Bomb Girls--Britain's Secret Army (17 page)

I was 21 when the war ended, after three years working at Cargenbridge. At first, we couldn’t quite take it all in that we had actually won. I’d already been engaged to Roland for quite some time. About a year after we’d started going out, he’d turned up one night with a turquoise ring – he’d already asked me my favourite colour. I was thrilled to bits.
I took the ring to work and gave it to the super to look after while I was working. Roland said he wanted us to marry after the war. So now, the news that the Germans had capitulated meant I could start planning our wedding.

For my sister Donna, it meant her husband Graham was coming home. We put out the welcome sign for him but he looked so thin when he returned after all those years in the PoW camp. He’d had bronchial trouble beforehand, so being a prisoner for all those years didn’t help his health.

ICI closed down as soon as they announced war had ended. No more clocking in with a policeman standing by for every shift. It all ended without any fanfare at all. One day we just clocked out – for the last time. It was over.

We got married in August 1945. It was the first wedding in Lochfoot village after the war. I went round all the farms in the area and bought extra clothing coupons, and a woman who lived two doors down made the bridesmaids’ dresses. I managed to borrow a lovely oyster satin dress. The whole village turned out. In a way, it was a double celebration, our marriage and no more war. For my going away, I wore a mustard-coloured linen suit with a three-quarter jacket. I was crying – I was leaving my family, my parents, everyone I’d been so close to during the war. It was the end of something. And we didn’t go for a honeymoon, as such. Roland had a wee racing car, a Midget, a two-seater, so we drove off in the ‘selfish wee car’ to a hotel in Newcastle.

Within a year, our daughter Louise was born. Two years later, Alison arrived. Roland managed to get a farm cottage until we settled in the farmhouse, three miles up the road from Shawhead. Louise was just a baby when we got the cottage half a mile from the farm: outside loo, no running
water, you’d go up into a stream in a field for water to drink. Roland worked hard on the farm. He also played percussion in a dance band and he was a great singer. So some weekends I’d be left alone. Then in 1951 we moved to the house in Shawhead, where I still live now.

Elizabeth arrived 18 months after Alison and then Roland junior came three years after Elizabeth in 1953. My youngest, Malcolm, arrived in 1960. By this time, Roland had taken on an agricultural contractors’ business – he got all the machines, the combine harvesters, the tractors. He’d buy the machines and the local farmers and farm workers hired the machines from him so that they could farm. It got so busy he had to have three men working for him.

None of my sisters learned to drive, but I did. Sometimes I’d have to drive the men out to where the tractors had been left in the fields. The farmers would often ring us at 5am when they needed a machine to get started. So it was always a hectic life, helping Roland, looking after the children. If it was dry, Roland could often work till 11pm.

In 1971, we went on a big holiday to Australia. Roland’s brother, David, had gone there for £10 on an assisted passage so it was high time we visited him. Our bank manager was shocked when we said we were going to Sydney for two months. ‘How can you afford that?’ he said. We could. The business was going very well at the time.

It was just as well we made that big trip, because five years later, in 1976, one frosty morning, everything was set to change forever. Something was very wrong with Roland. The men who worked with him were so worried, they came into the house and spoke to me about it.

‘He keeps sitting there, holding his head, Margaret, but he
won’t tell us what’s wrong,’ one of them said. Then, when I started pushing him to tell me, I got the truth: Roland admitted he was having the most terrible headaches.

‘But I’m not going to any doctor,’ he warned me.

‘They only tell you there’s something wrong with you,’ were his words.

The next night he’d been out playing at a staff dance in Dumfries and didn’t get home until 3am. Even then, he insisted on going out to collect some coal. Then, as he bent over our coal bin, he clutched the back of his head suddenly. I could see he was in terrible pain.

‘Margaret… I can’t see now,’ he told me. Then he collapsed.

I rang for the doctor and after he’d looked at Roland lying there, semi-conscious, he took me into the kitchen.

‘It’s a haemorrhage, a burst artery,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing I can do for him.’

I went with Roland in the ambulance but when we got to the hospital they made me wait while they took him up to the ward. When they finally directed me to the ward, I found him unconscious in the bed. He remained that way for three days until he died. All the family came and rallied round us, but there was nothing anyone in the world could do. We’d been married for 30 years.

It was tough, afterwards. We had to close the business down. One of his brothers was a partner but he couldn’t drive. Roland always did the books. But I knew I just couldn’t run the business on my own. With the help of my daughter, I managed to collect all the money we were owed by the farmers. Then we managed to sell a lot of the equipment. Roland had bought three new tractors but they
weren’t yet paid for, so they had to go back. There was a lot of money lost, too.

It was very strange afterwards, but my three daughters were all expecting at the time Roland died, so the next year three babies arrived. That made a huge difference. Now, I can say my children have all done well in life. And I have 14 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

I don’t mind living alone at all. Elizabeth is four miles away and Malcolm is the same distance. I’m out a lot, anyway. And healthwise, there aren’t many problems; maybe a pain in my hip when I climb the stairs, but that’s it. I still do the Scottish country dancing every Monday night. And I drive myself to church every Sunday – I never miss that.

To be honest, I don’t think the world is now any better than it was all those years ago. My children were able to play out like I used to when I was young. Any mother in our area wanted to know where her child was, they were here. That’s exactly how it was. But nowadays people won’t let their children out to play and they’ve all got their computer machines. No conversation, all playing with these machines.

There’s such a difference, living in the countryside. To me, even Dumfries is like living in the big city. Some folk smile at you in the street, but in the main, you’re not part of a small community, the way you are round here.

I’m proud of what I did in the war. I’d describe myself as someone who tries to do everything as well as they can do it, and who tries to do as much good as possible. My only regret in life is losing my husband the way I did. But then, when I think about it, I wouldn’t have liked him to be an invalid for the rest of his life.

My Roland would have hated that.

CHAPTER 8

MAISIE’S STORY: MAISIE FROM ESSEX WITH THE FACEPACK

‘ON NIGHT SHIFT, I’D GO INTO THE TOILETS AND FALL ASLEEP’

Maisie Jagger was born in 1922 in Woolwich, Southeast London, and grew up in Dagenham, Essex. She worked as a shop assistant and a machinist until war broke out. In 1940, she was conscripted for munitions work making gun cartridge cases at the small arms ammunition factory in Blackpole, Worcester. Like thousands of other women, leaving home and relocating to a strange environment proved to be a very difficult, unsettling experience for Maisie. After 18 months at Blackpole, her health deteriorated and she was moved back home. Towards the end of the war she continued her munitions work in Dagenham, making parachutes and masts for dinghies until she married her wartime sweetheart, George, in 1945. George died in 2007. Maisie has one son, three grandchildren and four great grandchildren. This is her story:

People often ask me, ‘What was life like then, how did you manage to live with all the rationing, the bombings, being away from your family?’ I always tell them the same thing: you just got on with it; you accepted it; you couldn’t do anything else.

I was one of five: two boys and three girls. My parents were Londoners, my mother, May, was from Leytonstone in East London. My father, Albert, worked as a labourer at the
Daily Mirror
newspaper in Holborn. At first we lived in Woolwich, Southeast London, but Dad managed to buy a house on a new estate in Dagenham, Essex, so we moved not long after I was born.

Our youngest, Jean, arrived 14 years after me. Jean was always with me, all the time, wherever I went, when she was little. By the time I was a teenager, if I went to a dance or to the pictures, I went with a crowd – but little Jean was always with us. We were a very close-knit family, that’s for sure.

At the top of our road in Dagenham there were quite a few shops. I left school at 14 and went straight into shop work. I was never once out of work. I think I worked in every shop near us: a grocer’s shop first, then a shop called Perk Stores, then a shop called Gunners – they had biscuits in tins all along the front of the shop. I worked on the counter of a fish and chip shop and I also worked in a place called Maypole. I can remember the cheese they sold, covered with something like a sack, or a type of webbing all around it.

I was quite a friendly girl. You had to get on with everyone in the shop, didn’t you? But I’d also change jobs quickly for a penny or tuppence more a week. By the time war broke out, I was working as a machinist, making haversacks and binocular cases in a big factory in Oxo Lane, Dagenham.
Whatever I earned went straight to Mum on a Thursday – when I knew she wouldn’t have any money left until Dad got paid on Friday night. In return, I’d get sixpence a week as pocket money.

Every Saturday night I’d go dancing at the British Legion Hall in Dagenham: the foxtrot, the waltz – I liked dancing, all right. I won’t say I was good at it but I was dead keen on it. One of the daftest things I always remember is if I was going dancing and it was raining, oh how I hated it because all the mud would splash up the backs of my legs. I’d have to rush into the cloakroom, pull down my stockings and wash my legs, pull up the stockings and then out to the dance floor… it’s quite daft the things you remember. But you do.

My mum worked in the police station as a cook until the war started. Then she had to be evacuated to Ilfracombe in Devon with my sister Queenie, my brother George and little Jean. My oldest brother, Harry – we used to call him ‘Chink’ – was two years older than me so he was old enough to be called up. Almost overnight, this close family, the Rushbrooks, was scattered, leaving just me and Dad in the house, which I hated because I missed everyone so much. Dad was very lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you saw it. He’d just finished 12 years in the reserves for the Navy when war broke out so they didn’t want him.

‘Chink’ was really unlucky. He was captured almost at once, in Africa, by the Italians. He hated the Italian PoW camp, then the Germans took over and he wound up as a PoW in Germany. We got letters from him sometimes but it was all very unsettling for everyone.

I had wanted to go into the WRNS (‘the Wrens’) but my mum put her foot down, she wouldn’t hear of it. Mums and
dads used to be able to say what they wanted you to do and you did it. They had some funny ideas then. A lot of people believed the Forces were bad places for a young girl. ‘The Navy’s no place for a young woman,’ my mum kept saying. I didn’t know what she meant but there was no way I would disobey her.

In the end, of course, because I’d turned 18, I went to sign up for war work. At the Labour Exchange, with a group of other girls, we were told we’d be ‘directed labour’ doing war work. In other words, you’ll be working wherever we want to send you. It turned out I was being sent to Worcester, nearly 150 miles away. My best friend, Lily, was in the same boat, also called up as directed labour. But she was being sent to Rugby, which was a bit of a blow, though we managed to keep in touch throughout the war – and have done ever since.

Naturally, I didn’t like the idea of leaving home one little bit. I don’t think anyone in that situation liked the idea of it, if you had a decent home. It was bad enough the boys being called up. We were all so close at home, especially me and Chink. Before war started, we had our own little arrangement when I went out at night, because our parents were quite strict with me. Dad wouldn’t let me be out after 9pm, so Chink would say: ‘It’s ok, Dad, Maisie and I are going out together; we won’t be back until 10.’ Then Chink and I would stroll to the top of our road – and go our separate ways. We’d meet up again at 10 to walk back down the road together. I was always going dancing; I had no idea where my brother went.

When I think about it all now, leaving your family and going wherever you had to go was a bit of a shock to the
system. We went to Worcester by train, with Dad waving me off at Paddington station; there were a lot of other young girls like me being waved off by their families. I remember the train was also crowded with soldiers; everywhere you went on a train in those years, it was always packed with soldiers with their kitbags in the aisles.

I sat myself down in a seat with my case on my lap and soon I got chatting to this very pretty girl sitting opposite me. Eileen Smart came from Rainham, also in Essex, so we had something in common. From that point on, Eileen and I stuck together like glue, two young women in a totally unfamiliar situation, no idea what lay ahead.

After the long train ride, there was a bus waiting for us and finally we arrived where we’d be living: a house in Lansdowne Road, Worcester, the home of a Mr and Mrs Prosser. He was a policeman. They’d arranged with the authorities to rent out their spare bedroom to two munitions workers: board and lodging, they called it. We’d be paying the Prossers out of our wages.

So there I was with Eileen, a stranger, in a strange house in a different part of the country. We’d be sharing a bed, Mrs Prosser said. I’d shared a bed at home with my sister; we had a double bed. But I didn’t really like the idea of sleeping in the same bed with a total stranger. There was no point in saying anything, you just had to get used to it. As it turned out, me and Eileen were working on the same shift at work. The house itself was a three-bedroom house, quite sturdy. Mrs Prosser worked in a factory nearby and they had a son who would go away a lot and come back. The general idea was that I’d be able to go home to Essex once a month. But in the end, what with work and the rent taking quite a big
chunk out of my wages, I only wound up going home about three times all the time I lived there.