Colette
Copyright© 2022 by Iskander
Chapter 2
December 1939 – November 1940
When the war broke out, my English father insisted we move back to England. I heard the arguments through my bedroom wall. My mother wanted to stay; she could not countenance leaving her position teaching chemistry at the Sorbonne, her French family or her friends; but my father had re-joined the RAF and England represented safety for the people he most loved.
In the last war, Paris remained free – moving to England for this war seemed unnecessary. I wanted to stay in Paris with all my friends, where I’d spent most of my life. My mother’s older sister, and her five children, my cousins, lived in Normandy where I’d spent summer holidays. We’d also visited England of course, staying with my English grandparents on the outskirts of the New Forest west of Southampton, but France – Paris – was my home.
My wishes and those of my mother counted for nought: we left Paris in mid-December 1939, just after my eighteenth birthday. Mother and I went straight to my grandparent’s house in Lyndhurst leaving father in London.
My grandparents made us welcome and father joined us for two days at Christmas, rather dashing in his uniform with the droopy RAF wings on his chest, a Squadron Leader’s rings on his sleeves. He assured everyone – but principally my mother – that he expected to be posted to a squadron as Intelligence officer or something like that and would not fly operations.
Granny Roberts volunteered with the local Red Cross, helping sort out and care for the children evacuated from London. She scooped us up to help with this and I passed the rest of the winter caring for a group of children from poor East End families. France has poor families, but not on the boulevards of Paris and my grandparents’ middle-class world had cocooned me during my visits to England.
These dislocated, scared youngsters from London’s east end taught me some realities of life. Torn away from London, their homes and the people they knew, their world had been shattered. As spring started to bud in gardens and the nearby New Forest, most of the children settled into the countryside life, but a few remained distraught at the cataclysmic change evacuation had brought. Some of the older children asked about returning to London as the war seemed a non-event, with none of the much-feared bombing of cities.
A group of disturbed and restless children of varying ages coalesced around me – perhaps because of my youth, diminutive stature and exotic French accent, signalling that, like them, I belonged elsewhere. They brought me their troubles; I listened and we hugged, sharing fears and tears. A quiet April blossomed into an unwarlike May and the push to return to London became louder.
One morning, I took my group of misfits on a walk into the fields and hedgerows, playing a game with them – they named what we saw and I taught them the French word which they had to remember and say when they saw it again – blackbird: merle, sheep: mouton. As children of the city, many lacked the English names for what we saw and I had to provide those as well – hawthorne: aubépine. We picnicked, eating our sandwiches in the dappled shade of a large oak growing in a hedgerow. When we returned to the Red Cross centre, drawn faces and rising tension greeted us.
Panzers were rolling across France and the low countries.
Through the next weeks, we watched in disbelief as France disintegrated and surrendered. My mother came close to collapse as the Wehrmacht swept through our country. Even the miracle of Dunkirk failed to raise our spirits as the unthinkable became a reality: England was next.
This terrifying, existential threat brought great unity of purpose to the country and clarified my thoughts; young and fit, I could contribute so much more than rambling through the fields with a group of evacuees.
I owed France for my happy years of childhood; I was honour bound to repay that debt.
I asked my father about joining the WAAFs – the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Two weeks later, having stretched to meet the minimum height requirement, I boarded a train to the WAAF training base at Harrogate.
Father had told me that since February, everyone entered the WAAFs at the bottom. This threw together people from all walks of life in basic training – and my education about the real world that started thanks to the East End children continued. I slept in a barrack room with eleven other women – all older than me. I’d never shared a room before and viewed the others in my barrack room nervously. My embarrassment peaked when ordered to strip to my panties while male doctors prodded and stared at me. But my shyness evaporated over the weeks of basic and by the end, I wandered around in undies in the barrack room like everyone else, thinking nothing of it.
In the last week of basic, they listed the jobs open to us, but made it clear that what we wanted counted for nothing against what the country needed. With no real idea about any of the jobs, I thought being a Met Observer, watching and recording the weather, sounded interesting, so I selected that. True to form for the armed forces, which usually confounded the desires of its members, I found myself training as an RDF operator, watching the skies for incoming enemy aircraft. The first thing we learned was that RDF stood for Range and Direction Finding – later called radar – and that it was top secret.
We were reminded about the Official Secrets Act we had signed on joining up.
I took to this specialist training: it piqued my interest and suited my unconventional science background, courtesy of my mother; perhaps the RAF understood me better than I knew myself. Our group of girls worked hard but wanted some fun as well. Our world might end tomorrow and that loosened restraints. The officers watched us closely and suspected every man of harbouring nefarious intent. But as those officers, too, wanted some diversion, we found ways to skirt round them, sneaking off to the local pub and once into town for a dance.
Churchill named the existential conflict in the sky the Battle of Britain. A daily, furious battle raged in the southern skies throughout our training. News filtered through that the Luftwaffe had bombed RDF stations and killed WAAFs, which gave us pause for thought. When a couple of trainees ‘washed out’ having failed the same test twice, I put my head down and fully applied myself.
We all wanted to work in the thick of it, in one of the RDF stations along the south coast where the big raids were coming in, but at the end of the course the RAF posted me to a place we had never heard of – Nether Button on the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Inevitably, one of my compatriot trainees rudely dubbed it Nether Bottom. I wondered if that’s what the people stationed there called it.
Just getting to Nether Bottom ... er Button ... proved quite an adventure involving two days and nights, multiple trains and a ferry. I arrived there at the beginning of September, with the Battle of Britain still raging down south. Nether Button proved to be the RDF station and a pair of nearby crofters’ cottages located about five miles south of Kirkwall, my port of arrival. We stayed in billets in Kirkwall. The RDF station fell under the command of RAF Kirkwall, currently host to a squadron of Hurricanes, but we never saw the station commander. Squadrons rotated through the airfield from the south, each getting a brief respite from the intense fighting while training replacement pilots with great urgency.
The RDF station never closed, its sleepless eye sweeping out across the North Sea towards Norway, enemy territory since April. We worked two four-hour shifts a day in a rotating three-day pattern that nominally provided us with a day off every ten days. But with sickness, transfers and people on occasional leave, shifts varied. Each day we checked the roster before leaving the station for the cold and draughty ride to Kirkwall in the back of a truck and set our alarm clocks for the following shift once we got to our digs.
At the start of the battle, the Luftwaffe sent unescorted bombers on daylight raids from Norway – but guided by our RDF, the fighters mauled them severely. They now only tried that at night. We found this frustrating: we watched them approach on the screens that showed us their position and height. From that we reported the track, altitude and the probable number of aircraft, but the RAF had no night fighters early in the war so the Boche carried on unopposed into England and Scotland until their returns faded from our screens. We’d track them again as they flew home having bombed their targets, the ghostly returns mocking our inability to engage.
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