The Bomb Girls Read online

  Daisy Styles

  * * *

  The Bomb Girls

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1: Emily

  CHAPTER 2: Alice

  CHAPTER 3: Elsie

  CHAPTER 4: Agnes

  CHAPTER 5: Lillian

  CHAPTER 6: The Phoenix

  CHAPTER 7: Canary Girls

  CHAPTER 8: Evacuee

  CHAPTER 9: Overpaid, Oversexed and Over Here

  CHAPTER 10: One Little Spark

  CHAPTER 11: The War Office

  CHAPTER 12: Churchill’s Secret Army

  CHAPTER 13: Preparations

  CHAPTER 14: Helford House

  CHAPTER 15: Wedding Bells

  CHAPTER 16: Lillian’s Yank

  CHAPTER 17: London Weekend

  CHAPTER 18: Thingummybob

  CHAPTER 19: Cambridge

  CHAPTER 20: Payback Time

  CHAPTER 21: Cracking

  CHAPTER 22: Surprise, Surprise

  CHAPTER 23: A Warning

  CHAPTER 24: Lancaster Assizes

  CHAPTER 25: Flight Lieutenant Rodney Harston-Binge

  CHAPTER 26: Fancy Pants Bilodeau

  CHAPTER 27: Claridge’s

  CHAPTER 28: Parachute Drop

  CHAPTER 29: A Royal Visit

  CHAPTER 30: Marseilles

  CHAPTER 31: Factory Explosion

  CHAPTER 32: Aftermath

  CHAPTER 33: Capture

  CHAPTER 34: D-Day

  CHAPTER 35: The Gestapo

  CHAPTER 36: The Visit

  CHAPTER 37: 8 May, VE Day 1945

  CHAPTER 38: We’ll Meet Again …

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE BOMB GIRLS

  Daisy Styles grew up in Lancashire surrounded by a family and community of strong women. She loved to listen to their stories of life in the cotton mill, in the home, at the pub, on the dance floor, in the local church, or just what happened to them on the bus going into town. It was from these women, particularly her vibrant mother and Irish grandmother, that Daisy learned the art of storytelling. There was also the landscape of her childhood: wide sweeping empty moors variously dappled with sunshine, thick with snow, slippery underfoot in the rain; hills that ran as far as the eye could see to the Pennine Way and beyond that to the Lake District. The perfect backdrop for a saga, a space big enough and wild enough to stage a drama about women’s lives in a munitions factory during the Second World War.

  In loving memory of Emily Redmond,

  a real Lancashire Bomb Girl.

  You always said you could write a

  book, Mummy … well, now you have!

  CHAPTER 1

  Emily

  The sun shining through the canteen window illuminated the cloud of flour that Emily had created as she pounded the pastry for her lunchtime meat pies. Blowing stray auburn curls out of her eyes, Emily smiled to herself. Butter might be rationed but there was more than one way to skin a cat when it came to culinary ingenuity. She’d been collecting wartime cookery tips from various magazines and newspapers, discovering alternatives to the real things, like cheese, eggs and milk, that were as rare as hen’s teeth these days. Because pastry and pies were big on her canteen menu (and cheap too) she couldn’t keep knocking out tasteless flour-and-water-based pastry tops for the poor sods working ten-hour shifts in the cotton sheds. She knew better than most that mill workers needed something to get their teeth into at dinner time.

  Emily herself had worked at the looms before she got her lucky break in the canteen. She’d always hated mill work, which was seen as her destiny along with that of every other female in the small Lancashire town of Pendle. She hated the grease and the fluff, the cotton fibres that went everywhere, up your nose, in your hair and clogged your lungs.

  ‘I want to run a canteen,’ she told her mother. ‘I want to cook food, be a chef!’

  Mrs Yates shook her head in despair. How did she and her even-tempered, steady husband ever manage to produce a firecracker like their Emily? What with her blazing hair, wide sky-blue eyes and generous mouth, she didn’t even resemble her parents. Her spirit and laughter, her exuberance for life and her energy were boundless; nothing and nobody ever got in Emily’s way. When she started walking out with Bill Redmond, Mrs Yates breathed a sigh of relief. Bill was a lovely boy, the good-looking eldest son of a nice, respectable family, and she’d known him since the day he was born. Bill would soon calm Emily down, Mrs Yates thought. Not so. Love and romance sent Emily into overdrive! Kissing and cuddling, whispering sweet nothings to Bill up on the moonlit moors, made Emily realize there was even more to life than she’d previously thought.

  With the coming of the war Emily’s major concerns were for her twenty-year-old sweetheart, who, handsome in his soldier’s uniform, had left Pendle to fight in northern France with the Lancashire Fusiliers. With the exodus of hundreds of local men, apart from the old and medically exempt, the mill became a predominantly female place. It didn’t take canny Emily long to clock that Mr Greenhalgh, the canteen manager, an affable but lazy man who disliked hard work, was in need of an extra pair of hands. Smiling and sweet-talking Mr Greenhalgh, Emily wheedled her way into an interview for canteen cook, a position that Mr Greenhalgh had been planning on giving to his brother.

  ‘But he’s no qualifications,’ Emily reasoned at the interview while Mr Greenhalgh sat smoking roll-ups with his feet on the scoured kitchen table.

  ‘Neither have you!’ barked Mr Greenhalgh.

  ‘I can cook,’ Emily protested.

  ‘That’s as may be but I’m used to working wi’ lads not lasses,’ Mr Greenhalgh replied.

  Emily smothered a snort of irritation. What planet was this man on? Only a few months ago over three hundred thousand troops had battled it out on the beaches of Dunkirk. Did Mr Greenhalgh really think there were spare men around to peel spuds and wash up kitchen pots?

  ‘There’s a war on, sir,’ Emily said. ‘Needs must.’

  Mr Greenhalgh blew out a cloud of smoke as he waxed philosophical.

  ‘Women are funny buggers …’ he mused. ‘I’ve got one at home,’ he said, as if he was talking about his cat. ‘She’s either waiting for “you know what” to happen or getting over it.’

  Assuming ‘you know what’ was a period, Emily briskly said, ‘My “you know whats” won’t cause you any trouble.’

  Her cryptic comment sealed the deal. Mr Greenhalgh swung his big feet off the table and stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray.

  ‘I’ll give you a week’s trial. Start at seven tomorrow morning – and bring your own overalls.’

  Now here she was, six months into the job and loving it. Rationing might be hard and getting harder but that shouldn’t stop a cook from experimenting in times of need. Of course it wasn’t easy, but it was satisfying to get a result like the pastry she was busily rolling out. She’d kept the dripping back from the weekly roast – it was only a shin of beef but there was enough fat to create dripping – and this she’d combined with thick white lard. Broken up and worked into the flour it worked a treat, making the pie crust light, fluffy and remarkably buttery. Emily expertly spun the large sheet of pastry then cut it into wide strips for topping the meat pies. She’d made three trays of mince, carrot and onion stew, spiced up with a handful of wild herbs and a generous dollop of gravy browning. After sealing the pastry around the trays she bent down and opened the door of the huge industrial oven. Popping the pies inside she quickly closed the door and turned around to find Mr Greenhalgh admiring her shapely backside.

  ‘Nice bit of rump!’ he joked.

  ‘Enough of that,
Mr Greenhalgh,’ she scolded.

  ‘Only talking about the pies, lovie, nowt else!’ he chuckled.

  The jolly strains of the Workers’ Playtime theme tune faded away on the Bakelite radio sitting on a wide shelf in pride of place at the front of the canteen. Joe Loss and his popular swing band were replaced by Ernest Bevin, the Minister for Labour, urgently appealing to all women between the ages of twenty and thirty to volunteer for war work.

  Emily caught her breath as she incredulously repeated the words she’d just heard.

  ‘We have to report to the local Labour Exchange and register for work in farming or in shelling factories,’ she gasped.

  Mr Greenhalgh nodded his approval.

  ‘I suppose somebody’s got to stand on the production line and make the bullets for our lads at the front,’ he said lugubriously.

  Emily bit back the angry words that sprang to her lips: Somebody … ? Anybody but you!

  Her boss rambled on.

  ‘Who’d a thowt it’d come to this, eh? Lasses manning factories.’

  In a rage, Emily turned her back on the radio and opened the heavy oven door to check her meat pies. With heat steaming around her already red face she looked fit to burst.

  ‘It’s taken me three years to get out of the weaving shed and into this canteen. Three years!’ she seethed. ‘And for what? To be conscripted as a land girl or work in a dirty munitions factory!’

  ‘It’s that or breaking the law,’ her boss answered flatly.

  Banging three pans full of peeled potatoes onto the gas rings, Emily lit the burners beneath them as she muttered under her breath, ‘I might just do that!’

  Serving dinner to over a hundred hungry mill workers soothed Emily’s spirits; chatting and joking with her customers was the second best thing to cooking for them.

  ‘What’s for pud, love?’ asked her mum’s sister, who was covered in cotton flecks and, like the rest of the workers, smelled of the oil they greased the machines with.

  ‘Apple fritters for you, Auntie Anne,’ Emily replied with a wink. ‘Steamed jam pudding for’t rest.’

  ‘You’re a little lovie,’ her auntie said fondly. Dropping her voice to a whisper she added, ‘Heard the news on female conscription?’

  Emily nodded grimly.

  ‘It had to come,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘We’ll never win this blasted war otherwise.’

  Emily knew her auntie was speaking the truth; she knew she was behaving unpatriotically thinking only of herself. She knew she should feel ashamed, but all she felt was frustration. Just as things were looking up it was back to square one for her.

  ‘I’ll go and make your fritters, Auntie,’ she said brusquely.

  ‘Plenty of custard, lovie!’

  As Mr Greenhalgh puffed on a Woodbine whilst reading the early edition of the local evening newspaper, Emily washed up the lunchtime pans and crockery in the vast double sink that had a fine view of Pendle moors. With the windows thrown wide open to the pale spring sunshine she breathed in the cool air drifting over from the high tops still specked with the last of the winter snow and wondered if she could plead illness or insanity, or both? No doctor would back her up with a sick note. At twenty, Emily was the picture of health, youth and beauty. Tall and strong with fine legs, a narrow waist, full breasts and a lovely face, Emily was unquestionably fit for work.

  As she scoured the pans with a worn-out piece of Brillo, another thought worse than the first entered her mind: would she be forced to leave home and work in another part of England? Mr Bevin had said conscripted women would be deployed where they were needed. Her blue eyes roved across the familiar line of moorland rolling upwards towards the high, blustery Pennines. She’d lived all her life in Pendle, a small quiet town nestled in the folds of a valley, its skyline spiked with mill chimneys and plumes of factory smoke that coloured the sunsets deep crimson and purple. She didn’t want to leave home and she desperately didn’t want to be far away from Bill. Emily’s stomach lurched at the thought of him. She didn’t even know when his next leave would be, and what would happen if she was posted to Aberdeen and Bill turned up in Pendle with a night pass?

  Mr Greenhalgh interrupted her chaotic thoughts with a wheezy cough and a loud burp.

  ‘Put kettle on, cock, mi stomach thinks mi throat’s cut!’

  CHAPTER 2

  Alice

  Listening to the tunes on Music While You Work, Emily polished down the canteen tables and swept the floor to Anne Shelton’s ‘Yours Till the Stars Lose Their Glory’. It was their song, the one she and Bill danced to and sang to each other at the end of every leave. Tears sprang to Emily’s eyes as she thought of her sweetheart’s gentle promises and tender loving words.

  ‘One day when all of this is over I’ll make you mine for ever.’

  That day couldn’t come soon enough, but before then they’d got to get through this bloody war that was turning her comparatively happy world upside down!

  Emily wrote out the following day’s lunchtime menu on the canteen blackboard.

  Potato hash, carrots and turnips

  Jam tart and custard

  Then, after peeling what seemed like a sackful of spuds, she stripped off her dirty overall and turban, shook out her now unrestrained auburn curls and pulled on her coat.

  ‘See you in the morning, Mr Greenhalgh!’ she called as she skipped out of the canteen.

  ‘Don’t forget to sign on at the Labour Exchange on your way home,’ Mr Greenhalgh shouted after her.

  Emily didn’t answer. She’d got somebody to see before she allowed Winston Churchill to redefine the rest of her life.

  She ran down the hill into the town, which was bright with bursts of yellow daffodils and spring blossom that lent a softness to the grey stone the town was built of. Not wanting to be delayed by neighbours who always stopped for a lengthy natter, Emily threaded her way through the narrow back streets desperate to find her best friend and ally, Alice. There was never a question about where Alice could be found; she was always in Tonge Moor Library, in the quiet reading room, with her nose in a book. She’d taken a temporary job in the local chemist’s shop as she prepared for the French degree she was hoping to start at Manchester University in the autumn, but that didn’t stop her nipping into the library whenever she had a spare minute.

  Alice had always been brainy, but that didn’t stop her from being a tearaway and a tomboy too. She’d attended the same local primary school as Emily and played out with her in the back streets, but after the eleven-plus examination everything suddenly changed. Alice left the school where she’d sat beside Emily through long, hot, stuffy days, raffia-weaving on the back row, swapping answers and flicking ink bombs at each other. Alice was the only kid in the street, no, the entire town (and a girl at that!) who went to grammar school.

  ‘A posh kids’ education she’ll be having,’ Emily’s mum said tartly as twelve-year-old Alice self-consciously hurried down the street in her brand-new school uniform.

  Though Emily and several other children, including young Bill, passed the eleven-plus exam they weren’t allowed to go to grammar school. Their parents were unable to afford the compulsory and very expensive school uniform, nor could they pay the bus fares and school dinner money. Alice was the rare exception courtesy of her late dad’s pension plan and a generous bequest from her paternal grandmother. Her doting mother poured all of her savings into her only child. Alice was a small, delicate-framed girl with fine blonde hair, usually caught up in a blue ribbon, that brought out the paleness of her dreamy silver-grey eyes.

  Their paths may have diverged but Emily and Alice remained very best friends; they shared their secrets, their cigarettes, their hopes and dreams. Spotting Alice in her usual corner, bowed over a book, making notes on a sheet of paper, Emily made a beeline for her.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ she yelped, shattering the silence of the library and causing several old men to look up from their newspapers.

  ‘What news?’ Ali
ce whispered.

  ‘Churchill’s calling up women!’

  Alice was so shocked she burst into tears.

  ‘It hit me just like that too,’ Emily said as she handed Alice her rather grubby handkerchief.

  ‘Can you two bugger off and do your skriking outside?’ a grouchy old man in a flat cap snapped at them.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alice sweetly as she gathered up her pile of books. ‘We’ve just had a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Yeah … well, life’s like that,’ the old man grumbled.

  Outside the two friends sat at the top of the flight of municipal steps that led up to the library entrance and glumly smoked cigarette after cigarette.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ groaned Alice. ‘After all that studying, bang goes my French degree if I’m working in a factory.’

  ‘We could be sent anywhere,’ Emily pointed out. ‘Scotland, Wales, anywhere!’

  ‘We’re not exactly patriotic, are we?’ Alice said guiltily. ‘Moaning about conscription when there are boys younger than us on the front line.’

  Emily flushed with shame. One of those boys on the front line was her fiancé, Bill, so what right had she to complain? Stubbing out her cigarette, she stood up and squared her shoulders.

  ‘You’re right. Come on, kid, let’s do our bit for King and country.’

  Pendle was a small town and when Emily and Alice arrived to sign on they knew most of the women queuing at the Labour Exchange.

  ‘Churchill’s done me a favour,’ one woman in front of them said. ‘Mi dad was all for sending me off to th’ army. Didn’t fancy being an officer’s comforter,’ she said with a knowing wink. ‘So I grabbed mi chance at munitions.’

  ‘A word of advice, ladies,’ an older woman whispered. ‘Be careful what group you sign up for.’

  Emily and Alice, who had no idea what the woman was talking about, stared at her blankly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Alice asked.

  ‘We’ve heard that some sections are more prone to explosions than others,’ she answered.