The Wartime Memories of a "Wee WAAF"

Submitted by Laura Eastlake of ERSKINE on behalf on Sandra Duncan.

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We knew there was something. We knew that things weren’t quite right. I think we were always hoping it would pass over. Then all of a sudden we realised oh, they’re beginning to get troops trained and then there was a big call up and the next thing was that women would have to join in too. So, that was it - Air Force - you were on conscript just the same as the men: you registered, usually a local railway station and, depending on what the numbers were, you got a choice of which service you wanted. I was quite lucky; I asked for the Air force but my neighbour downstairs, she didn’t get that option. But we were luckier than the men because some of them didn’t get any choice at all. They just said “Right, Air force, Army, we need more in the army.” Then again, as the war was going on, some of the boys got put down the pits. They didn’t get any choice. See the miners were being called up by age group but the country was still using fuel. I used to think it was so unfair because some people would have a heart attack going down on a rope, being on your own, you know, dropped into darkness, not knowing where you were going… but that’s what they had to do. Then the Land Army girls, they were called up quite early on and then the women went to munitions. My mother was in her forties but if she hadn’t had that young brother of mine she’d have been called up. I think it was up to forty-something. But some of the women beside us, they had to go into munitions. Some of them went to Hoover to work there and they were put onto munitions as well. Wherever you were needed, that’s where you were sent but, as I say, what saved my mother was having that young brother of mine so late in life.

Before the war, I worked in the Co-operative Drapery and afterwards I went into the local Pharmacy. It didn’t matter what your job was, it was kept for you after the war. They wanted me back in the drapery but I’d spend so long away from all that, handling heavy tool kits, that I didn’t go back there. When I joined the Air Force I didn’t know a screwdriver from a chisel but when I came out I could make up forty different tool kits without looking. By Jove you soon learned, you had to, because even the metal used in the toolkits, with men going to the arctic or the tropics, sometimes the metal didn’t respond in one place or another because of the temperatures.

LIFE IN THE AIR FORCE:
Training was hectic. We had to cram in, in just a few weeks, what took nine months in peacetime. We learned to march and make toolkits and keep registers of all the equipment — thousands of them. We also learned how to handle and order all the stock: The main maintenance unit was in Carlisle and there was one down in the Midlands — that was a big, big place too. You had ‘requests’, ‘exchanges’ and you had ‘returns’ and if you had anything that you needed in a hurry you marked it AOG: ‘Aircraft on Ground.’ Then signals would signal the maintenance unit and see where they could get the stock fastest and it would all be sent up in what we called the Queen Mary’s but whatever you needed for the aircraft that was on the ground was priority.

We were trained by women. We were taught how to march - oh that was a laugh. You were taught to move your hands and feet in time. And some of us were going the wrong way and it was just a shambles. You had to wear heavy shoes and, of course, I had been used to high heels! We all were and we all had such sore feet. We would all sit at the end of the day with our feet in basins of water.

First of all, you had all your kit to mark and then you were taught how to put on your collar and your tie because we weren’t used to ties. We were looking in the mirror and doing it the wrong way and we all had to help each other. Oh and I remember the pants we were given were huge! They came from your knees to your chest - they drowned you! *Laughs* Later, we were told we were getting better ones and they were air force blue, right enough, but they weren’t any smaller! Your skirt had to be 16 inches from the ground and, during the summer if you were without your tunic, your shirt sleeves had to be rolled up to a certain depth. It was measured. If you had your great coat on during winter it was fastened to the neck. In the morning, when you were being checked, you had to stand with your thumbs down each side of your coat so if you had been wearing nail polish the night before, you only took it off your thumb. But then they got wise to that so you weren’t allowed nail polish at all. Your make-up had to be discreet, your hair had to be an inch and a half above your collar and if you left any buttons open they used to say “are you sunbathing?” Everything had rules and regulations.

As things went on, we started to work with the tools, getting covered in oil and everything, that was when we got battle dress but until then it was just ordinary skirt and tunic. You’d have a navy blue overall and sometimes it fitted you and sometimes it didn’t so I was glad to see the back of those. Some of the things used to make me mad, we used to say “why are they worrying about that?” There was no jewellery. If you were married you had your wedding ring on but they weren’t keen on engagement rings as far as I remember. You had your watch but not many people had them quite honestly. Even your gym shoes you had to brush…you’d be up at six in the morning! Then after that you made up your bed, cleaned all your bed space and even underneath your bed and all your pillows were all exact. Your blankets were all folded. Then a room orderly would do the middle of the floor while you went for your breakfast and then you’d go to your workstation. Your billet was examined every day and if there was anything to be reported it was put up in the mess: “DIRTY BED, number this or DIRTY FLOOR, number that.” Everyone knew if you hadn’t done your bed space properly. That had all to be done in the morning and if you were on leave you turned the card on your bed to: ABSENCE AUTHORISED. That was so that when they came during the night they would know where you were. Other than that, the police would be sent out looking for you. You could go out of camp so long as you signed out and were signed back in at 23:59. There was always dancing or a film on show and you got until a minute to midnight but you had to be back, even if you had been on leave, you reported back at 23:59. I was particularly mad about dancing and sometimes you never got the chance to get dressed up for weeks at a time so when we got the chance, it was great to go for a dance.

You could be on duty for maybe two or three days when you’d get hardly any sleep. You were actually sleeping in your battle dress sometimes. You just got so used to things: at the beginning you could have broken down and into tears but you got so hardened to it. Things didn’t mean an awful lot to you. You would hear “Oh, such and such didn’t come back this time” or “oh, no, they were blown up over the channel.” It was like everyday talk. It didn’t seem to strike home to you that you weren’t going to see these human beings again: you get a very hard streak in you. You saw some terrible things. People don’t realise the sorts of things that were fairly underhand. I remember there were no body bags then, just canvas cut to about 2ft wide that we used to cover the bodies, clothing would come back with body parts in it and sometimes the microphone masks would be brought back bloodied where fighters had been blown up over the channel. It was terrible and you became so hardened to it all. There could be a camp dance and there’d be a big squad in, so many bombers, so many fighters, and you never saw some of these men again. You’d maybe count four bombers going out and four strikers and you’d lie awake during the night and you’d hear people limping home or only three or four planes coming back.

Censorship became very strict as the war went on. At first they just crossed bits out in blue pencil and you could sometimes read through it but once they started cutting bits out of the letters then mail took a long time to arrive. Often what was left uncut didn’t make sense. I got a letter from my brother once who was serving in India and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I did an awful stupid thing once when I wrote to him. He was a piper in the Royal Highland Division (the RHR) but, stupid me, went and wrote HRH and his Sergeant read out ‘His Royal Highness William Duncan.’ Oh, if you’d heard my brother screaming about it afterwards. *laughs*

It was six months before we could get leave. If we went home for seven days we got a ration card and perhaps ration money too but you didn’t get anything for weekend leave. I don’t think many of the girls took weekend leave because it meant you were taking from your folks and the people at home. They got very poor rations as it was so you just had to say “Oh, no, I don’t take sugar in my tea, thank you.” Even your clothes didn’t fit you because you’d either lost weight or gained weight. The only thing I had to come back to was my shoes — my sister had used all my clothes but she took a size seven shoe and I took a size four. It was only my shoes that were safe! *Laughs* I remember rationing was particularly tough — eggs, bacon, tea, all these things were limited. It was only the children who ever got things like bananas and many of them, by the end of the war didn’t even know what a banana was! If you were ill, like I was when I came home from the army, you maybe got an extra egg ration to help you out.

AFTER THE ARMY:
I got a war pension at this time. I was given my vaccinations and inoculations because I was going to the Far East, Burma presumably but two days into my embarkation leave I took ill and spent nine months in a military hospital in Edinburgh. I’d had some sort of reaction to the vaccines that gave me lung trouble and that was when I got my “walking ticket” as they say. I was in the dining rooms (at ERSKINE) recently and I’d said something about war pensions and the lad sitting next to me turned around and said “Hey lads, this wee WAAF has got a war pension!” I told him what had happened and he said to me “Well, you go down on your knees and thank God you didn’t get out there because if you had gone outside your own quarters you would never have been seen again. You’d have been taken for one purpose only…” and every time I think of it now I feel sick at the thought and lucky to have escaped it.

Nevertheless, we thought we had a difficult time and yet I can’t imagine what my mother and her generation went through. They were put into munitions and still had to stand in line for food, cook meals, raise families. I used to come home sometimes and try to help around the house and think to myself “Imagine trying to endure this.” At least in the forces you could get time to yourself when you needed it. I often think how lucky my mother was to have had my wee brother so late in life. It saved her from the munitions works at least.

But once the war was over, everything had changed, even down to the clothes you wore, father had missed their children growing up. People weren’t so polite anymore because you were fighting all the way. Politeness was going out the door with a lot of people. If you were in a queue and someone tried to push in front of you, you forgot your good manners. It would take a wee while to get used to people, the way they answered you because they were fighting for their existence, just in a different way to how we were fighting for ours.

Even now I see these war films and think, ‘well, most of it is just Hollywood but what would I have done?’ You get mixed feelings about these films but some of the things you see that seem so unbelievable must have happened to so many people. I was particularly angry at one point during the war because there was a family who lived near us and they had five sons in the navy, all on different ships and they lost four of them within the same week! It made you determined to survive. You thought ‘I’m going to get through this.’ You see, I don’t think you can ever know real hatred or real love until you’ve lived through something like that.

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