Read When the Lights Go on Again Online
Authors: Annie Groves
Tags: #World War; 1939-1945, #Sagas, #Family Life, #Historical
When the Lights Go on Again
As this is the final book in the Campion series I would like to dedicate it to all the ‘real life’ families and their descendants, who lived through WWII
Late August 1943
Jean Campion was standing in her kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil. Today was her birthday. Her soft brown wavy hair had been freshly cut and set the previous day especially for the occasion, the last drops of the precious Chanel scent that her son, Luke, had brought her back from Paris the first Christmas of the war, dabbed behind her ears. Jean smoothed down the cotton fabric of her blue floral print summer dress, loose on her now after nearly four years of wartime rationing. She had bought the dress from Lewis’s in Liverpool, when her eldest daughter, Grace, had been working there, before the store had been bombed in the dreadful blitz of May 1940.
The kettle was coming up to the boil. From the front room, with the doors open into the hallway, Jean could hear the voices of her family, come to celebrate with her the birthday she shared with her twin sister, Vi. The voices of her daughters Grace and Sasha, her niece, Bella, her sisters, Vi
and Francine. Female voices. Female voices because they were at war and so many men were fighting for their country – and their lives. A heartfelt sigh escaped Jean’s lips.
She was lucky, she reminded herself; many women she knew had lost sons and husbands. Luke might have been injured fighting in the desert, but at least he had recovered now, even if he had made that recovery far from home and, according to his most recent letter – which had miraculously arrived today – was about to rejoin his army unit.
She was lucky too in having the rest of her family close at hand. Grace, who was a nurse, might have moved to Whitchurch because her RAF husband, who was part of the very important and secret Y Section, had been posted there, but she too had her husband living at home with her.
Seb and Grace had come up from Whitchurch today on the train, and right now Seb and Jean’s husband, Sam, were down at Sam’s allotment, no doubt talking about the progress of the war and the recent invasion of Sicily by the Allied Forces, as well as Seb’s desire to turn part of the rambling garden attached to the cottage they were renting into a vegetable plot.
Thinking of that invasion made Jean’s heart thud with anxiety, for Luke, who was with the Eighth Army, and bound to be involved at some stage in the Allies’ push into the Italian mainland to force back the Germans and Italians.
And Luke wasn’t the only one of her children she had to worry about, Jean admitted, lifting her hand to smooth back a wayward strand of hair.
There was Lou, who of all things was now learning to fly aeroplanes, if you please, having been transferred by the WAAF into something called the Air Transport Auxiliary service. And Lou’s twin, Sasha, despite having a nice steady job at the local telephone exchange and an equally nice steady fiancé working in bomb disposal, never seemed to be happy.
As she poured the boiling water onto the precious tea leaves, Jean thought how typically generous it was of her younger sister, Francine – a singer with ENSA, and recently married to a major in the army – to have brought her own rations with her for the birthday get-together.
On cue, the kitchen door opened wider to admit Francine, a rueful look of mischief sparkling in her eyes.
‘I thought I’d escape from Vi by coming to see if you needed a hand.’
Francine was by far the prettiest one of the three sisters, with her strawberry-blonde curls and her heart-shaped face. Grace had the same pretty features.
As always, Francine was beautifully dressed, in a floral silk frock. She’d had the foresight to have some new clothes made whilst she’d been posted to Egypt with ENSA. You simply couldn’t get clothes of the quality and style Fran had brought back with her in England now, not with rationing and the rules the Government had laid down for austerity clothing. Not that Jean minded having to stick by those rules, not when she knew the danger the country’s poor merchant seamen had
to endure bringing raw materials into the country for the war effort.
No, she didn’t feel the lack of pretty things for herself, but she did feel it for her girls sometimes, Jean admitted, although Fran had been wonderfully generous, not just bringing a whole trousseau of clothes, including her wedding dress, back from Egypt for Grace, but also bringing lovely fabrics that she had shared with them all.
Fran pulled a face. ‘I know that it can’t be easy for Vi with Edwin having left her for someone else, but she doesn’t exactly make it easy for others to sympathise with her, does she? I’ve never heard anyone complain so much, and over next to nothing.’
‘That’s just Vi’s way,’ Jean tried to defend her twin. ‘She’s always been like that, boasting when things are going well for her and complaining about life not being fair and her being hard done to when they aren’t, but Edwin wanting a divorce, and the war, have made her worse. You can carry that tray through for me, if you will.’ Jean nodded at the tray with the pretty china tea set that Grace had given her the first Christmas of the war. ‘And I’ll bring the teapot.’
Over a decade younger than Jean and Vi, Francine had been through such a lot. Pregnant at sixteen by a married man she naïvely believed loved her, Francine had given in to pressure from Vi and her husband to allow them to bring up her baby as their own before she left for America to make a new life for herself there as a singer.
But then the war had brought her back to do
her bit for the country, and Francine had found out that Vi and Edwin had not been the loving parents to little Jack that she’d expected. That had been ever such a bad time. Poor Jack had run away from the people Vi had sent him to, supposedly to keep him safe from the war, and Jean had seen what Francine had gone through, wanting to claim her little boy and mother him, whilst Vi and Edwin did their utmost to stop her. And then had come the terrible tragedy of Jack being killed when a bomb had dropped on the farm to which he’d been evacuated. Such a terrible thing to happen. Of course, things had never been the same between Francine and Vi after that.
‘I don’t know how Bella puts up with Vi,’ Francine told Jean. ‘Vi’s done nothing but complain about how hard done by she is since she got here, when it’s perfectly plain that she has poor Bella running round after her, as well as working full time managing that nursery.’
Bella, the elder of Vi’s two children, was in charge of a government nursery in Wallasey where she and her new husband, a Polish fighter pilot, lived.
‘Vi’s worried that, now that Bella’s married, once the war’s over she’s going to be left on her own. She might complain about having Bella living with her when Bella has got a perfectly good house of her own, but she’d be lost without her,’ Jean told Fran.
Fran had picked up the tea tray but now she put it down again, the tone of her voice softening, as she told her sister, ‘I had a letter from Marcus
this morning. His regiment is still on home duties but he thinks now that we’ve got Sicily, if we can win Italy, it won’t be long before we invade Western Europe, and that his regiment is bound to be part of that. I feel so guilty at times, Jean. One half of me is jubilant because we’re beginning to win the war at last, even though I know that there is still more fighting to be done, but the other half of me is so terribly afraid for my own happiness and for Marcus. Life is so precious and so very fragile, and loving Marcus makes me feel so vulnerable. If I should lose him…’ She gave a deep shudder. ‘I’m being selfish, I know. After all, there isn’t a woman in the land who doesn’t feel as I do for someone.’
The two sisters exchanged understanding looks.
‘You have Luke with the Eighth Army,’ Francine continued, ‘Bella has Jan with the RAF, and even Vi has Charlie in the army, although to listen to her she seems more concerned about him losing out if Edwin’s mistress has a son than she is about Charlie losing his life.’
Jean knew what Francine meant. With a victory predicted for the Allies and an end to the war, peace seemed so tantalisingly close that it was harder than ever for those at home to hold back their fears that their loved ones fighting for that peace might not survive to share it with them.
‘Mum, Auntie Vi’s complaining that she’s parched,’ Grace announced, coming into the kitchen. Pulling a face, she added, ‘She’s done nothing but complain since she and Bella got here.’
‘We’re on our way,’ Jean answered, laughing.
As Francine followed Jean through the door with the tea things, her mind was still on Marcus. Neither of them had said so in as many words, but Francine knew how much it would mean to him were she to start a baby before he was sent overseas, and not just because they loved one another, or even because his child would be a living reminder of their love, should he fall in combat. Each of them had already lost a child to the war: Marcus when his first wife, who had been pregnant with their first child, had been killed in an air raid, and Francine herself when the same thing had happened to Jack, the child who had never even known she was his mother and with whom she had shared such a short and poignant handful of days on her return to Liverpool from America. Superstitiously, Francine felt that if she did conceive then Marcus would survive the war because, after all they’d been through, God simply wouldn’t let them have a child if both of them weren’t going to be there to love and protect it.
For that reason she had waited with eager anticipation each month, only to be disappointed when her period arrived with relentless regularity. And now Marcus was warning her that he was expecting to be sent into action.
As she pushed open the door to Jean’s small front room the sight of its exclusively female occupants reinforced everything that she had been thinking about the reality of the war and what lay ahead.
‘I wish you could stay up here long enough to spend a couple of days in Whitchurch with us,’
Grace told Francine later on when they were washing up, whilst Jean took some sandwiches and a flask of tea down to the allotment for Sam and Seb.
The kitchen should have been cold and unwelcoming, facing north as it did, but Sam had painted it a bright yellow before the war, and Francine always thought that in addition to the warming colour the homely room held something of Jean’s own comforting warmth about it.
‘Next time I come up I’ll have to do that,’ Francine agreed,
‘Will you be coming back up soon? Only it’s so hard to get Mum to come out to see me, she’s always so busy here, and I know she’d come if you were coming,’ Grace pressed her, adding coaxingly, ‘Seb’s going to be away in a month’s time on a course at Bletchley Park and it would be lovely if you could both come then.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘I know I’m lucky to have Seb stationed here in England, and even luckier for him to be living out so that we can be together, but I do miss Liverpool and home.’
Poor Grace, Francine thought. It was obvious to Fran that what her niece didn’t want to say was that she missed her mother.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ Francine agreed on a rush of sympathy, ‘and I’ll make sure that your mum comes with me.’
Grace’s face lit up. Putting down the cloth with which she was carefully drying the tea set, she gave Francine a fierce hug.
‘Thanks ever so, Auntie Fran.’
‘You are happy in Whitchurch, aren’t you?’ Francine asked. What she really meant was, was Grace happy in her marriage, but that was something she was reluctant to ask straight out.
‘Oh, yes,’ Grace answered immediately and, very obviously, truthfully, to Francine’s relief. ‘It’s just that Whitchurch is only a small place and all the girls I work with are local and have their families there, and somehow that makes me miss my family even more. Then when I do come home I hardly get to speak properly to Mum, she’s so busy. You
will
come and stay with me and bring Mum, won’t you?’
‘I promise,’ Fran confirmed.
‘Lou, you are soooo lucky. You brought that Harvard down daisy-cutter perfect first time, but when I had to do it I came in too high and had to go round again.’
‘It didn’t feel like a perfect landing,’ Lou assured her friend and fellow ATA pilot June Merryvale as they walked away from the airfield and its hangars, carrying their parachutes with them.
The breeze filled out the loose fabric of their Sidcot flying suits, worn not, as it was rumoured so many of the ferry pool pilots did, over merely their underwear, but over their smart navy-blue uniform trousers and pale blue shirts. The same breeze was lifting the wind sock on the airfield and also tugging at Lou’s curls, the tips of her hair sun-bleached now by the summer sunshine.
The two girls had been posted to the ATA training airbase at Thame at the same time for their ongoing training from flying Grade 1 only planes to flying Grade 2 planes – advanced single-engined aircraft, primarily fighter aircraft, such as Hurricanes, Spitfires, Typhoons, Mustangs, Airacobras, and even
‘tricky’ aircraft like the Walruses. The aircraft, though, that Lou most longed to fly was the Spitfire, the small fighter plane that those women pilots who had flown them declared were perfect for female flyers.
Spits – Lou’s heart lifted with excitement every time she thought of flying one. She knew that some of the RAF men disapproved of girls flying at all, but especially disliked and resented the idea of girls flying Spitfires, feeling that only the male ATA pilots – those pilots who for one reason or another could not fly in combat, but who were still good airmen – should be allowed to do so.
So much had happened since she had undergone her ab initio training at Barton-in-the-Clay, the small grass airfield where she had spent the regulation two weeks having lessons in ‘ground school’, followed by bumps and circuits in the school’s Gypsy Moth training plane. From there she had gone on to solo flight, before being assigned the thirty cross-country flights every would-be ATA pilot had to complete successfully before getting her ‘wings’. These flights, designed to hone the skills the trainees had been taught in ground school, had involved putting into practice their navigation ability. The rule was that all ATA pilots, no matter how skilled, had to stick to ‘contact’ flying, which meant that they had to fly beneath any cloud cover so that they could navigate using their maps and what was visible on the ground below them. One of the worst test flights, so far as Lou was concerned, had been when she’d had to navigate round the Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich
avoiding the barrage balloons that protected the site.
Every ATA pilot was expected to progress to more complicated planes as speedily as she could – it was her role, after all, to move as many planes as possible around the country – but in accordance with her own confidence and the wisdom of those teaching her.
Once an ATA pilot was qualified and had her wings, she was then sent to one of the ATA ferry pools where she would be given ‘chits’ to collect and deliver planes.
The ferry pools used Avro Ansons in a taxi service to get the pilots to the planes they had to deliver. The pilots then had to collect the planes, and deliver them to MUs, as the maintenance units were called. Only then would the planes be fitted with their onboard navigation systems and other equipment. This was why the ATA pilots had to learn to fly without anything other than basic instruments, and were forbidden to go above the clouds, or from an MU to an RAF station.
Every new recruit was told hideously graphic tales of pilots who had ignored this rule and ended up losing their planes and their lives.
Here at Thame, though, which was close to ATA’s Ferry Pool Number 5 at Luton, Lou had also heard tales of certain daredevil ATA female pilots who not only ignored the rules to fly above the cloud but who also performed acrobatic manoeuvres with the fighter planes they were delivering, something that was strictly forbidden and for which they were not trained.
Lou couldn’t imagine herself ever being skilled enough to do that, even though she had made such good progress in Grade 1 that she had been sent back to Thame to undergo her conversion course to Grade 2 in record time.
‘We’ve both got an off-duty weekend coming up – why don’t the two of us spend it in London?’ June suggested.
‘I’d love to,’ Lou told her truthfully, hitching her parachute higher onto her shoulder, ‘but I can’t. I haven’t been home in an age. My twin has been engaged for over two months and I haven’t congratulated her properly yet.’
Good pals though they had become, Lou didn’t feel she could confide in June how guilty she felt that she and Sasha had drifted so far apart that sometimes, reading Sasha’s short, stilted letters to her, Lou felt as though they had become strangers, and that they had nothing in common any more.
‘Oh, well, never mind,’ June accepted philosophically. ‘But promise that you’ll come with me the next time we get a weekend pass.’
‘Of course I will,’ Lou agreed, wincing as the Tannoy broke into life, announcing that the two pilots whose names had been broadcast were required to present themselves at the admin block for ferry duties.
Lou couldn’t wait until she was properly qualified. What a thrill it would be to hear her own name being broadcast. Inside her head Lou replayed the message delivered in the stentorian accents of the base’s admin controller, but substituting her own name for those of the girls called.
Their admin controller was, like the original instructors for ATA, a BOAC employee. Now, though, the Government, in the belief that the Allies would win the war, had allowed BOAC to recall all its own instructors to start preparing post-war training for the corporation. The job of training ATA pilots had been handed over to instructors who had themselves been ATA pilots, many of them women who had the advantage of knowing exactly what the work of an ATA pilot entailed.
Lou’s instructor this morning, Margery Smythe, who had sent her out on her first solo Grade 2 flight, was a firm disciplinarian but very fair and encouraging.
She had been so lucky to have been upgraded on to a Grade 2 course so speedily after having first qualified, Lou reflected as she tucked into her salad lunch in the canteen. She’d be flying again this afternoon and she didn’t want a heavy meal lying on the butterflies she knew would invade her tummy. June had qualified two months ahead of her and insisted that Lou had to be ‘super good’ to have been pushed up a grade so quickly.
Lou suspected, more modestly, that it was more a case of her being in the right place at the right time. Not that she hadn’t been thrilled and excited. She had, the words almost falling over themselves as she wrote them when she sent Sasha a letter telling her about her potential up-grade to fly advanced single-engined planes, but in her response her twin hadn’t even mentioned Lou’s triumph. What made Lou feel even more guilty now was that secretly she would much rather have spent
her precious leave weekend in London with June than in Liverpool with her twin sister.
‘I just hope that when we finish this conversion course we’re both posted together, that neither of us gets posted to Ratcliffe,’ June announced, breaking into Lou’s thoughts.
Lou finished chewing a rubbery piece of Spam, and demanded, ‘Why, what’s wrong with Ratcliffe?’
June raised her eyebrows and shook her head so vigorously that the bun into which her auburn hair was knotted threatened to unravel.
‘Haven’t you heard about those Americans who joined ATA who are based there?’
‘No, what about them?’ Lou demanded.
‘They’ve put it about that they can outfly and outplay any other ATA female pilot, and they’ve got the reputation to prove that they mean it. There was a pilot at my last ferry pool who swore blind that she’d seen two of them deliberately racing one another to see who could put down first. They don’t like us and they’re quite happy to show it, or so I’ve heard.’
‘There were a couple of American pilots at my last posting and they were nothing like that.’ Lou felt obliged to defend the two senior and very dedicated American women she’d seen flying in and out of Barton-in-the-Clay.
‘Well, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be posted to Ratcliffe. I like a good time but when it comes to some of the things I’ve heard that they get up to, I’m afraid I draw the line.’
‘What kind of things?’ Lou pressed her.
‘Like I just said – wild parties. Very wild parties. The kind where you end up in some man’s bed,’ June emphasised darkly. ‘I mean, I’m no prude,
but.
’
If what June had said was true then she had to agree with her, Lou reflected as they cleared what was left on their plates into the slop bin and then placed them on the trolley for washing.
‘I’ve got my first solo this afternoon.’ June rolled her eyes. ‘I’m dreading it. What about you – what are you doing?’
‘Margery is going to go through the details of my three cross-country solo flights with me, ready for the first one tomorrow. She’s not told me yet which plane I’ll be flying, though.’
‘See you tonight then.’
Lou nodded.
Although most of the ferry pools didn’t have accommodation blocks, and ATA pilots were normally billeted with local people or clubbed together to rent somewhere between them if they could, at Thame Sir William Currie had put one wing of his Tudor mansion at the disposal of ATA to provide a ‘live-in mess’.
After living in basic WAAF accommodation at an RAF base before transferring to ATA, Lou had been round-eyed with disbelief when she had first been shown her new quarters – a wood-panelled room with its mullioned windows overlooking the knot garden.
She even had a four-poster bed, with the same heavy ruby-red velvet curtains as were hanging at the windows. Her room had its own fireplace, and
a large polished wardrobe and a chest of drawers, both of which smelled of lavender.
On the wall next to Lou’s bed hung a sampler, requesting ‘Bless this House’, stitched, so she had been told by the housekeeper, by Sir William’s great-aunt as a young girl.
‘Their’ wing of the large house was accessed via the main hall with its magnificent polished wood staircase, the banister carved with symbols from Sir William’s family crest. Since ATA did not have an officer structure – pilot seniority being denoted by length of service and ability to fly a variety of planes – there was no official ‘mess’. Instead the girls ate their meals in the base’s canteen or occasionally by invitation in the house’s elegant dining room, furnished with an antique Hepplewhite dining-room table and chairs, eating off delicate china and using silver cutlery, with Sir William as their genial host. One of the drawbacks, though, as far as Lou was concerned, were the bathrooms, with their huge baths, which they were allowed to fill with only two inches of hot water.
‘Yes, see you tonight,’ Lou confirmed as she set off in the direction of the hangars.