much.
All our love, Mother XXOO
From the very first, I loved to march. It was like dancing, planting my feet in measured lengths, swinging my hips a few inches to make my skirt sway back and forth, lifting my arms to shoulder height. When I caught a glimpse of the other girls, wheeling and turning together like a ribbon tied to a stick, I saw their shining eyes and rapt expressions.
On this frigid January day, we drew up before the examining stand in perfect formation. My eyes were full of tears but my head was high, my jaw clenched and my arms ramrod straight by my sides. When the last pin was presented, I whooped and tossed my hat into the air along with the others.
“Oh, Rose, you’ve been a brick.” Shy little Daphne hugged me. “I wish we had gotten the same posting.” Daphne had been assigned to work as a laundress, but she was ecstatic because her new station was only three miles away from her home.
“Don’t remind me, Daffy.”
Yesterday the other girls had ripped open their envelopes with feverish haste. I heard cries of glee and dismay around me as I fumbled with the flap. My heart sank as I read the terse message: I was ordered to take another three months of training.
“But nobody else in the class has their props already,” said Daphne, referring to the tiny set of propellers, which as Leading Aircraftwoman, I was now entitled to sew on my shoulders. “You skipped a whole rank! And nobody else had 98 percent in the technical exam! Lots of other girls wanted to train in photography.”
“I guess so,” I said doubtfully. “As soon as they found out I could use a camera and develop my own film, I was sunk.”
This is only a temporary setback, I told myself. The men posted to air bases had to train for months. And there was certainly a lot to learn, just to become a lowly darkroom technician.
We began with instruction in the assembly of a camera, characteristics of film, types of paper, and properties of light. Then we went to work in the laboratory, illuminated with a dim red light, called the “screaming room” because of the women’s reaction when their film didn’t turn out. I remembered how I had cried when MacTavish once fired me for spoiling a roll of film. I could laugh about it now, just barely.
My newspaper experience was helpful, because I already knew how to remove the film from the camera in total darkness and develop it in a tank of chemicals, rotating the tank by hand with a crank. I knew how to print photographs, too, placing the negative in the enlarger, exposing the paper to light and bathing it in hydrochloric acid before rinsing it with water. Here I didn’t hang the wet prints to dry, but fished them out of the tank with rubber tongs and flattened them against a huge revolving heated drum.
The new skill for me, and one that I enjoyed the most, was piecing together aerial maps. All the photographs were printed four inches square, and overlapped in a diagonal pattern to form an aerial view of the landscape below, as if a deck of cards had fallen over sideways. The edges were almost invisible, and the scale so accurate that the entire thing could be superimposed over a map with all the roads and railways matching.
I was so absorbed during the day that I didn’t think about anything but my work. At night, I was tired enough to fall asleep before the homesickness really sunk its teeth into me.
9
I tore open the envelope and pulled out my orders. Closing my eyes, I said a silent prayer before unfolding the stiff white sheet and reading: “Report to the Central Interpretation Unit, RAF Medmenham, 1300 hours, April 1, 1942.”
My disappointment was so intense that I felt dizzy. I raised my hand and pressed my fingers under my collarbone. Now I understood what that final interview was about, when they asked all those questions concerning family and friends. They were going to park me in some stuffy intelligence office. I’d never even heard of a place called Medmenham.
I requested a meeting with my commanding officer.
“You know it’s bad form to question a posting,” he said with a stern expression. “You should consider yourself lucky indeed to be assigned to this position. For one thing, it will put you in line for promotion. Many British girls would jump at the opportunity.” There was a faint emphasis on the word “British.”
He looked at my face and seemed to relent. “Don’t take it so hard, Jolliffe. It’s quite an honour to be selected for intelligence work. We can’t all fight the Hun, you know.”
The journey to my new headquarters, located in the Thames River valley forty miles northwest of London, took place on a typically sodden spring day. The landscape shimmered under a sheet of rain like a watercolour painting.
As the train jogged along, I closed my eyes against the deluge that poured down the windowpanes of my compartment and visualized the farm at this time of the year: new calves frisking around the pasture on legs like spindles, flocks of geese honking their way north, Dad’s rubber boots sticking out from under the tractor.
With my eyes closed, I fingered the set of propellers on my shoulder. My new rank made me feel a little better. Every recruit began as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class, called an Acey-Deucey, and after basic training was promoted to Aircraftwoman 1st Class. I had gone straight up to the third rank: Leading Aircraftwoman, or LAC. There were still nine ranks to go ending with wing officer, but I was glad to have made it this far.
As the train jerked to a halt, I opened my eyes. “Is your journey really necessary?” asked a threatening message on the wall. How I wished it weren’t. All signs had been removed to thwart the invading Germans, but I had counted the stops on my fingers and knew this was my destination, the town of Marlow.
I slung my gas mask container over one shoulder and struggled off the train with my kit bag. Why did they make us carry so darned much stuff? A canvas tube tied around the top with a rope, the kit bag contained my shoes, clothing, rain cape, and ground sheet. When my helmet fell out of the bag, I resisted the impulse to kick it across the platform.
“LAC Jolliffe?” A young transport driver with acne was walking toward me. I dropped the heavy bag on my foot and winced as I returned his salute.
“The lorry is around the corner, ma’am. Let me help you with that.” He picked up the bag and set off while I trotted along behind him, then hoisted myself into the cab of the transport truck while he loaded several boxes from the train.
We left the town and headed west along a winding road that followed the northern bank of the Thames River through a dense forest. The showers ended abruptly, as they often did in England, and the sun broke through the clouds, piercing the dark green leaves and dappling the road with golden coins of light.
As always, the sunshine lifted my spirits. Through an opening in the trees, I caught a glimpse of the Thames, the opalescent water gliding past the low riverbanks dotted with flocks of woolly sheep like huge fluffy dandelions gone to seed.
After a few miles, the driver turned off the main road and changed gears as the truck laboured up a steep, narrow incline. We broke through the trees at last and my new home came into view. The driver glanced at me with a smile. “Here we are, ma’am.”
