Stooge
That is not a WAAF trade. That is what they call it when you go along in an aircraft just for the ride and don’t meaningfully contribute to a successful flight. Perhaps Maddie was more of a backseat driver than a stooge.
– ‘Don’t think you’ve reset the directional gyro.’
– ‘He told you heading 270. You’ve turned east.’
– ‘Look sharp, lads, northbound aircraft at three o’clock, one thousand feet below.’
Once the electric undercarriage failed and she had to earn her keep by taking her turn at the hand pump so they didn’t have to crash-land. Once they let her ride in the gun turret. She loved that, like being a goldfish alone in an empty sky.
Once they had to lift her out of the plane after landing because she was shaking so badly she couldn’t climb down herself.
Maddie’s Wellington joyrides were not exactly clandestine, but they weren’t exactly cricket either. She was counted among the S.O.B. – Souls On Board – when the lads took off, but she certainly wasn’t authorised to be there chivvying along the novice bombing crews as they practised low flying over the high moors. So various off-and on-duty concerned people came pelting out of offices and the men’s and ladies’ tea huts, coatless and white-faced, when they saw Maddie’s RAF mates chair-lifting her in their arms across the runway.
A WAAF friend of hers called Joan and the guilty squadron leader reached her first.
‘What’s wrong? What happened? Is she hurt?’
Maddie was not hurt. She was already badgering the Wellington crew who carried her to put her down. ‘Get off, everyone will see, the girls will never let me forget it –’
‘What happened?’
Maddie struggled to her feet and stood shivering on the concrete. ‘We got fired on,’ she said, and looked away, burning with shame at how much it had taken out of her.
‘Fired on!’ barked the squadron leader. This was in the spring of 1940 – the war was still in Europe. It was before the disastrous May when the Allies fled retreating to the French beaches, before the siege that was the Battle of Britain, before the thunder and flame-filled nights of the Blitz. In the spring of 1940 our skies were alert, and armed, and uneasy. But they were still safe.
‘Yes, fired on,’ echoed the Wellington pilot in fury. He was white as a sheet too. ‘By those idiots manning the anti-aircraft guns at the Cattercup barrage balloons. By our own gunners. Who the hell’s training them? Bloody daft trigger-happy morons! Wasting ammo and scaring the blue bleeding daylights out of everybody! Any school lad can spot the difference between a flying cigar and a flying pencil!’
(We call our jolly Wellingtons ‘flying cigars’ and we call your nasty Dorniers ‘flying pencils’. Have fun translating, Miss E.)
The pilot had been as scared as Maddie, but he was not shaking.
Joan put a comforting arm round Maddie’s shoulders and advised her in a whisper to pay no attention to the pilot’s language. Maddie gave an uncertain and forced laugh.
‘Wasn’t even sitting in the gun turret,’ she muttered. ‘Thank goodness I’m not flying into Europe.’
Signals Branch
‘Flight Lieutenant Mottram has been singing your praises,’ Maddie’s WAAF Section Officer told her. ‘He says you’ve got the sharpest pair of eyes at Oakway –’ (the Section Officer rolled her own eyes) ‘– probably a bit of an exaggeration, but he said that in flight you’re always the first to spot another aircraft approaching. How do you fancy further training?’
‘In what?’
The Section Officer coughed apologetically. ‘It’s a bit secret. Well: very secret. Say yes, and I’ll send you on the course.’
‘Yes,’ Maddie said.
—
To clarify a remark someone made earlier, I confess that I am making up all the proper nouns. Did you think I remembered all the names and ranks of everybody Maddie ever worked with? Or every plane she ever flew in? I think it is more interesting this way.
That is all I can usefully write today, though I would keep on blethering about nothing if I thought that by doing it I could avoid the next few hours’ cross-examination – Engel struggling over my handwriting and von Linden picking holes in everything I’ve said. It must be done … no point in putting it off. I have a blanket to look forward to afterwards, I hope, perhaps a tepid dish of kailkenny à la guerre – that is, cabbage and potato mash without the potato and with not very much cabbage. I have not got scurvy yet anyway, thanks to France’s infinite supply of prison cabbage. Heigh ho –
Ormaie 10.XI.43 JB-S
RAF WAAF RDF Y
S.O.B. S.O.E.
Asst S/O Flt Off
w/op
clk/sd
m’aidez m’aidez mayday
Coastal Defence
Actually I am afraid to write this.
I don’t know why I think it matters. The Battle of Britain is over. Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation Sea Lion, failed three years ago. And soon he will be fighting a desperate war on two fronts, with the Americans behind us and the Russians closing in on Berlin from the east, and organised Resistance in all the countries in the middle. I can’t believe his advisers don’t already know what went on in the makeshift huts of iron and concrete up and down the south-east coast of England in the summer of 1940 – in a general sense at any rate.
Only I don’t really want to go down in history as the one who gave out the details.
RDF is Range and Direction Finding. Same acronym as Radio Direction Finding, to confuse the enemy, but not exactly the same thing. As you know. Well. They call it Radar now, an American word, an acronym of RAdio Detection And Ranging, which I do not think is easier to remember. In the summer of 1940 it was still so new nobody knew what it was, and so secret that
Buckets of blood – I can’t do this.
—
I have spent a vexing half-hour scrapping with Fräulein Engel over the pen nib, which I swear I did not bend on purpose the first time. It is true that it spared me having to continue for a good long while but it did not move things along for that harpy to straighten it out against my teeth when I could have easily done it myself against the table. It is also true that it was stupid of me to bend it out of shape again, on purpose, the second she handed it back to me. Then she had to show me SEVERAL TIMES how, when she was at school, the nurse would use a pen nib to make a pinprick for a blood test.