The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces
hits proved to be the exception rather than the rule.
As the girls of 518 mixed battery got to know each other better, they began to acquire affectionate nicknames. A girl with brilliant red hair became ‘Ginger’, while a tall girl was inevitably christened ‘Lofty’. Jessie’s diminutive height meant she was known around the camp as ‘Short-arse’, and Elsie Windsor’s quick temper saw her labelled ‘the Spitfire’. Two sisters called Thelma and Olga Twig, meanwhile, were simply called ‘Twig’ and ‘Twiglet’.
After the exhausting demands of practising on the gun-site, the evenings came as a welcome respite, and the men and women of the battery looked forward to letting their hair down in the NAAFI. Jessie’s piano playing had proved such a hit during the concert at Arborfield that now she found herself roped into joining a new band. Lilian Booth, who had so impressed at the concert, was their singer, while a handsome, fair-haired Scottish gunner called Stan played the trumpet.
Stan, as it happened, had recently initiated 518 battery’s first romance – and with none other than Elsie Windsor. As a corporal, Elsie had been commanding the ATS guard at the Grand Hotel one night, when a girl cried out suddenly, ‘There’s a man trying to break in!’
‘All right, you grab him and I’ll hit him round the head,’ Elsie had told her. But as she was preparing for action, in had walked Stan, asking innocently, ‘Is there any cocoa going?’
After that inauspicious introduction, Elsie and Stan had begun courting. Since they were in different sections, their time off didn’t always coincide, but by pooling their cigarette coupons they were able to bribe Stan’s sergeant to ensure that they could spend a bit of time together.
While Jessie was in Sheringham, she was able to arrange a date of her own. Jim was also stationed in Norfolk at the time, and they agreed that he would come and meet her in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. It was several months now since they had last seen each other, and when Jim first caught sight of Jessie in her ATS uniform, the look of shock on his face was unmistakable. Although he had been supportive of his fiancée joining the Army, actually seeing her in khaki threw him a little. ‘I’m … not sure the uniform suits you,’ he admitted, when Jessie asked what was on his mind.
‘Well, tough!’ she replied, with a laugh. ‘You’ll just have to get used to it.’ Then she added, gently, ‘Don’t worry, it’s still me underneath.’
Jessie and Jim spent a blissful day together, wandering along the sea front and exploring the little seaside town. After months of making do with just his letters, it felt wonderful to finally hold him again, and to hear the words ‘I love you’ spoken out loud. That evening Jessie returned to the Grand Hotel feeling like she was walking on air.
After a month at the practice camp, Jessie felt ready to put her skills to the test in a genuine raid. But before the men and women of 518 mixed battery departed for their first proper posting – a gun-site outside Sheffield – they were sent home to spend a weekend with their families.
Jessie and her friend Elsie Acres caught the same train from Leicester station, and as they settled down in one of the carriages they heard a couple of men coming along the corridor. ‘I wouldn’t go in there,’ one of them told the other as they passed the girls’ compartment. ‘It’s full of those bloody ATS tarts.’
For a moment, Jessie felt a little shocked, but when she and Elsie caught each other’s eye they both burst out laughing.
Back in Holbeach Bank, Jessie’s mother was as cold as ever, but her father couldn’t have been more pleased to see her, and he pestered her incessantly with questions about ack-ack. ‘Dad! You know I’m not allowed to tell you,’ she replied, doing her best to satisfy him with tales of life in the huts or the NAAFI instead.
Although it was nice to see her father, Jessie spent most of the weekend looking forward to getting back to her friends in the battery, and she arrived in Sheffield on Monday morning buzzing with excitement. ‘Well, here we are – the ATS tarts!’ she declared, when the girls all gathered for breakfast in the canteen. After Elsie Acres had explained the origin of the phrase, everyone soon began using it.
The camp had been built in a beautiful hilly area about four miles away from Sheffield city centre. It was a basic set-up, with just the guns and a few wooden accommodation huts that stood about 20 feet away. Although the battery had arrived there ready for action, to begin with the Germans seemed reluctant to send any targets their way. Several times Jessie and her friends were woken in the night by the alarm that indicated an imminent raid, but after an hour or more of shivering in the cold, the order was always given to stand down without any guns being fired.
The girls had plenty to keep them occupied, however. There were regular kit inspections and lectures on aircraft recognition, as well as an hour’s drill practice every day on the parade ground. And then there were the fatigues – a series of odd jobs that the girls were expected to perform around the camp when their section wasn’t needed at the gun-site. In the evenings, Jessie would check a board in the guardroom to find out her duties for the next day – which could be anything from peeling potatoes to cleaning out the latrines.
One of the least popular fatigues was guard duty, which meant sitting up at night in the sentry box and shouting, ‘Who goes there?’ at anyone coming or going in the dark. Jessie soon found that she was lucky to get a straight answer, particularly if there had been a dance that evening, and often her queries were met by such jokey responses as ‘Fred and Ginger’ or ‘Hitler and Mussolini’.
Most of the girls found guard duty tedious, and struggled to stay awake with no one to talk to, but Jessie rather enjoyed the quiet solitude. She whiled away the hours reciting poems she had learned at school in her head, or quietly humming her favourite songs.
One night, Jessie was fast asleep in her Nissen hut when the piercing call of the alert siren jolted her back to consciousness. She leapt out of bed and threw her greatcoat over her pyjamas, forcing her bare feet into her boots. Then she dashed out of the hut and ran to the gun park as fast as she could.
By the time she reached the height-and-range finder, Elsie and Jean were already in position, and something about the intense atmosphere at the gun park told her this was no false alarm. She cast her eyes up to the sky, watching the beams of the searchlights criss-crossing above her.
Suddenly she saw it – three little shining dots, flying in formation. As they passed directly through the glare of the beams, they flashed silver for a second, and Jessie could make out the outlines of German aircraft.
‘Engage!’ Captain Rait bellowed, and the girls on the gun-site flew into action. Jessie and Elsie swivelled the height-and-range finder until they had the lead plane in their sights.
‘Read!’ Elsie shouted.
‘Read!’ Jessie yelled.
‘Seven-nine-hundred!’ Jean shouted, squinting at her little dial. At once, the predictor girls began working their magic, turning knobs and pulling on levers as the giant box rotated on its base. After what felt like an age, one of them called out, ‘Fuse two-four!’
Jessie watched anxiously as the shells were loaded into the guns. The moment they were ready, Captain Rait boomed ‘Fire!’
In the stillness of the night, the noise of the guns was like a thunderclap, but by now everyone was too used to it to flinch. As the shells burst thousands of feet above her head, Jessie stared at the lead German plane, hoping to spot some sign of damage. If the damned thing would only burst into flames it would be the most wonderful feeling in the world.
There was no dramatic explosion, no flaming fireball dropping from the heavens. But as Jessie peered at the little plane, silhouetted in the piercing beam of the searchlights, she saw it swerve slightly from the straight line it had been cutting through the night sky. That was it – they had forced the pilot to deviate from his course, and everyone knew what that meant. Without a clear 30-second run-up before he dropped his bombs, there was little chance that they would land on target.
The men and women of 518 mixed battery were far too professional to