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Maddie scrubbed at midges and scrubbed at her eyes too, too miserable to answer.
‘And when you’re done slaving, I’m going to make you a mug of best Oakway Pilot’s Oily Tea, and tomorrow morning I’m going to march you into the nearest WAAF recruitment office.’
WAAF is Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, auxiliary to the RAF, the Royal Air Force. You don’t fly in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, but the way things are now you can do almost any job a man does, all the work associated with flying and fighting: electrician, technician, fitter, barrage balloon operator, driver, cook, hairdresser . . . You would have thought our Maddie would go for a job in mechanics, wouldn’t you? So early in the war, they hadn’t yet opened up those jobs to women. It didn’t matter that Maddie already had a deal more experience than a lot of boys; there wasn’t a place for her. But she’d already learned Morse code and a bit about radio transmission as part of her training for her pilot’s ‘A’ licence. The Air Ministry was in a panic in August 1939, scrambling for women to do radio work as it dawned on them how many men they’d need to do the flying. Maddie joined the WAAF and eventually became a radio operator.
Some WAAF Trades
It was like being at school. I don’t know if Maddie thought so too; she didn’t go to a Swiss boarding school, she was at a grammar school in Manchester and she certainly never thought about going to university. Even when she was at school, she came home every day and never had to share a room with twenty girls, or sleep on a straw mattress made up of three bricks like a set of settee cushions. We called them biscuits. You were always so tired you didn’t care; I would cut off my left hand to have one here. That fussy kit inspection they made you do, where you had to lay out all your worldly belongings in random but particular order on the folded blanket, like a jigsaw, and if anything was a millimetre the wrong way you got points off your score – that was just like being in school. Also all the slang, the ‘square-bashing’ drilling exercises, and the boring meals and the uniforms, though Maddie’s group didn’t get issued proper uniforms at first. They all wore matching blue cardigans, like Girl Guides (Guides don’t wear Air Force blue cardigans, but you see what I mean).
Maddie was stationed at Oakway to begin with, very convenient to home. This was late 1939, early 1940. The Phoney War. Nothing much happening.
Not in Britain anyway. We were biting our nails, practising.
Waiting.
Telephonist
‘You! Girl in the blue cardigan!’
Five girls in headsets looked round from their switchboards, pointed to their chests and mouthed silently, Me?
‘Yes, you! Aircraftwoman Brodatt! What are you doing here? You’re a licensed radio operator!’
Maddie pointed to her headset and the front cord she was about to connect.
‘Take the damned thing off and answer me.’
Maddie turned back to her switchboard and coolly plugged in the front cord. She toggled the appropriate keys and spoke clearly into the headset. ‘The Group Captain is through to you now, sir. You may go ahead.’ She took off the headset and turned back to the troll who was waiting for a reply. It was the chief flight instructor for Oakway’s Royal Air Force squadron, the man who had given Maddie her flight test nearly a year ago.
‘Sorry, sir. This is where I’ve been posted, sir.’ (I did say it was like being at school.)
‘Posted! You’re not even any of you in uniform!’
Five dutiful Aircraftwomen First Class straightened their Air Force blue cardigans.
‘We’ve not been issued full dress, sir.’
‘Posted!’ the officer repeated. ‘You’ll start in the radio room tomorrow, Aircraftwoman Brodatt. The operator’s assistant is down with influenza.’ And he lifted the headset from her console to perch it precariously over his own large head. ‘Put me through to the WAAF administration unit,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to your Section Officer.’
Maddie flipped the keys and plugged in the cords and he gave her posting orders over her own telephone.
Radio Operator
‘Tyro to ground, tyro to ground,’ came the call from the training aircraft. ‘Position uncertain, overhead triangular body of water to east of corridor.’
‘Ground to tyro,’ answered Maddie. ‘Is it a lake or a reservoir?’
‘Say again?’
‘Lake or reservoir? Your triangular body of water.’
After a short silence, Maddie prompted: ‘A reservoir has got a dam at one end.’
‘Tyro to ground. Affirm reservoir.’
‘Is it Ladyswell? Manchester barrage balloons at ten o’clock and Macclesfield at eight o’clock?’
‘Tyro to ground, affirm. Position located. Overhead Ladyswell for return to Oakway.’
Maddie sighed. ‘Ground to tyro, call on final approach.’
‘Wilco.’
Maddie shook her head, swearing unprettily under her breath. ‘Oh my sainted aunt! Unlimited visibility! Unlimited visibility except for the dirty great city in the north-west! That would be the dirty great city surrounded at 3000 feet by a few hundred silver hydrogen balloons as big as buses! How in the name of mud is he going to find Berlin if he can’t find Manchester?’
There was a bit of quiet in the radio room. Then the chief radio officer said gently, ‘Leading Aircraftwoman Brodatt, you’re still transmitting.’
—
‘Brodatt, stop there.’
Maddie and everyone else had been told to go home. Or back to their various barracks and lodgings anyway, for an afternoon’s rest. It was a day of such appallingly evil weather that the street lamps would have been lit if it weren’t for fear of enemy aircraft seeing them, not that enemy aircraft can fly in such murk either. Maddie and the other WAAFs in her barracks still hadn’t got proper uniforms, but as it was winter they had been issued RAF overcoats – men’s overcoats. Warm, and waterproof, but ridiculous. Like wearing a tent. Maddie clutched hers tight in at the sides when the officer spoke to her, standing straight and hoping she looked smarter than she felt. She stopped so he could catch up with her, waiting on the duckboards laid over the concrete apron because there was so much standing water about that if you stepped in a puddle it came over the tops of your shoes.
‘Was it you talked down my lads training in the Wellington bomber this morning?’ the officer asked.
Maddie gulped. She had thrown radio protocol to the wind to guide those boys in, bullying them through a ten-minute gap in the low-lying cloud, praying they would follow her instructions without question and that she wasn’t directing them straight into the explosive-rigged steel cables that tethered the barrage balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. Now she recognised the officer: it was one of the squadron leaders.
‘Yes, sir,’ she admitted hoarsely, her chin held high. The air was so full of moisture it made her hair stick to her forehead. She waited miserably, expecting him to summon her to be court-martialled.
‘Those boys jolly well owe you their lives,’ he said to Maddie. ‘Not one of them on instruments yet and flying without a map. We shouldn’t have let them take off this morning.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Maddie gasped.
‘Singing your praises, those lads were. Made me wonder though; have you any idea what the runway looks like from the air?’
Maddie smiled faintly. ‘I’ve a pilot’s “A” licence. Still valid. Of course I haven’t flown since August.’
‘Oh, I see!’
The RAF squadron leader set off to walk Maddie to the canteen at the airfield’s perimeter. She had to trot a little to match his stride.
‘Took your licence here at Oakway, did you? Civil Air Guard?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Instructor’s rating?’
‘No, sir. But I’ve flown at night.’
‘Now that’s unusual! Used the fog line, have you?’
He meant the fierce gas lamps that line the runway at intervals on either side so you can land in bad weather.
‘Two or three times. Not often, sir.’
‘So you have seen the runway from the air. And in the dark too! Well –’
Maddie waited. She really didn’t have any idea what this man was going to say next.
‘If you’re going to talk people down you’d damn well better know what the forward view from the cockpit of a Wellington bomber looks like in the landing configuration. Fancy a flight in a Wellington?’
‘Oh, yes please, sir!’
(You see – it was just like being in school.)
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.
I don’t know why I bent the stupid thing again. It is so easy to wind Miss Engel up. She always wins; but only because my ankles are tied to my chair.
Well, and also because at the end of every argument she reminds me of the deal I made with a certain officer of the Gestapo, and I collapse.
‘Hauptsturmführer von Linden is busy, as you know, and will not wish to be interrupted. But I have been told to summon him if necessary. You have been given pen and paper by his judgement of your willingness to cooperate with him, and if you will not write out the confession you have agreed he will have no choice but to resume your interrogation.’
JUST SHUT UP, ANNA ENGEL. I KNOW.
I will do anything: she has only to mention his name and I remember now, I will do anything, anything, to avoid him interrogating me again.
So. Range and Direction Finding. Coastal Defence. Do I get my thirty pieces of silver? No, just some more of this hotel stationery. It is very nice to write on.
Coastal Defence, the unabridged version
We saw it coming – someone saw it coming. We were that little bit ahead of you and you didn’t realise it. You didn’t realise how advanced the RDF system was already, or how quickly we were training people to use it, or how far we could see with it. You didn’t even realise how quickly we were building new planes of our own. It is true we were outnumbered, but with RDF we saw you coming – saw the swarms of Luftwaffe aircraft even as they were leaving their bases in Occupied France, worked out how high they were flying, saw how many of them were making the raid. And that gave us time to rally. We could meet you in the air, beat you back, keep you from landing, distract you till your fuel ran out and you turned tail until the next wave. Our besieged island, alone on the edge of Europe.
Maddie was sworn to secrecy on the life of her unborn children. It’s so secret they don’t give you a title when you have anything to do with Radar; you’re just called a ‘special duties clerk’. Clerk, Special Duties, clk/sd for short, like w/op is for Wireless Operator and Y for wireless. Clk/sd, that’s possibly the most useful and damning piece of information I’ve given you. Now you know.
Maddie spent six weeks in Radar training. She was also given a very nice promotion and made an officer. Then she was posted to RAF Maidsend, an operational base for a squadron of new Spitfire fighter planes, not far from Canterbury, near the Kentish coast. It was the furthest she had ever been from home. Maddie was not actually put to work at a Radar screen in one of the direction finding stations, though Maidsend did have one; she was still in the radio room. In the fire and fury of the summer of 1940 Maddie sat in a tower of iron and concrete taking bearings over the telephone. The other RDF girls did the ID work on the glass screens with the blinking green lights, and wired or telephoned it to Operations; then when Operations identified approaching aircraft for her, Maddie answered air-to-ground radio calls as the aircraft came limping home. Or sometimes roaring home in triumph, or newly delivered from the maintenance depot at Swi
SWINLEY SWINLEY
At Swinley. Thibaut has made me finish writing the name. I am so ashamed of myself I want to be sick again.
Engel says impatiently not to bother about the name of the workshop. There have been repeated attempts to bomb it to bits and it’s not really a secret. Engel is sure our Hauptsturmführer will be more interested in my sample description of the early Radar network. She is cross with T. now for interrupting.
I hate them both. Hate them all.
I HATE THEM
Coastal Defence, damn it.
Snivelling IDIOT.
So. So, on the RDF screen you’d see a green dot for an aircraft, one or two, moving across the screen. It might be ours. You’d watch a battle building, the dots multiplying – more joining the first as the pulsing light swept the screen. They’d come together and some of them would go out, like the cinders of sparklers. And every green flash that disappeared was a life finished, one man for a fighter, a whole crew for a bomber. Out, out, brief candle. (That is from Macbeth. He is said to be another of my unlikely ancestors, and actually did hold court on my family’s estate from time to time. He was not, by all contemporary Scottish accounts, the treacherous bastard Shakespeare makes him out to be. Will history remember me for my MBE, my British Empire honour for ‘chivalry’, or for my cooperation with the Gestapo? I don’t want to think about it. I expect they can take the MBE away if you stop being chivalrous.)
If they were radio equipped Maddie could talk to the planes the special duties clerks saw on their screens. She’d tell the pilots more or less what she’d have told them back at Oakway, except she didn’t know landmarks so well in Kent. She’d pass bearings to the moving aircraft, along with wind speed and whether or not there were holes in the runway today (sometimes we got raided). Or she’d tell other planes to give priority to the one that had lost its flaps, or whose pilot had a lump of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder, or something like that.
Maddie was listening for incoming stragglers one afternoon following a battle that hadn’t involved the Maidsend Squadron. She nearly fell off her chair when she heard the desperate call that came in on her frequency.
‘Mayday – mayday –’
– Recognisable in English. Or perhaps that was French, ‘M’aidez’, help me. The rest of the transmission was in German.
The voice was a boy’s voice, young and scared. He broke off each call with a sob. Maddie swallowed – she had no idea where the anguished cries for help were coming from. Maddie called out, ‘Listen – listen!’ and switched her headset on to the Tannoy so that everyone could hear, and then she grabbed the telephone.
‘It’s Assistant Section Officer Brodatt in the Tower. Can I get directly through to Jenny in Special Duties? All right, Tessa then. Anyone with a screen going. I need an ident on a radio call – ’
Everyone crowded round the telephone, reading over Maddie’s shoulder as she took notes from the direction finding station, then gasping aloud as the meaning of her notes sank in.
‘Heading straight for Maidsend!’
‘What if it’s a bomber?’
‘What if it’s still loaded?’
‘What if it’s a hoax?’
‘He’d be calling in English if it was a hoax!’
‘Anyone speak German?’ shouted the officer in charge of the radio room. Silence.
‘Christ! Brodatt, stay on the ’phone. Davenport, you run to the wireless station, perhaps one of those girls can help. Get me a German-speaker! Now!’
Maddie listened with her heart in her mouth, holding her headset to one ear and the telephone to the other, waiting for the girl at the RDF screen to pass her new information.
‘Shhh,’ warned the radio officer, leaning over Maddie’s shoulder and taking hold of the telephone receiver for her so her right hand was freed up for taking notes. ‘Don’t say anything – don’t let him know who’s listening –’
The door to the radio room banged open and the subordinate Davenport was back, with one of the WAAF wireless operators hard on his heels. Maddie looked up.
The girl was immaculate – not a blue thread out of place, her chignon of long fair hair coiled in regulation neatness two inches above her uniform collar. Maddie recognised her from the canteen and rare social evenings. Queenie, people called her, though she was not the official WAAF Queen Bee (that’s what we call the senior administrative officer on the base), nor was it her name. Maddie did not know her real name. Queenie had acquired a certain reputation for being fast and fearless; she sauced superior officers and got away with it, but equally she wouldn’t leave a building during an air raid until she’d made sure everyone else was out. Distantly connected to royalty, she was of some rank herself, of privilege rather than experience, a Flight Officer; but she was said to work as diligently at her wireless set as any self-made shop girl. She was pretty, petite and light on her feet, and if there was a Squadron dance on a Saturday night she was the one the pilots went for.
‘Let’s have your headset, Brodatt,’ said the radio officer. Maddie uncurled the gripping earphones and microphone and passed her headset to the pretty little blonde wireless operator, who adjusted the phones to fit her head.
After a few seconds, Queenie said, ‘He says he’s over the English Channel. He’s looking for Calais.’
‘But Tessa says he’s approaching the coast at Whitstable!’
‘He’s in a Heinkel bomber and his crew’s been killed and he’s lost an engine and he wants to land at Calais.’
They all stared at the wireless operator.
‘You sure we’re all talking about the same aircraft?’ the radio officer asked dubiously.