whirl of publicity it's going to be hard being nobody when the war's over.
8 November 1939
Last night a good time was had by all. Six of us went to a cinema at Hendon and saw an excellent French film called Drame de Shanghai. After the film we stumbled through the blackout to a restaurant where we ate frankfurter sausages and sauerkraut and laughed immoderately. On our return, Joyce's car refused to go and after pushing it miles down roads assisted by taxi drivers and pursued by buses the other four went home to sign us in before 9.30, leaving Joyce and me to park the car in the Hendon Way and walk across half the aerodrome to the MT7 sheds and a driver Joyce knew who would retrieve and mend it for her. It was a wonderful walk – stars and a clear sky and the wind in our hair. Joyce and I are trying to get out of our present house for one where we can have a room to ourselves and a little less of this hearty communal living.
9 November 1939
Owing to the pleasing fact that all surplus No. 11 Company WAAF are being posted away from Hendon at a great rate, our previous billet, No. 7 Booth Road, was formally condemned and Joyce and I this evening moved into the top bedroom of No. 18. After No. 7, where every time you put the blackout down, part of the wall falls with it and where our bedroom was like trying to live and sleep on a dirty, busy railway platform, this is the Ritz Hotel.
We have a large room intended for three but which we trust to keep exclusively to ourselves, and now we have got it straight we have to keep on looking to believe it's true. One thing it lacked was a table. Remembering that No. 7 was condemned anyway we decided that we, as well as anyone else, might as well enjoy the pickings. With this in mind Joyce and I carried out the table under cover of the blackout down Booth Road, but even in a blackout a table is not easy to disguise. We were caught on our new doorstep by Johnston, one of the girls downstairs, but were able to laugh it off airily and take it upstairs, without removing any great part of the staircase wall, where it now rests, very fetching with our wireless on it.
Later in the evening Joyce returned to collect the last of her luggage from No. 7, while I washed and scrubbed in the bath. Frances and Mike and some chaps had returned from the cinema and cried angrily about the missing table. Joyce not only denied stealing it but questioned a justly indignant Mickey about its disappearance. She was about to depart when Frances asked if she could come round in the morning and see what sort of room we's got. ‘Yes,’ said Joyce, turning a little blue. The table is very large and very obvious. The situation is not what I's call happy.
13 November 1939
Coming back here from leave I was told that breakfast had been changed from the ladylike hour of eight to the grey and ‘still a few stars’ time of 7.15 in order that we may come back later and clean up our respective houses. Still, in compensation, the WAAFs themselves have taken over the cooking completely and everything now is cleaned and better and – excess of refinement – we have flowers on the tables.
15 November 1939
Coming back in the Tube, an overheard dialogue: ‘What's she?’ (I had my uniform on, at least all of it I've got which includes a hat.)
‘Oh’ – contemptuously – ‘Fire Service.’ (Me sitting there with ‘RAF’ bang in the middle of my uniform.)
‘Why don't you join it?’
‘They only take all those society and titled people.’
Visible attempt from me to look society and titled.
20 November 1939
On Saturday Joyce and I and two other girls got given tickets for an ice hockey match at Wembley. We had simply super seats and enjoyed ourselves greatly, eating a great quantity of miscellaneous food and cheering immoderately. At about ten we left to see our home bus disappearing into the blackout. After forty minutes of waiting in the rain we were glad to see the next bus, so judge our disgust when the conductor told us that the last bus right through to Colindale went at eight o'clock A.M. After another wait we got a train to Wembley Park, and after a still longer wait in still heavier rain for a nonexistent bus we had to take a taxi back: not very kind on my slight finances. We had to be in by twelve as there had been a hell of a stink the night before when five WAAF came in at five in the morning from a night out at the Kit Kat Club with those forbidden gods, the officers.
Yesterday everybody else in the house was out so I lit a fire, ate a lot, went to bed with a bottle and listened in the darkness to The Thin Man on our wireless, and then slept until woken up by Joyce dropping her Optrex bottle at one o'clock in the morning. On the bottom of her bed was a pile of books brought from her home, all of them asking that I read them, and I'm starting tonight on Clement Dane's Will Shakespeare.
Tomorrow, those of us who were posted to Hendon move over to work at Station Headquarters, I with the job I've been hoping for: secretary to the Commanding Officer (CO), Mrs Rowley – small, dark, handsome, immaculate, sensible, intelligent, fair and so many things so few women ever are. Today I went up and collected my anti-gas clothing which consists of a five-times-too-large coat and a colossal hat. In all this, plus goggles and gas mask, I certainly shan't die of a gas attack. I'll be suffocated long before that.
25 November 1939
One day last week in the inevitable rain I went over to Bunty's on late leave pass. My hat had been borrowed by another WAAF – twelve of us had been chosen to take part in a Tommy Trinder8 film and between us we had pooled our uniform resources to equip them creditably – and I arrived untidy, dirty and shabby but full of such confidence that neither clothes nor looks mattered at all.
I ate enormously, had a bath there by torch light as of course the Goldies9 had not got proper blackout curtains, and cleaner but with hair even more untidy went back to laugh and talk with Bunty, Bernie and Eric10 with such effect that Eric took me back as far as King's Cross. Sitting beside him in an empty Tube carriage and laughing with him over a coffee at King's Cross Station I tried to remember that a ‘to-be-remembered’ moment was happening and that I must savour it fully, but the time went on and then I was waving him goodbye, and when I was back at Hendon it was unreal and unhappenable. I wish I got these moods of get anything and confidence more often. When they come nothing can stop me. When I really want a thing it always happens.
I've had my first promotion in the WAAF. I was reclassified on Thursday to ACW111 from ACW2 and get, I think, sixpence more a day. I also went to Moss Bros today and ordered a second uniform (the first, I may say, is still to be issued to me), Mother having advanced me the money. I'm being fitted on Friday and it should be ready for me in ten days. I've optimistically and illegally had it made in officer's cloth.
29 November
