Ella knocked on the door of the austerely furnished office at RAF Gulford, her dark blonde hair pinned back in a tidy roll, clutching her handbag which contained her certificate and references from Buchanan’s Secretarial College. A voice barked, ‘Come in!’ and she found herself standing before Squadron Officer Macpherson, the equally redoubtable sister-in-law of the Mrs Macpherson who chaired the branch of the Scottish Rural Women’s Institute where Ella’s mother had been assisting with jam-making for the war effort.
‘So, Eleanor, you wish to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.’ Squadron Officer Macpherson squared up the papers on the desk in front of her and fixed Ella with a steely eyed glance. ‘We have a number of roles to fill at this juncture, and I should say that your secretarial skills would be a welcome addition to the office here at Gulford. Yes, thank you, Victoria, you may leave the tray here.’ She broke off to glare at the girl in the air-force blue uniform who’d just brought in two cups of tea, as ordered, and was dawdling to grin at Ella instead of returning smartly to her post at the filing cabinets in the outer office.
Accepting the cup that was handed to her, Ella looked past Squadron Officer Macpherson to the window behind the desk, beyond which the deserted East Lothian airfield could be seen, comprising little more than a couple of Nissen huts and a makeshift hangar at one end of a landing strip surrounded by potato fields. The winter sky was a cold, flat grey and the wind, which blew straight in off the North Sea, snatched at the wind sock, causing it to spin wildly and strain at its fixings like a hunting dog eager for the off. A herring gull, which had been huddling on the scrubby grass alongside the runway, flapped its wings clumsily and then took off, suddenly graceful as it returned to its natural element, banking with outspread wings before disappearing seawards.
‘We shall also be requiring communications operators, a vital role, if that would be of interest. I’m sure you’d soon pick it up.’
Ella swallowed a sip of the tea, which was scarcely more than lukewarm and as weak as pond water, and plucked up her courage.
‘Thank you, I shall be pleased to accept whatever position you are able to offer me. I am absolutely committed to joining the WAAF and I very much appreciate you giving me this opportunity.’ She was aware that her mother’s formidable network of Edinburgh connections had already got her this far this quickly, and she didn’t want to push her luck.
‘But . . .’ Ella hesitated.
‘Yes, my dear?’
‘Well, it’s just that I should really like a role that’s a bit more practical. With the planes, I mean. I read that there’s someone called a rigger, who gets the aircraft ready to go and sees them back in and so on. And I know I don’t have any mechanical skills, but I promise you I’m a fast learner. And I should so like to be outside in the open air.’
Squadron Officer Macpherson pressed her lips together firmly. ‘Hmm, I see.’ She smiled, a little grimly. ‘Very well, Eleanor, you may have your wish. Let’s see what you’re made of. But I won’t be surprised if, within a couple of weeks, you are sitting here begging me to transfer you to a nice clean administrative role in a nice warm office.’
Ella beamed. ‘Oh, I won’t, Squadron Officer Macpherson. I promise. Thank you so much for giving me this chance.’
Her commanding officer stood, straightening the hem of her serge jacket, and extended a hand. ‘In that case, welcome to RAF Gulford, Eleanor. Now, let’s sort you out with your uniform and see if we can find you a billet.’
As the two girls took off their damp overcoats and hung them on the hooks in the narrow hallway of their digs, Jeanie Cochrane, their landlady, hailed them from the kitchen. ‘There’s a letter come for you, Ella.’ She handed her a flimsy envelope, addressed in Christophe’s distinctive handwriting, then turned back to stir the pot of mince – which was mostly onions and diced carrots, in fact, to pad out the fatty scraps of grey meat that the ration allowed. ‘That’ll be from your young man in France then?’
‘Aha, how is the gorgeous Christophe?’ Vicky pulled off her peaked cap and ran her fingers through her dark curls in a vague attempt to tidy the tangle the April wind had made of them on the bike ride home from the airfield. She sighed. ‘It’s so romantic, having a foreign boyfriend. I bet French boys treat their girls a lot better than British ones do. I’m going to have to find myself a foreign fella too. There’s a rumour that we’re going to get some Polish airmen stationed at the base, though I doubt the Poles are as romantic as the French.’ Vicky had progressed from her job amongst the filing cabinets to being a communications operator, which gave her access to all sorts of interesting and useful information.
‘Supper’ll be twenty minutes. I’ve just put the tatties on to boil.’ Jeanie turned to her young son, Dougie, who had come in from playing with his friends in the close now that they had been called in for their tea by their own mothers. ‘Not so fast. You can wash your hands and get that table set. Leave the girls in peace for five minutes, why don’t you?’
With his father in the army now and off to a training camp somewhere in the Highlands, Dougie was enjoying the leeway that being ‘At War’ entailed in the Cochrane household. Ella was aware that his status amongst his peers in the village of Gulford had shot up with the arrival of the two glamorous WAAFs. She’d overheard him telling them that he wasn’t interested in girls, but that Archie’s big brother, Tam, reckoned they were ‘right bonny ones, they lassies’. Ella and Vicky spoiled Dougie and sometimes gave him sweets from their rations, if there were any. Ella knew that, as she worked on the planes, Dougie was secretly hoping that one day she might be able to cadge him a ride in one.
Ella ran upstairs clutching her letter, while Vicky tactfully remained in the kitchen with Jeanie and Dougie to give her a little privacy in their shared bedroom whilst she read it.
‘Supper’s on the table. Time to tear yourself away from your French lover-boy.’ Vicky tapped on the bedroom door before sticking her head around it. ‘Oh Ella, sweetheart, what is it?’
Ella lay curled on her side on her bed, with the letter crumpled in her hand, her cheeks wet with tears that were soaking her pillow. Vicky sat down beside her and gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze.
Fumbling in the pocket of her jump-suit, Ella pulled out an oil-smudged handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘He’s joined up,’ she said, miserably, carefully smoothing out the sheets of Christophe’s letter and folding them so that they’d fit into the cigar box that she kept on the chest of drawers that separated the two beds in their sparsely furnished room. She reached up now and opened the box, its faint smell reminding her of the Martets’ Paris home, of Monsieur Martet’s after-dinner cigars, and French furniture polish and white lilies. She gently touched the shells that sat in the box on top of Christophe’s letters and the postcard of the Mona Lisa that Caroline had sent her: a razor shell, a sun-bleached oyster shell and Neptune’s locket, the hinged clamshell Christophe had given her that first night in the dunes.
She wiped her eyes and turned to her friend. ‘I knew he would, but I’d been hoping against hope that something would happen to stop it – some vital war work at the bank. Or flat feet. Anything that would keep him safely behind a desk in Paris.’
Vicky nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, but Ella, you know the French need every able-bodied man they have now that Mr Hitler is knocking at their front door.’
Ella knew that as well as anyone. Lately, the two squadrons currently based at RAF Gulford had begun a new pattern of training sorties. Previously, the Hurricane aircraft had been practising torpedo bombing in the Firth of Forth, with a view to deployment to protect the British fleet, rumoured to be concealed in Scapa Flow, if Vicky’s gleanings of information were correct. But these past ten days the planes she’d been sending up had been practising air combat manoeuvres, and Sandy, the flight sergeant who worked in the hangar fixing the planes when they needed more than just routine maintenance, said it was a sign that the boys were about to be deployed elsewhere. ‘Aye, it’ll be Holland or France right enough. Now, young Ella, hand me up that wrench so we can get things fixed up good and well to keep our boys safe while they’re giving that Adolf Hitler a right royal boot up his Nazi backside.’