Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (13 page)

It was a happy time, in a way. There was
Music While You Work
playing from a radio high up on the ceiling. And a meal for sixpence in the canteen. Wilf was making rum barrels for the Navy in Birkenhead. I was making eight shillings a week when I started out in Lux Flakes. Now I was making nearly double: l5 shillings a week on the jeeps, which was a lot. And we were still working days. The journey to work wasn’t that bad: a quarter-of-a-mile walk from home and then onto a special bus to take us to Lever Brothers. Go through the main gate, show anything you were carrying, always two men standing there to check everyone.

I didn’t realise at the time – it wasn’t until many years later that I found out – that glycerine was stored at the factory, round the sides of the huge ‘shops’. If a bomb had ever hit us, it would have set the place on fire immediately. It would have been terrible. Though at that point, there wasn’t much bombing in our area.

In December 1941, the jeeps section was closed down. I was told I’d be sent to Chester for two months to learn how to be a turner at an engineering factory. Little did I know but that would turn out to be an exhausting couple of months. The training hours were either 6am to 2pm or 2pm to 10pm. Leave the house at 4.30am and walk two-and-a-half miles in the blackout to get a train to Chester for 5.45am, then run like mad through Chester Cathedral to the factory for 6am.

For this, we wore the same overalls, but with a peaked hat, where you had to tuck all your hair in, every single hair. Anything that was loose or dangling could get caught in the machinery. So your sleeves, anything like that, had to be very tight. You had to be very, very careful. If anything did get caught in the machine, that was it – unless someone was quick, saw you and managed to stop the machine.

I was 21 while I was doing the training. And because it meant doing shift work, there was more money – 25 shillings a week. They were teaching us how to use a lathe. So as we were training, we knew we’d be making the ‘legs’, the undercarriage for Dowty aircraft bombers, big US bombers. I was training on the lathe, another girl was training on a drilling machine, another on a milling machine. I could only operate a lathe, but there were different sizes of lathe, so there was a lot to learn. Then it was back to Lever Brothers. While we’d been away, new machines had been set up and now we had been trained to operate them.

I’m quite tiny, just 4ft 11in, and at the time I weighed about 7st 10lb. But they put me on a huge machine, a Gisholt lathe. How it worked was, I’d be given a solid piece of steel – the men had to put it into the machine for me because it was too heavy – and there was a big drill attached at the other end. I had to get the drill to the centre of the piece of steel, then you had a tap, with oil and water, and I had to direct that to the drill.

Then I could start the machine, what they called ‘the feed’. Lift the handle and start to feed the drill into the steel, the oil and water ran down into a big trough. I’d have to stand in the trough to centre the drill into the steel I was drilling. As the drill turned round and bored into the machine, what
we call ‘swarf’ came from the drill – ringlets of steel that came out of the hole you were making. You had to keep watching it all the time. Not so surprisingly, I didn’t stay on this for very long.

‘Who on earth put that little girl on that big machine?’ someone said. It was obvious you needed a man’s strength to lift the steel.

Then they set me to work on a capstan lathe. I did the same thing but with smaller pieces of steel and smaller drills. So of course, I could get through the work much faster. You needed to keep your eye on the swarf all the time, mind you. If the swarf got stuck, the drill broke. So instead of making the bomber undercarriage itself, I was now making the attachments for the undercarriage. I had to work with copper too. That didn’t come out like ringlets; it would spit out. And it burnt you so you had to wear gloves.

Once, on night shift, I yawned without thinking, and a piece of copper spat out onto my tongue. Someone went and got the nurse and she came out, looked at me and laughed. ‘Drink milk,’ she said. It was a bit of a shock for me. It did burn. I had an ‘s’ on my tongue for ages. I drank milk for a week. But later on, it went away. It was just a burn. Everyone around me thought it was very funny. ‘That’ll teach you to open your mouth, Ivy,’ one of the men joked in the canteen.

But not long after that, something really dreadful happened. There were a few other girls working drilling machines in the same section as me. This particular girl worked with her back to me. ‘Tuck your hair under your hat,’ she was told, time and time again. But for some reason, she would never do it. On this shift, I saw her bend over to look at something,
and the drill caught her hair. It scalped her. I saw it happen, right in front of my eyes. It was horrendous.

She was screaming and there was blood everywhere – tiny pinpricks where the hair root had been. She screamed the place down. It was dreadful. She was in a terrible state. The drill had yanked her hair out by the roots, so it would never grow again. She was completely scalped. They helped her, got an ambulance to take her away. But we never saw her any more after that. That frightened the life out of everyone. It was a big lesson to all of us to make sure we had completely tucked every single hair into our caps.

A couple of months after that accident, I was moved again. This time it was on to a centre lathe, which was small. This time I would be making piston rods for engines. To do this work, you had to be very precise about what you did. Luckily, I had steady hands. They were always keeping a lookout for girls with steady hands. With this type of work you really had to be concentrating very hard, watch what you did. But you were tired all the time, even when you were not working. If you were working 6am to 2pm and there’d been a bombing raid, there were no buses to get you to work. You had to walk a couple of miles before a bus caught up with you.

In the end, my grandmother got me a bike. You were given a tin hat to put on if the air raid warden suddenly blew the whistle and you were cycling to or from work. But at work, if there was an air raid, you kept working through the bombing. We were never allowed to stop work and go into the shelter. It was just non-stop. You would be on 6am to 2pm and then you changed on the weekends to 2pm to10pm on Sunday night and then back on 10am to 6pm
again. There were no public holidays apart from Christmas Day; you were allowed that off, but not New Year.

You got one week’s holiday a year. Mum and I went to Blackpool twice, and once we went to the Isle of Man, where we could see the internees in the hotels in Douglas with all the barbed wire around. But it was peaceful there. A week of peace and quiet away from the noise of the shop floor – and the air raid warnings.

My brother Ronald was 14 when war broke out. He was a messenger boy for the ARP [Air Raid Precautions, all volunteers] with a bike and tin hat. He’d take messages from one air raid shelter to the next, at night, through all the bombing. One day the police came to the front door. Mum went white when she saw them but they said: ‘Your son Ronald’s in the hospital.’ He’d smashed into a concrete pillar in the Birkenhead Park. His face was in a terrible state but he was alive.

My mother was also an ARP, doing so many shifts a week. There was a big tunnel underneath Birkenhead Park where people would shelter; they had a paid air raid warden there all the time. One night, the bombs hit all the roads around the park: people in the park panicked, wanting to get out.

The warden stood there at the entrance and said: ‘Anyone wants to get out, they have to get past me.’ He was right. There were land mines: that was why he stopped the people from rushing out. He had a hook hand from an accident as a child. After the war, the people clubbed together and bought him an artificial hand. He was a hero.

But it wasn’t all bombs and shelters. We did have fun, too. The girls I worked with used to go to tea dances in Liverpool when they had time off and of course, there was
still the pictures, though they used to close pretty early. That trip to the pictures I never forgot. Wilf and I were sitting in the Ritz Cinema in Claughton Road. We’d seen most of the film. Then the sirens went: air raid coming.

‘Oh, I’m going, Wilf,’ I said, and jumped up straight away. For a minute, Wilf hesitated. He wanted to stay, see the end of the film. But being sensible, of course, he came out after me. It was a very clear night. As we walked along, we looked up at the sky and there were the silver planes, getting ready to bomb us. And a bit later, from the distance, you could see the bombs coming down – exactly where we’d been watching the film at the Ritz.

That was the sort of thing that happened to people. Someone made a snap decision to get out, go home or do something suddenly – and it could be all over for them. Going to work after a bombing, particularly on a bike, you’d see the houses down and the bodies – which were always round the chimney stacks. The chimney stacks were big then, so if the house was hit, people would be swept up and the chimney pots stopped them falling off the roof. You saw it all.

You’d hear the bombs, of course, if you slept in our shelter, the cellar. But you usually knew it wasn’t close – unless the house shook, then you knew it really was close. We were lucky in our road; all we had were cracked windows. But not everyone was so lucky. Of the whole group of boys I knew from the youth club, most of them went into the Air Force – and were dead within a year. Just two boys out of our group came home. One lad had been in a Japanese prison camp. He died a year after he came back. The other one was torpedoed and spent a week in a lifeboat until he was rescued. He went back into the Navy.

We were so longing for peace; for us to win the war. The propaganda – ‘Be Like Dad, Keep Mum’ – was wonderful. Nobody ever thought we’d lose. In the factory, there were people from all over: war refugees from Poland, men from the West Indies, they were great fun. One of the girls in my section wound up marrying one of them.

In the building next to ours, there were girls packing the bullets. We were never allowed in there. And we never saw those girls on the bus or even on the same shift. The men always told us: ‘You can’t go in there, girls. Just stay in your own place.’ After I’d started working on the jeeps, there was so much pressure to get the work done, we didn’t even get time to go to the canteen to eat; the food was brought to us and we ate it in a little side room. So we never got to see those girls in the next building.

All you’d ever hear were rumours. It was all very vague. All I knew was, those girls were packing bullets and the rest of us better keep away, it was so dangerous. I don’t even think they knew themselves it was dangerous. But I heard that there were really bad accidents, some of those girls didn’t live very long. One friend of a friend died after an accident.

Once we all knew about D-Day, of course, that was the real turning point. We knew then that the war was going our way. I turned 21 at the end of that year. I came home after the 6am shift and my mother gave me my birthday gift: one little chocolate éclair. She’d queued an hour to get it.

By the New Year of 1945, the munitions work stopped. Ten weeks after that, I went back to normal factory work for Lever Brothers for a matter of weeks. I finished up at the factory just before Wilf and I got married on May 25th, just after VE Day. The wedding was lovely but there wasn’t much
to eat. Spam salad was the best you could get for a wedding reception. My mum and Wilf’s mum got together to see what they could do. Even little things, like icing for the cake, were hard to find. They did a lot of swapping of coupons and got everyone they knew to hunt around for icing. And in the end, I had a three-tier cake with real icing. And I don’t know how my mother managed it, but she got a quarter of a pig. Wonderful! Pork salad and a big cake with real icing. You hadn’t seen things like that for ages.

All my friends got married in borrowed white dresses. In the end, I bought a blue silk coat in Liverpool, a hat with an ostrich feather with veiling. I’ve still got that ostrich feather. The bride and groom were both virgins on their wedding night. Neither of us had a clue what to do because no one told you or talked about it in those days.

At first, we went to live with my mother-in-law in North Birkenhead and wound up staying with her until 1950, when my daughter Lynn was born. That was when Wilf started working as a fitter at Ellesmere Port and we managed to get a council house just down the road from where I live now. Our life was as happy and contented as we’d hoped it would be over the years. In 1974, Wilf and I went on holiday in October, to Torquay. We were in a dancing group. We were going dancing almost every night. But then, out of the blue, our world began to topple. On that holiday, Wilf discovered a lump on his neck.

I wasn’t too bothered at first but Wilf sensed, immediately, that something had happened to him: ‘Ivy, if I’ve got something wrong and I’m going to die, promise you won’t tell me,’ he said to me one day, sitting in the park. I just nodded. A promise was a promise. But surely it couldn’t be
that bad? Wilf was 53, I was 52. Surely we had many more years together?

A couple of weeks later, after Wilf had already gone to see the doctor, I went out to get a paper. A woman in the shop asked after Wilf and I told her about the lump. It turned out her husband had worked at exactly the same place as Wilf in Ellesmere Port. Like Wilf, he was a fitter, putting lead into petrol; using Tetraethyl lead, known as TEL. The woman’s husband had died. From lead poisoning.

I went home and told my brother. I wanted to see the doctor on my own. It was true. The doctor told me Wilf had a few months to live. That week, he was taken into hospital. He went in on the 3rd October and died on the 6th December. There were three men in our road that all died the same way, from lead poisoning. All working at the same place, though Wilf had left the firm before he got ill.

It took me years to get over it. You didn’t know what happened in factories then. He got a medical every month. And around that time they stopped putting the lead into the petrol. But it was too late for Wilf. He was in terrible pain, my lovely husband, crying in pain. And we both pretended we didn’t know. Because that was what I’d promised. After that I moved, to where I live now – Wilf’s pension paid for the house. And I worked for 20 years as a supervisor in a laundry business.