The Bomb Girls' Secrets Read online

  Happy as she was at Lyons, nothing equalled the thrill of her evening job, when she played the alto saxophone in Jimmy Angelo’s Swing Band. Gladys had always loved music. From the time they were just tots, she and Les had joined their dad, who played the booming drum for the Salvation Army, in marching through the streets of Leeds, singing hymns and collecting money for the homeless. When his children were still small, Mr Johnson had bought each of them a tiny trumpet, which they proudly tooted as they strode along beside him through the streets of Leeds city centre. In their teens, much influenced by the American swing bands which they both adored, Gladys had moved from the trumpet to the alto sax, whilst Les stuck with his beloved trumpet. Brother and sister loved to play duets: up in their bedrooms they’d take it in turns to pick a dance number and experiment with harmonies until their mother banged on the ceiling with a brush.

  ‘Will you stop that din up there – the neighbours will have us thrown out!’ she bellowed.

  The Andrews Sisters were their all-time favourites, especially ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B’, which they played with wild abandon whenever they could get away with it. Les loved his music and was good at it but his talented sister had bigger ideas; Gladys wanted to take her musical skills to a professional level.

  ‘Perform in public! You must be joking,’ Les had laughed when she confessed her burning ambition. ‘Our dad’ll go crackers!’

  ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ she’d said with a shrug of her pretty shoulders.

  When she’d seen an advert in the General Post Office for a dance band saxophonist, Gladys had immediately applied. The dance bandleader, Jimmy Angelo, though born and bred in Leeds, had a Sicilian father and spoke in a thick Northern dialect interspersed with snips of Italian.

  ‘Eh! Non credo che sia una ragazza!’ he laughed when Gladys turned up to audition.

  Not having a clue what he was talking about, Gladys, in a tight-fitting black crêpe dress with her long dark hair swinging around her shoulders, took her saxophone out of its leather case and played a powerful rendition of ‘You are My Sunshine’ that took the indulgent smile off Angelo’s cocky face. Dropping the Italian, he blurted out, ‘Blood ’ell, kid! Who taught you ’ow for’t play yon sax?’

  ‘My dad,’ she replied proudly. ‘There’s more,’ she added as she launched into ‘Oh, Lady Be Good’ without any sign of sheet music.

  At the end of her performance, Angelo applauded loudly, then blew kisses in the air.

  ‘Favoloso! Eccellente! When can you start?’

  She was required to play each evening from Friday to Sunday at the Mecca Locarno in the County Arcade in Leeds.

  Les had been right when he’d warned Gladys about the family’s reaction to her playing in public. Her mother, a born worrier, was appalled by the thought of her twenty-year-old daughter having two jobs.

  ‘You’ll kill yourself!’ she exclaimed.

  But it was her father who was the biggest obstacle. He adored his little girl and wasn’t happy about her performing with an all-male band.

  ‘That’s not a job for lasses,’ he announced as he lit up his pipe and buried his head in the Yorkshire Evening Post.

  ‘Lots o’ lasses play in the Sally Army band!’ Les said in his sister’s defence.

  Gladys shot him a loving smile. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed.

  ‘That’s different,’ Mr Johnson retorted. ‘That’s for the Lord.’

  Gladys cuddled up to her dad. ‘Come on,’ she coaxed. ‘It’s you that taught me music; it’s not my fault if I’m good at it – it’s a gift from God!’

  Mr Johnson finally relented – on condition that he accompanied Gladys to the Locarno and stayed throughout the night to keep an eye on her. He became a regular feature in the ballroom, sitting in a corner drinking warm lemonade and puffing on his pipe. If the truth were known, he loved his nights out watching his dazzling daughter playing the alto sax, which had almost become an extension of her bright, vibrant personality. The complicated melodies that poured out of the instrument when Gladys was playing solo sometimes brought the dancers to a stop; they’d gaze in amazement at the good-looking young girl in her full-length satin ballroom dress embellished with sequins and bows playing the alto saxophone like they’d never heard it played before. Though surrounded by men, Gladys was rarely approached for a date or a dance. Her father’s glowering presence frightened off potential suitors, which suited Gladys down to the ground. Her passion was music – men would just get in the way of her secret ambition, which was to lead her own all-female swing band.

  Ironically, it wasn’t men that got in the way of her dreams: it was female conscription. There was no denying that Gladys, a staunch patriotic Yorkshire lass, wanted to do her bit for the war effort; her only condition was that she wanted to stay in Leeds, where she could continue to play for Jimmy Angelo at the Locarno in between her shifts. So it was with horror that she read her call-up letter, which instructed her to report to a munitions factory in Pendleton, on the other side of the Pennines.

  With tears spilling from her lovely blue eyes, she blurted out, ‘I don’t want to go, Dad!’

  Mr Johnson choked back a tear too: not only had his son recently announced he had joined up but he was now losing his daughter. Frightened of betraying his emotions, he replied more brusquely than was necessary. ‘Thou’s got no choice, our lass.’

  ‘Why can’t I do my war work here in Leeds?’ she sobbed.

  Mr Johnson sighed as he gave her hand a squeeze. ‘The government are sending you where you needed, Glad, that’s all that’s to it.’

  On her final night at the Locarno, Gladys played her heart out. After a show-stopping rendition of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, she took to the floor with Jimmy, who was a superb ballroom dancer, and, to the strains of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’, she leant her head against his shoulder and wept.

  ‘I’ll die without my music,’ she said as he dabbed away her tears with his red silk handkerchief.

  ‘Come on, amore, it won’t be forever,’ he assured her. ‘The war has to end one day, eh, certo? We’ll be waiting for you when you get back.’

  Gladys gave a brave smile … Little did she know that night in January 1942 that she’d never be coming back.

  3. Manchester

  Kit arrived in Manchester soaked to the bone. Confused and cold, she’d sat on the train from Heysham to Victoria surrounded by troops laughing and joking as they chain-smoked cigarettes. Scared by their loud male voices, Kit huddled deeper into the ragged tweed coat that she’d taken from the bed she and her sister slept in. Her shoes leaked so much she couldn’t even feel her feet, and her long black hair lay in wet streaks around her ashen white face. Seeing the wretched-looking girl squeezed into the corner of the compartment, the jovial troops tried to cheer her up with offers of soggy sandwiches, a Woodbine, even a swig of beer from a bottle. Too frightened to speak, wide-eyed Kit shook her head, then turned to the window, where she kept her eyes firmly fixed until the train puffed its way into Victoria Station. The troops shouldered their kit bags and disembarked as Kit dragged her case from the overhead netted luggage rack. Then she walked in the drizzling rain to her cousins’ house in Moss Side. Loud and noisy, they welcomed her into their filthy two-roomed flat in a crumbling tenement block, where Colleen, the eldest of the cousins, showed Kit to a bed that was crawling with bed bugs and cockroaches.

  Early the next morning Kit was given a slice of stale grey bread and a cup of black tea, after which she hurried through the sooty streets along with her chattering cousins to the Majestic Mill, where bossy Colleen shoved her through the door.

  ‘Go and ask for a bloody job,’ she said.

  Cringing with embarrassment, Kit shook her head.

  ‘You ask him,’ she begged.

  Colleen threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘I’ve already got a bloody job! Go and get one yerself.’

  As Colleen and her younger sister made their way into the weaving shed, Kit
hung back, too frightened to approach the foreman. She waited, hoping he might notice her.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked when he caught sight of her lurking in a dark corner.

  ‘I … I … I …’

  ‘Spit it out, lass, I ’aven’t got all day,’ he said good-naturedly.

  ‘I need a job!’ she blurted out.

  Looking her up and down, he shook his head.

  ‘You’re not the size of two pennies’ worth of copper,’ he joked.

  Thinking he was going to turn her down, Kit took a bold step forwards. ‘I’m stronger than I look: I’ve been picking potatoes twelve hours a day in all weathers in Ireland,’ she told him.

  The foreman’s eyes raked up her thin body draped in rags, but it was her eyes that arrested him. Large and dark in her pale anxious face, they showed the desperation of her situation.

  ‘Aye, go on, then,’ he said with a shrug. ‘We’re short in’t card room – clock on there.’

  Kit’s first day was a nightmare. Fibres from the fluffy white cotton that they combed and separated floated in the air, covering the workers’ clothes and hair in a layer of greasy white specks. Kit returned to the tenement block coughing and gagging from the fibres she’d inhaled and sometimes swallowed.

  ‘Keep your trap shut,’ Colleen advised. ‘Swallow too much cotton and you’ll clog your lungs and die coughing your guts up.’

  Terrified of leaving her son an orphan, Kit kept her mouth firmly shut, but it didn’t stop the evil fibres from going up her nose and covering her from head to foot. The combination of the dirty work in the carding room and life in the squalid tenement block was intolerable. After Kit picked up her first wage packet, she carefully counted out the money she’d agreed to send to her father, then realized all she’d got left to live on till payday was ten shillings and sixpence. She knew she had no choice but to continue working and living the way she was, but she seriously wondered if she’d survived the hazards of her daily life. Dysentery and tuberculosis were rife in the slums, and byssinosis was a virulent mill-related disease. Somehow she HAD to survive if only for Billy.

  After shyly consulting an older woman in the carding room, Kit discovered there was a place in town called the Labour Exchange, where she was told she might be able to find alternative work. In her short dinner break Kit ran all the way up the steep hill to the Exchange. A woman behind the desk asked her age.

  ‘I’m twenty-four.’

  ‘You look about fourteen,’ the woman said as she shoved a form across the desk to Kit. ‘Do you know about female conscription?’

  Feeling stupid and ignorant Kit dumbly shook her head. ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I’ve just arrived from Ireland.’

  ‘Lasses are being called up by the government to do men’s work,’ the helpful woman explained. ‘Working on the land, or in factories, building planes and tanks and bombs. Though we can’t force you into subscription seeing as you’re from Ireland,’ she quickly added.

  Worried about the amount of money she might get paid, Kit asked, ‘Do the government pay lasses to do this men’s work?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh, aye!’ she cried. ‘Munitions work is good money. Mind you, you could be sent anywhere, Scotland, Wales, down South – and you have to live on site, working shifts around the clock.’

  A slow smile lit up Kit’s tired face as she realized she’d get more money doing war work; plus, if she was posted elsewhere, she could leave the slum where she was presently living. Smiling with hope, she asked one final question.

  ‘When can I start?’

  Kit had to endure the misery of her cousins’ tenement block for two more weeks before a letter from the Labour Exchange arrived, instructing her to report to the Phoenix Munitions Factory in Pendleton. Fortunately Kit had had the foresight to warn her cousins in advance that she might be ‘flitting’, moving on to another mill job in Salford, where she told Colleen she planned to stay with friends she’d met on the boat coming over to England.

  ‘God forgive me for lying,’ she thought guiltily.

  Kit had no choice but to deceive Colleen, as she knew full well that she would be obliged to pass the information back to her father, whom she had every intention of keeping in the dark. She’d send home the money her dad expected every week, but what was left over from her munitions work she would save for herself and Billy. Luckily she was on the other side of the Irish Sea from her dad, who’d be unable to learn of her plan to squirrel away money for her future.

  ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart can’t grieve over,’ she said gleefully to herself as she formed the bold plan to deceive her tyrannical father.

  As the Pendleton bus rumbled out of the damp smoky city, the air began to clear and the slum blocks receded; and, though the black-faced mills with their tall sooty chimneys were still in evidence, they grew fewer and fewer as the bus drove further away from Manchester. When she saw skudding white clouds over the high misty ridges of the Pennines, Kit’s heart lifted.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she fervently prayed. ‘Let this be a better place to live.’

  4. Violet

  Violet Walsh left Coventry Hospital, where she worked in the filing department, with a heavy heart. The last thing she wanted to do was return to her matrimonial home in Wood End. Beautiful, slender Violet, with widely set pale blue eyes and long silver-blonde hair, had married young, too young.

  Seeing the Wood End bus approaching, Violet forced herself to join the queue at the bus stop, and when it pulled up at the shops a block away from her house she got off and bought some stringy sausages with her ration coupons. It was a relief to find the house empty, and, feeling the tension drain out of her, Violet switched on the radio, lit the fire and started to cook tea. When she heard the key turning in the front door, her heart skipped a beat and her pulse started to race. Panicking, she began to think about what he could find wrong. She was home, cooking his tea; the house was warm and welcoming. She jumped as Ronnie snapped off the radio, killing the music that she’d been enjoying. He peered at the stringy sausages in the frying pan, which he grabbed from her hand and threw at the wall.

  ‘NO!’ she cried in shock.

  ‘Don’t argue with me, bitch!’ he cried as his hand came down and smacked her hard across the face.

  After a few more blows to the head, Ronnie turned his back on his wife and without another word walked out of the house. Reeling in pain, Violet slumped on the sofa, where she took out her handkerchief to wipe the blood dripping from her mouth and nose.

  ‘God help me,’ she prayed out loud, wondering for the millionth time how she could have made such a terrible mistake and ended up in this mess.

  At eighteen she had been swooped off her feet by Ronnie, ten years her elder, a handsome bus driver who charmed her every day to and from work. How could Violet, a clever, educated girl brought up by a gentle mother, a music teacher and a widow, ever have guessed the enormity of the mistake she was making? The minute the wedding ring was on her finger, sweet-talking, romantic Ronnie kept her a virtual prisoner in the house, allowing her out only to go to work or to shop for food. She’d learnt early on in the marriage that to question or disobey him brought on a flash of temper, which resulted in a beating. Violet, previously so happy and carefree, was soon reduced to a nervous wreck.

  There wasn’t a day went by when Violet didn’t ask herself WHY she’d ever allowed herself to be seduced by Ronnie. She remembered being flattered by the advances of a handsome older man, who showered her with gifts: nylons, chocolates, a gold watch and finally a diamond engagement ring, which a month after they’d married he pawned along with the watch. What a fool she’d been, flying in the face of her family’s advice and ditching the devoted boy whom she’d been shyly dating since her grammar-school days.

  Since the war started three years ago, their marriage had become even worse. Ronnie had successfully dodged conscription, claiming bad eyesight, which was a cowardly lie. As if that wasn’t shaming enough, Ronn
ie had started meeting up with dodgy local spivs. Many a time Violet had come home from work to find her home stinking of cigarettes and black market whisky.

  Nursing her new bruises and wiping blood from her broken lip, Violet felt something rustling underneath her; shifting position, she saw she was sitting on the Coventry Evening Telegraph. Her eyes blearily scanned the headlines, then stopped as something caught her eye.

  CONSCRIPTED WOMEN MAKING A DIFFERENCE

  Churchill’s secret army of female conscripts are stepping into men’s shoes. Women across the nation are building bombs, tanks, planes and artillery for our brave boys on the front line. Massive residential sites are going up across the Midlands, Wales, Scotland, Lancashire and Yorkshire to house hundreds of women forced to move away from home in order to work in munitions factories.

  Violet read no further: the paper fell from her hands, and she sat staring at the embers flickering in the hearth. Could conscription be her way out of the hell of a life she shared with Ronnie?

  When Violet signed up at the Labour Exchange the next day, she specified that she wanted to be posted as far away from Coventry as possible.

  ‘You could end up in Dumfries or Swansea,’ the woman in the Exchange told her.

  Violet smiled as she replied, ‘The further away from Wood End the better!’

  When she received instructions to sign on immediately at the Phoenix Munitions Factory in Pendleton, Lancashire, Violet hugged the letter to herself. After the first rush of euphoria, she wondered how she’d make it out of the house without Ronnie breaking both her arms. Predictably he went berserk when she told him, but after he’d hit her the first time Violet pointed out that neither she nor he had any choice: it was obligatory work, and she had to go.