Sand In My Shoes: Coming of Age in the Second World War: A WAAF’s Diary. Joan Rice
muddle. Still there is this consolation: it's a bad world but it's not a dull one. It's got evil and stupidity and muddle but it's also got excitement and adventure and variety. For the cynical, for the without illusions, one can still live zestfully and not yearn too unbearably for Utopia.
15 March 1940
I am home and tired, I've been out every night this week. Tomorrow morning I shall lie in a soft warm bed and stretch out a languid hand to my bell, which will bring my breakfast to me. Tonight I shall dissolve the grime of ages (three days and nights) in a large boiling bath.
I've got to give up my room. The corporal whose rightful residence it is has decided she wants it and I am to have the front double room, so very much more to clean. I am sick and sorry; I like my room. I like the sixpenny and flourishing plant on the windowsill. I like the string from the light via the door to my bed which enables me to extinguish both light and wireless without getting back into the cold. I like it because it is little and easy to warm and has clean windows and a polished floor. I wish I were a corporal and not so tired. I am writing this all odd: it was going to be very artful introducing all the week's events in so natural a manner that one slipped easily into the other.
Allow me, says she in her best pompous author manner, to take you from my usual haunts of Booth Road and Claygate and that part of London encircling Leicester Square into the hitherto unexplored region of Hendon Aerodrome. If we are lucky, as we enter its gates, the police on duty will salute me and make me feel very smooth. Why then, reader, do I hurry? Why have I paid unusual trouble with my toilet and clutch in my hand a limp paper when usually I saunter past late, untidy and sucking a Zube? I am going to a Messing meeting as a representative of WAAF airwomen, that's why – a role strangely thrust on me by Our Annie.
We gather in the messing officer's room, the WAAFs waved politely to chairs, the airmen soldiers standing self-consciously behind us. After a pause, which I passed looking out of the window unaware that I was expected to speak and thinking how rude it was that nobody did so, I, as WAAF representative, am asked to complain first. I blushed a lot and said the WAAFs wanted more fruit.
That noted, Pilot Officer Burton turned to the men and the fun began. They said their fried bread was hard. The sergeants, two harsh-faced individuals, said it was inevitable on account of the ovens; Pilot Officer Burton strove courageously to pacify both parties. Throughout the battle, which travelled through hard fried bread to bread at dinner to too thin tea, he remained courteous, fair and eternally anxious to help the men. This was definitely one of the better Service customs. The men get direct to the officers with their complaints.
As a result of this morning meeting, far from finishing my work at the customary 4.15, when I left at 4.45 it was yet undone. At 5 p.m. when I was preparing to go to town, a trembling WAAF informed me that an angry Annie was on the phone demanding my return to finish my work. I returned swearing all up Booth Road and by the time I got to her my anger had surprisingly gone. I accepted, not very well concealing my smiling lack of penitence, her and Henderson's bawling, so that at the end they were smiling too. I like Henderson, she is small and attractive and tough.
20 March 1940
WAAF whisklets –
Mr Dunne, giving Frances Baxter a packet of Smarties: ‘You've got a habit I don't like.’
Frances: ‘What's that?’
Mr Dunne: ‘You breathe.’
Mr Dunne is a civilian clerk under whose care we WAAFs at Station Headquarters are. He has promised to lift me one of those ‘You never know who's listening’ posters for my billet.
Mickey Johnston has a driving test. ‘Don't let her drive inside the aerodrome,’ warns a sergeant to the girl who accompanies her on her test, suspecting Mickey's ability with tragic truth. From the WAAF Mess to the aerodrome gates Mickey takes the wheel. She flashes down Booth Road, her companion beginning to be uneasy and success and speed intoxicating her, and as she takes the corner sends two milk cans hurtling down the road. She misses a swearing stag-like leaping wing commander by inches and jams on the brakes to a halt in front of the frozen face of a station policeman. Mickey has not driven for some years and then only in Prague and on the wrong side of the road. The nearly run-over wing commander was very, very mad. Only much effort, not helped by Mickey's merry laughter as she sat in the van, destruction right and left, got her out of being put on a charge.
21 March 1940
In the afternoon Frances and Evans, with the solemn, nervously smiling faces of people who know their expressions ought to be sad, came to say, ‘We came to tell you something dreadful has happened. Oliver's husband has been killed.’ Oliver used to work with me; she's only been married six weeks; her husband was one of the Hendon sergeant pilots. He crashed near Birmingham and the plane caught fire.
Later, I went into our officers' room and reminded Annie that I was having Wednesday off for Barbara's wedding, and Mrs Burley, the Code and Cipher Officer, said she too was going to a wedding on Wednesday. I said it couldn't be the same one and she said ‘Howroyd’, and I said ‘David’, and the whole room shrieked because it is the same one.
After tea: sitting in the Recreation Room on guardroom duty, hearing more details about Oliver's husband, and everybody telling other dreadful accidents.
24 March 1940
Yesterday evening Bridget, Boompsie and I went to a dance at the Overseas Club to meet Canadians. Before I went I knew I was going to enjoy it, despite spots on my face through overeating and not being energetic enough. I had one of my moods when nothing mattered. Anyway the spots were only few and small and make-up covered them.
When we got there a Paul Jones18 was in progress and the end of it found me with an officer: very Canadian, very tight and a very good dancer. While others danced decorously around, we trucked and shagged and said ‘ha cha cha’, all his instructions to me being prefaced with a ‘honey child’. I felt like the whole of Gone With the Wind. By the time the next Paul Jones was over I was somewhat weary and ended that with a young French Canadian soldier who took me to supper and with whom I spent the rest of the evening. He's twenty-two and his name is Gerry. He's not good looking nor very well bred but he's young and fresh and I liked him a lot. I enjoyed it all.
At the end both of us wanted to make a date. I was only able to tell him my address and as he's new to London and doesn't speak much English I doubt if it registered; pity because he was fun.
This morning I was woken by Bridget at 7.30, said ‘what the hell’ and went to sleep till 9.30, when I had to tear to work without any breakfast. I had meant to have a quiet afternoon reading and gardening and having a necessary bath, but Eric phoned up and said he was free till seven o'clock, so I went up to town and we went to the zoo. He asked me out next Friday. I only have a French class, which I could have postponed, but I heard myself refusing. I cannot accept every time he asks me.
That beastly sergeant who wouldn't give the men soft fried bread has been put on a charge for swiping coal; I'm very glad.
28 March 1940
This new diary is much too small but it is all that the shop had. I'm starting it off anyway in proper style with a description of Barbie's wedding. Yesterday, a quarter to two saw me waiting for a bus outside Simpson's in Piccadilly. I was looking very smart and clean with my hair newly set, my buttons shining and I was wearing my Moss Bros best blue.
This part of London was sleek and prosperous with its offices and ‘not-having-to-think-about-having-to-take-a-taxi’ people. The sun was shining on its large