Duncan Barrett - Margery’s Story - Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces

The huts were not only cold but dark as well, and the dwindling daylight hours made it increasingly hard for the girls to read the paperwork in front of them. They complained bitterly to each other and encouraged Margery, who as ‘the girl from the course’ carried a certain dubious authority, to mention the problem to a WAAF officer on their behalf. But to Margery’s dismay, when the unimpressed officer turned up at the hut and demanded to know if anyone else felt the same way as she did, suddenly the cat seemed to have got her colleagues’ tongues. Margery was carted off in an ambulance to get her eyes tested at the nearest hospital, returning with a very ugly pair of steel spectacles. They were distance glasses, so they made no difference to her work in the dimly lit office, but the sight of her wearing them gave the rest of the girls a good laugh.

One thing that brightened Margery’s days at Titchfield was the arrival of the latest letter from James Preston, the Army cook from Lancashire who she had met during her training in Penarth. He had recently been posted to a camp on the Isle of Dogs in London, and for Margery his long, artfully written letters brought every detail of his experiences there to life. Tearing open the latest missive to find page upon page of his beautiful handwriting always brought a smile to her face.

It was James who had helped allay Margery’s loneliness during her time in Wales, but at Titchfield she made her first proper friend in the WAAF – a Geordie woman in her mid-thirties called May Strong, who more than lived up to her name. May was the corporal in charge of Margery’s dorm hut, and slept in a private room at one end of it. Before the war, she had worked as an office manager at a paint factory in Haltwhistle, a coal-mining town not far from Newcastle. She had a natural self-assurance and authority, combined with a talent for leadership, and all the girls in the hut looked up to her – none of them more so than Margery.

One evening, when one of Margery’s hut-mates was suffering with a bad cold, May announced that she knew just what to do. ‘A tot of whisky would cure this,’ she proclaimed. Then turning to Margery, she said, ‘Come on, we can get some at the Joseph Paxton.’

It wasn’t exactly an order, but somehow Margery didn’t feel she could say no, so she grabbed an empty bottle and accompanied May to the pub in the nearby town of Locks Heath.

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