Bobby pushed damp hair out of her face. ‘Have you been in the forces before? You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘In a way. My father was an officer in the Army. I spent my early childhood being dragged from camp to camp. Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.’
‘Thank you.’
Bobby had been unsure what to make of Mike, whose view of the world seemed so very different to her own, but she was craving a kind word more than anything right now. She hadn’t realised how much she needed someone who would be a friend to her, however little they might have in common.
Mike shivered as she pulled her coat around her. ‘Bloody freezing in this rain. You ought to hurry, if you don’t want to start your first full day on charge. Not long until lights out.’
Bobby didn’t sleep much. She lay awake on her hard, uncomfortable bed under hairy Air Force blankets, feeling unbearably wretched as she listened to the snores of her bunkmate and the heavy rain rattling the tin roof. Although she had been fighting back tears most of the day, now she was at liberty to indulge in the catharsis of a good cry, she found they wouldn’t come. Her arms and shoulders ached like hell, she felt hot and then cold and then hot again, and she had a sick, emptyfeeling in her stomach. The arm ache and fever flushes she put down to her vaccinations, but the empty feeling was all her own.
Everything was so much harder than she had thought it would be. Yes, she had been worried about leaving, but she had, after all, left home once before. It wasn’t so very long ago that she had uprooted herself from everything she knew to begin a new life in the Dales, and while that, too, had been daunting at the time, she had soon come to see the place as her home. Bobby had assumed she would adjust to this new military life as well as she had eventually done to the world of Silverdale. Now she was here, however, she was beginning to doubt whether that could ever happen.
She had never been in this sort of environment before. It felt strange to be so very… so veryinsignificant, just one face among many, stripped of your name and labelled with a number. Everyone forced to eat the same, dress the same, even walk the same, as if they were a single person copied over and over. School had had its challenges but it hadn’t been like this.
She could hear sniffs coming from other bunks, muffled by pillows. Bobby suspected these had more to do with homesickness than cold. Many of the girls here were young, probably experiencing their first time away from home. She was sure she even heard some sniffles from Dilys’s bunk.
It reminded her that young men and women were being plunged into a life like this every day, with no choice but to cope. Lilian had done it, and Charlie, and her brothers. So why did it feel so difficult for her? Bobby had always believed she was a resilient person, yet now she wondered if she could even get through her six-week basic training without breaking down.
It wasn’t that she disliked the people she had found herself among. As hedonistic and worldly as Mike seemed, she had been kind earlier when Bobby had needed kindness, and offered her friendship. For all her abruptness, Carol was bouncy andgood-natured, and seemed to have acquired numerous friends already. Perhaps even Dilys would improve on acquaintance – as Mike had said, she wasn’t much more than a kid. But it felt like the other women shared a camaraderie from which she was excluded, and she couldn’t help feeling like an alien amongst them. She didn’t want to be labelled a prig or a stick-in-the-mud, but nor did she want to be dragged into that heady world of dances, men, drinking and flirtations around which the lives of her new acquaintances seemed to revolve.
Bobby had found Mulligan cold and intimidating when she had met her at the recruiting centre, yet the final part of her welcome speech today had struck a chord. The officer’s face had been filled with a steely pride when she had talked about standing up to those people who sneered at women in uniform, and the men who would try to persuade them they were less than they were. Bobby had stood a little taller when Mulligan had talked about taking pride in their contribution to the war effort, although the others may have rolled their eyes, and she had determined she would wear her WAAF uniform with distinction.
But when she had tried on that uniform earlier and looked at herself in the mirror – this pale, frightened little thing blinking under her peaked cap, ill at ease in a set of clothes that seemed to have been made for someone else – Bobby wondered if she could ever feel like she belonged here.
Chapter 31
The next day, Bobby discovered that the first thing the WAAF expected its recruits to learn was how to queue.
They were awakened by the sound of an efficient bugle at six a.m. This was the same time as Bobby would have risen at home, giving her an hour to pump the water and do her chores before she needed to start getting ready for work, but after a night containing no more than two hours’ sleep, she groaned just as much as the other women when she dragged herself out of bed.
As they queued outside the ablutions block, shivering and jiggling on the spot to get warm, Bobby felt how foolish she had been to believe that life in the cow house would have prepared her for the military. The outhouse they had shared with Moorside may have been cold, the water often frozen in the lavatory bowl in winter, but at least she had never had to wait long to use it. Now not only her arms but her whole body ached after a night struggling to get comfortable on the thin mattresses, and by the time her turn came to wash, her hands were almost too numb to turn on the tap.
They were given just an hour to wash, dress, use the latrines, tidy their bunks and make themselves presentable before marching to the cookhouse for breakfast. An NCO who had been placed in charge of their hut strode up and down barking instructions as, bleary-eyed, the new WAAFs prepared for their first day.
‘Hair is not to touch collars at any time,’ Corporal Bennett told them. ‘Minimal rouge, please, ladies. A WAAF is feminine but never garish. Look sharp or we’ll be late for breakfast.’
After everyone had dressed, the corporal gave them a lecture on the correct way to ‘stack’ their beds. In the RAF, Bobbylearned, beds were stacked rather than made. The three mattresses, known as biscuits, had to be piled on top of each other with utmost precision, then the blankets and sheets arranged alternately with the third blanket folded lengthways and wrapped around. Untidy stacks, they were told, would be pulled apart and the culprit forced to remake them until the inspecting NCO was satisfied.
‘Obviously it would be impossible to win a war with an untidy stack and hair touching our collars,’ Mike whispered as they stood by their bunks watching this demonstration, and Bobby smothered a smile.
Once beds had been stacked and inspected, the women were made to package up their civilian clothes to be sent back to their families. Bobby stood in her new uniform, with its itchy lisle stockings and the long woollen ‘blackout’ underwear, and felt rather helpless as she watched the brown paper parcel containing her clothes be taken away. In parting with it, she felt as though she was saying goodbye to the last remnant of her life in Silverdale.
The next queue was for breakfast, the WAAFs lining up two by two for a plate of bacon and eggs. While the queueing was tedious, the portions were relatively unstinting, and Bobby cheered up slightly as she tucked in.
By the time the day was nearly over, she had spent almost all of it in some sort of queue. They had queued for photographs, queued for pay books, queued for button polish, queued for tape and marking ink to sew into their uniforms, and finally queued to find out if they had been accepted for their preferred trade.
‘Rank and number?’ an RAF flight sergeant demanded when she reached the front of this last queue.
‘ACW/2, 2172954,’ Bobby told him.
The new service number felt strange as it rolled off her tongue. She was no longer Bobby Bancroft but ACW/2, 2172954. Theimpersonal – inhuman – sound of it sent a shiver down her spine.
Her father still remembered his army service number from the last war. He never forgot that, although in the darkest times he might forget the names of his daughters, what day it was or even what year. Sometimes she heard him mumble it in his sleep. Bobby wondered if, when she was a wizened old woman, this new and unfamiliar identity label would feel as much a part of her as her own name.
‘2172954,’ the man said, looking at his list. ‘You’re to be trained as a clerk, general duties.’ He handed her a pamphlet. ‘Impressive test scores, I see. Well done.’
Bobby frowned. ‘Generalduties? You mean administration?’
