get on with it!’ Daisy said, dabbing some syrup on Celia’s nose with her spoon.

‘So what does that mean?’ Eileen encouraged her.

‘Well, we’re part of Signals,’ Celia said self-consciously. ‘We breed pigeons and train them, then when they’re ready we put a metal tag on each bird’s leg,
with the date, the basket number and the aircraft’s number. There’s a container on the leg with a white SOS strip and one showing the station, then they’re put aboard the planes
before takeoff on Ops.’

Eileen was chuckling, sure this was a joke, and Daisy kicked her under the table and threw her a warning look.

‘But why?’ Eileen asked.

‘Well, if the plane goes down, one of the aircrew writes down their last position on the SOS strip with an indelible pencil. Then the pigeon flies home and we know where to pick the crew
up. That’s the theory – it doesn’t always work.’

Daisy threw her arms up in the air. ‘Will you get to the point?’ she demanded. ‘Tell her about Winkie before I thump you!’

‘Winkie?’ Eileen asked, looking from one to the other.

‘Yes, Winkie,’ Daisy said impatiently, ‘she’s a damned pigeon!
Tell
her!’

‘Oh, I see, yes,’ Celia smiled. ‘Well, Winkie is a blue chequered hen—’

‘Does it matter?’ Daisy asked, rolling her eyes. ‘I mean, would it make any difference if she was polka-dotted?’

‘—and she was on a Beaufort in the North Sea last winter when it was brought down. The crew got into the raft and they didn’t see Winkie had got herself free, so they were just
sitting there waiting to die of cold or to be picked up by the enemy. But Winkie flew over a hundred miles covered in oil, and her code number was relayed to the Ops Room of her home station, and
even though there wasn’t a message, the number gave an idea of where the crew could be, and they were picked up. Winkie got a medal.’

‘Good old Winkie,’ Eileen said diplomatically, wondering if pigeons could get medals and, if they could, where they were pinned.

‘Wait, there’s more,’ Daisy said.

‘What?’ Eileen giggled. ‘A pigeon with a medal, and there’s
more?
’

‘And you won’t get to hear it if you don’t stop being sarcastic,’ Daisy reproved her. ‘Will you tell her the rest, Celia, or do I have to get the electric wires
out?’

‘You only want me to tell her so that you can both laugh again,’ Celia protested.

‘And what’s wrong with that? Don’t you think we could do with a laugh?’

Celia sighed. ‘Daisy thinks this is really funny for some reason, but the crew the pigeon helped save had a big celebration dinner for her and, as Winkie was the guest of honour, she was
placed in her cage at the top table.’

At that Daisy dissolved in laughter and had to search through the make-up in her gas-mask container for a hankie to wipe her eyes, as Celia looked on disapprovingly. Then Eileen joined in,
though she wasn’t sure if she was laughing at Winkie’s celebration dinner or Daisy’s giggling.

‘Oh, stop being so po-faced,’ Daisy said to Celia. ‘If you weren’t so close to your pigeons you’d laugh too.’

‘I just don’t see what’s so funny,’ Celia said primly, shrugging her shoulders, ‘though I can see by the two of you that I’m in a minority of one!’

‘It’s the picture of old Winkie sitting inside her cage at the top table being honoured, and she’s just a pigeon, she doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s going
on!’ Daisy cried, dabbing at her eyes again.

‘Well, you don’t know that,’ Celia said defensively. ‘Pigeons are very clever, you know.’

But by then neither Daisy nor Eileen could hear her above their own laughter.

‘We’re not finished yet!’ Daisy screeched.

‘Oh, surely we
must
be!’ Eileen giggled.

Daisy shook her head helplessly. ‘Tell her about the hawk project!’

This time Celia giggled too. ‘Well, our lot discovered that the Germans were using pigeons, too,’ she said.

‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ Eileen responded.

‘And so our lot came up with this idea to train hawks to kill the German pigeons, only—’

‘How could the hawks tell the difference?’ Eileen interrupted, wide-eyed. ‘Between our pigeons and German pigeons, I mean?’

‘I was just coming to that,’ Celia protested, reaching for a hankie of her own. ‘That was the fatal flaw, you see, they couldn’t!’

When the three girls got back to the hut later that night, Daisy’s good mood changed. Normally she collected her mail up at Admin, but, presumably as she hadn’t
done so for a while, some kind person had picked up a letter and put it on her bed. She knew by the handwriting that it was from her Australian penpal in Orkney.

When the correspondence had first started she had made her replies as boring as his own letters to Dotty, then she tried leaving her responses later and later, in the hope that he’d stop
writing all together. Foreign servicemen often asked WAAFs to write to them, and even to write to their mothers to let them know how their boys were, so Frank Moran wasn’t unusual, except
that usually in the normal way of things contact slowly but surely died out after a while, as both parties found their time eaten up with work and other pursuits.

Not Frank, though. Frank stuck to it. He was in Shetland now, at a place called Sumburgh, which was as different from his beloved Dalby as anyone could imagine. With the Germans now in Norway
they were just 180 miles from the northern-most part of the British Isles, so these tiny islands had been flooded with army, navy and RAF personnel; they now outnumbered the natives. There were few
trees to be seen and little greenery, and even with so many service people about it was cold, lonely and remote.

‘
The people are wonderful, though
,’ Frank wrote. ‘
God knows, we’ve disrupted their way of life more than we do anywhere else, but they can’t do enough for
us. Every door is open to us. We’re like family, and though they’re on rations they’re always baking for us. One Shetland sailor came home on leave and found his home full of
other sailors – his family were on first-name terms with them. He said it felt like he was the stranger; it was like being back aboard ship. We have dances in the town hall and concerts in
the RAF gym. Service personnel come from all over in lorries. Gracie Fields has been here a couple of times, though I’ve never heard her – I’m told I might not be missing a
lot!’

And then it was back to Dalby.
‘I don’t know if I’ve told you, but we have about 3000 acres all told, mostly open tree-land and grass with a paddock of maybe 100 acres for
growing crops. Our main income is from wool, so we grow some oats for feeding the sheep in winter and some lucerne to give them good summer forage. A lot of the work is fencing to keep the
blighters in, making sure they’re healthy and checking the water supply – water’s really important. We have an underground bore a hundred feet down and a windmill to keep the
sheep trough supplied and a horse and a couple of dogs for mustering.

‘Every couple of months we bring the sheep in for crutching (you don’t want to know!), drenching, branding, lamb-tailing and paddock rotation – if they stay on the
same pasture they get worms. Six weeks off shearing we drench them to get rid of the lice. Lice are bad news: the sheep rub themselves against trees and fences to get rid of the itch and that
affects their wool, and you have to keep an eye on blowfly that strike at the crotch and shoulder in the hot, wet weather. You have to shear the patches where the blowfly has laid and put on some
oil to kill the maggots. And there’s always burrs and poisonous weeds like prickly pear to look out for. I used to hate it, couldn’t wait to get away from it and swore I’d never
be back, but now I get sentimental thinking of blowflies! The house has a diesel-powered generator for electricity, a kerosene-fired fridge and a wood-burning stove for cooking. I’m going to
build a new house when I get back, though, make it of cypress pine on two-foot stumps of hardwood like ironbark or spotted gum, they don’t rot in the ground like cypress. Galvanised iron for
the roof, and I’ll have a phone in and a wireless, everybody will have them after the war.

You can have anything you want, Daisy, furnish it how you like. You’ll be a long way from your family, but they can visit. You’ve never told me about your family. Have you
got brothers and sister?’

It was all getting too much, too involved. Even though she didn’t respond in kind he was getting under her skin to the extent that she found herself picturing Dalby, wondering what his
mother and father looked like. And there was Dotty to consider, Dotty who thought she would be the one to find that out after the war, if he survived that was.

And that was another thing. If he didn’t survive she didn’t want to know. She would hear from Dotty afterwards, but that would be one step removed, she didn’t want to be the
one who heard first.

She would have to tell him plainly not to write again, Daisy decided. She would use Dotty’s undying love for him as an excuse, though the real reason was that she didn’t want him or
anyone else to fix themselves to her. So she wrote to him for the last time, telling him that she was far too busy to write, that she had nothing to write about other than work, that Dotty would be
upset if she knew he was writing to her and she didn’t want Dotty to feel something had been going on behind her back all along, even if nothing had been, couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Anyway, they didn’t know each other apart from that one brief meeting when they didn’t get on, so maybe he should stop now, and, for her part, there would be no more letters.