Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary. Joan Rice
eventually got a steam train as far as Surbiton (passing en route a notice flaunting the words ‘And still the railways carry on’). This morning there is still no train so I am back again by the welcome home fire warming up for a second attempt after lunch starting with a cab to Surbiton.
I February 1940
I have been moved out of house number 18 to number 11 and have been put in temporary charge of it until the return of a very nice corporal friend of mine, Rene Le Mesurier. Its other inhabitants are old and staid and utterly law abiding with a conscience over helping with the housework. I am none of these, with a livid reputation for breakfast lateness. It's half past ten now, I'm on a pouffe before a very hot fire and a half-read American Ladies Home Journal.
8 February 1940
For weeks I've wantonly escaped it, tonight there was no further eluding it. I am on duty on the telephone. That unpleasantness means that you sit from five to nine in the WAAF Recreation Room, if you're like me with both feet in the fire, and when the phone rings you have to answer it and, depending on your conscience, say either ‘leave a message’ or ‘I'll see if I can find her’.
On the wireless a frightful band of men are singing over and over again the same song interspersed with remarks of dullness about keeping on key and top Bs by another man with a shaking voice. I've got to keep it on, it's my only means of knowing six o'clock. I've got cigarettes, my knitting, this diary and a magazine. I can't sincerely be martyred, especially if I did want to go out, I've got no money and owe odd WAAFs 11/6d.
Up and down Booth Road WAAFs are cleaning windows, hiding beer bottles and Dillon is reluctantly black-leading a grate. Big bugs from Air Ministry are coming tomorrow to billet inspect. My room will be the only one not with its morning face. The orderly sergeant has now arrived and is battling with the intricacies of the NAAFI finances. I've combined three good deeds tonight but I've resigned the struggle. I've helped the cooks wash up and I'm taking someone's place in the decontamination squad so that she can leave camp. I glow with a large pro-social feeling.
28 February 1940
Two weeks' interlude between this and the last entry represents a week in the WAAF sickbay with a cold and pink eye and five days in an isolation hospital with measles, separated by two delightful days of sick leave seeing both the Gate Review and Funny Side Up with Eric. I was talking while in sickbay with a girl about platonic friendship, the way you do get talking very late in the night with neither of you tired through too much bed, and she said it never worked because the very fact that you were men and women made one of you at some point, if only very briefly, have feelings for the other. That's true. Sitting beside Eric in Funny Side Up, he in his new undress uniform and I in the unaccustomed femininity of a pretty frock, this dialogue just over between us:
Joan: ‘Mind you've caught my frock.’
Eric: ‘Joan, you're getting me in quite a state.’
Joan: ‘Is that the effect the frock has on you?’
Eric: ‘The frock or you.’
I got the first feeling I had for him of sentimentality but now it's gone and I feel nothing again.
I read somewhere else that a woman who can inspire love and not even feel pity is a dangerous and unhappy character.
8 March 1940
I am becoming a most domesticated girl. The mornings see me sweeping, dusting and bed making and even cleaning the windows of my room, and most surprising, liking it. Housework, I see, is nothing like as soul destroying as typing. Lunch hour saw me in shirtsleeves and mackintosh apron standing before a sink, singing tunelessly the twiddly-pom bit of ‘Eighteenth-Century Minuet’ and faced with piles and piles and more piles of WAAF washing up. Washing up after meals now being compulsory, one of the vast growing number of unpleasantnesses that are compulsory these days. I can't say I enjoyed that but thought hard of soldiers being killed for England and me only being inconvenienced, which helped me along.
Yesterday evening I decided not to go to the station dance as I had a cold, so put on slacks, many jerseys, mittens and a scarf and went out into the back garden where I weeded and dug and generally prepared the earth for its invasion of seeds on Sunday and finished off with a truly colossal bonfire which brought all the little boys from far and wide to watch the fun. Digging there in the mildness of an early spring evening, with the faint sound of other WAAF voices on the billet the other side and a few children climbing in and out of air raid shelters, left me at peace. I had no thoughts beyond the moment; all emotion had run out of the world; it was only the pleasant day and the earth heavy under my fork and my own satisfied tiredness. All this is probably just my way of saying there's something in this gardening racket after all.
After, I came in to find Mickey roasting before my fire and we drank her soup, toasted my bread and ate my mother's marmalade. This morning I got an invitation to Barbara's wedding on 27th of this month and Our Annie, the hearty CO who has taken over from Mrs Rowley, has given me the afternoon off to go to it.
9 March 1940
This evening is Saturday. I had money and decided to go in to Hendon after tea. I walked round Woolworths, shed some several shillings and returned to Booth Road with arms containing bulbs in a pot, six packets of seeds, a face flannel, a tin of boot polish, a duster, a vase, flowers, needles and cotton, a garden trowel and a packet of soap flakes. Back in my room I've lit my fire, cleaned three pairs of shoes, washed several stockings and am preparing for a snug evening before a now burning fire mending clothes and listening to the wireless, supplemented by toast and Stork16 and marmalade and climaxed by a bath.
Yesterday evening Mickey and I and other deluded WAAFs went through the blackout and into the wilds of Hammersmith enduring the journey with the thought of the rollicking, witty West End show, Broadway Follies, studded with stars, to which we WAAFs had been invited free. I might say frightful, I might say terrible, awful, boring, tedious, but they only reveal the inadequacy of words. After the third hour, or so it seemed, I was convinced that I had died and was in hell, watching turn after turn in unending procession, each longer, each less funny, each more unbelievably bad than the last. During the interval, Hendon WAAFs rushed to the bar, scruffy WAAFS, obviously from West Drayton, sat still rollicking with mirth in the Stalls. We tossed back whisky and ginger beer and watched in a stupor the longer, duller, apparently unending second half. After came the journey back in the blackout made blue by our opinions of the evening.
11 March 1940
How nice it is to listen in the mornings to the BBC broadcasting physical jerks17 when one has no intention whatsoever of doing them. Our Annie and I have practically no point of common interest. She's a large strapping woman with appalling legs and heaps of hearty laughter. Her spiritual home is in a damp tent with a smoking campfire and a brood of nasty little Girl Guides. In fact, I believe between being a general's daughter she was once a Girl Guide captain.
I went with Mickey and Frances to the pictures tonight and came back arguing about politics and the future of England. Obviously England is a declining power; obviously Communism has come to stay; obviously the breaking of British class barriers is a long overdue necessity if the country's ever to survive. Do you realise only 3 per cent of our populace, the lucky percentage with a public school education, can ever hope to receive any of the really first-rate jobs? Oh, the colossal conceit of a country, to limit its selection of brain ability from a future 3 per cent. There is so