Annie Groves - The Grafton Girls

The bright summer sunshine was surely enough of an excuse for her to blink, Diane reassured herself as the train pulled out of the station. And if she was also blinking away those threatening tears then who was to know but her? No one here knew anything about her or her situation. That alone was enough to make her glad that the transfer she had begged for had brought her here.

‘HQ Western Approaches won’t be what you’re used to here, Wilson,’ she had been warned when she had been called to the office to receive her new orders from her commanding officer.

‘But I’ll still be working as a teleprinter operator, won’t I, ma’am?’ she had asked, uncertainly.

‘Well, as to that, I dare say that yes, you will. But Derby House is a joint effort run principally by the Senior Service,’ she told Diane, referring to the British Navy, ‘unlike here, where it’s all RAF. It will be part of your duty as a WAAF to make sure that you create the right impression on those you’ll be working with.’ When her CO had added, straight-faced, ‘The Senior Service takes a pretty dim view of flighty behaviour,’ Diane hadn’t known whether or not she was cracking a joke.

‘The CO joke?’ one of her pals had scoffed when she had related the incident to her. ‘That’ll be the day!’

Diane hadn’t really needed her CO’s warning. Everyone in uniform knew about the rivalries between the various services, and that the Senior Service in particular tended to look down somewhat on the upstart RAF.

She could practically hear Kit’s voice now -strong and filled with good humour as he laughed, ‘The trouble with those Senior Service lot is that they’re jealous of our success.’

‘You mean because of the Battle of Britain?’ Diane had asked, thinking he had meant that the navy men envied the victory the RAF had had over the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940, when men like Kit had driven back the incoming German fighters.

‘No,’ she remembered Kit had told her, his eyes – fighter pilot’s far-seeing eyes – crinkling up at the corners with amusement as he had leaned forward and told her boldly, ‘I meant because of our success with the fairer sex.’

She had pretended to be dismissive, tossing her head as they stood together at the small bar of the packed Cambridgeshire pub on that breathlessly hot summer night, but when a careless airman, overeager to get to the bar before the beer ran out, had accidentally bumped into her, she hadn’t complained when Kit had made a grab for her waist. ‘To protect you,’ he had assured her guilelessly, but he hadn’t been in any hurry to release her, and the truth was that by that stage she had been too entranced by him to want him to. With Kit, over six foot tall, broad-shouldered, with a shock of thick wavy dark hair, and the kind of good looks and easy charm that had already got him a nine out of ten rating in the WAAF canteen, there was barely a girl Diane knew who wouldn’t have fallen for his charms.

But there had been another side to him, or so she had believed. A side that…

The sudden jerk of the train’s brakes brought her back to the present. Already the corridor outside her carriage was packed with passengers wanting to get off. Diane reached up to the overhead luggage rack to remove her kitbag, ready to join the stream of people disembarking at Lime Street.

So this was Liverpool. The voices she could hear all around her certainly had very different accents from those in Cambridgeshire, although the Liverpool accent wasn’t the only one swelling the noise in the busy station, and Diane’s eyes widened a little when she saw – and heard – how many Americans there were clustered around in large groups.

They would, of course, be the ‘Yanks’ from the American base at Burtonwood, which her fellow traveller had mentioned. American bases were being established in Lincolnshire, and at Bomber Command, in High Wycombe, and there had been American personnel at the Cambridgeshire base as well. Diane had heard from some of the other girls about the attractions of the American male and the American PX – as the stores on the newly established American supply bases were named -both generous providers of much that was unavailable or rationed, including chocolate and stockings.

The station platforms were busy with men in uniform, with the distinctively dressed women of the Women’s Voluntary Service also very much in evidence with their tea urns. Diane would not have said no to a cuppa herself, but it had already gone five in the evening and she still had to find her way to her billet near Wavertree.

One of the friendly WVS women was happy to explain to Diane how to get to her billet on Chestnut Close, which was in what she described approvingly as ‘a respectable part of the city’.

‘It’s a fair walk, but you could take the bus.’

‘No, I’d prefer the walk,’ Diane assured her.

The summer sunshine had enough warmth in it to make her walk a pleasant one, and to allow her to pause to stare in shocked compassion at the blitzed and bombed-out centre of the city. She could see huge gaps where it looked as though whole streets had disappeared, and smaller ones, where only a single house had gone, leaving the rest of the street intact.

The city was very different from the pretty Hertfordshire village where she had grown up, Diane acknowledged. Her parents were far from well off, but their semi was one of several on a quiet leafy lane opposite the village green and duck pond. Diane had grown up knowing virtually everyone else who lived in the village. She couldn’t help contrasting the pretty comfortable calm of her home village with the devastation of this powerful northern port city. Her parents had been proud but anxious when she had announced her intention of doing her bit and joining up, and they had been even more anxious when she had told them that she was seeing an airman, insisting that she took him home with her so that they could meet him. Although at first they had been cool towards him, by the time Diane and Kit’s forty-eight-hour pass was up, Kit had completely charmed them. Diane had been so thrilled and proud, both of him and her parents. Of course, the minute her mother had discovered that he was virtually an orphan, having lost his mother shortly after his birth, she had taken to fussing over him. They had laughed about it together later, Kit teasing Diane that once they were married she would never be able to run home to her mother because she would always take his side. She had laughed too, telling him with the assurance that falling in love brought that she would never ever want to run anywhere other than to him.

She had been so deliriously happy, living in a world coloured by her hopes and dreams for the future, even if her heart had been in her mouth during every mission Kit flew, her fear always that he might not make it back. Too happy, she knew now. And her fear should not just have been for Kit’s survival but for the survival of their love.

She had been so busy with her own thoughts whilst she was walking that she hadn’t really observed very much of her surroundings, and it came as a surprise when she realised that she must have passed the hospital she had been told to look out for and that she could now see the Picton Clock landmark she had been warned meant that she had gone too far and missed her turning.

An elderly woman, obviously having noticed her looking around, came over to her.

‘Lost your way, have you?’ she enquired.

‘I’ve been billeted to Chestnut Close,’ Diane explained, ‘but I think I’ve missed my turning.’

‘Well, as to that,’ the other woman sniffed, ‘you have, yes. This is Wavertree, not Edge Hill.’ The way she stressed what she obviously considered to be the superiority of ‘Wavertree’ would normally have made Diane smile. A similarly petty type of snobbery existed in Melham on the Green, the village where she had grown up, with one end of it being considered ‘better’ than the other. Kit had enjoyed teasing her about her mother’s pride in the fact that their well-cared-for semi was just over the invisible border that separated the ‘better’ end of the village from the ‘other’ end. ‘And, of course, we aren’t supposed to give out directions to strangers,’ the elderly lady added pompously.