The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces

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The ‘hussif’ – or ‘housewife’ – was a sewing kit issued to every member of the services, and was just one of a bewildering array of items that Jessie soon found herself piling into a large Army kitbag. First there was the basic ATS uniform: shirt, skirt, tunic, tie and cap, along with stockings, suspender belt and bra – plus three pairs of voluminous khaki bloomers, which were known throughout the ATS as ‘passion killers’. Jessie found that two of hers were broadly speaking wearable, but the third for some reason stretched from above her bosom to below her knees.

Next came two pairs of heavy lace-up shoes, plimsolls, a top and shorts for physical training, a field dressing, knife, fork, mug and spoon (collectively known as ‘irons’), towels, hairbrush, comb and toothbrush, plus special brushes and implements for polishing shoes and buttons.

On top of all this, every girl was handed a gas mask, complete with a haversack to carry it in, and – last but by no means least – a supply of sanitary towels. The cost of providing these had been met by the generous Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors – and as a result they were known unofficially as ‘Nuffies’. Little did he know that in addition to their intended purpose, they were used by resourceful girls in uniform for everything from cleaning buttons to straining coffee grounds. Those with loops were even fashioned into makeshift eye-masks, popular with night-shift girls trying to catch 40 winks in the daytime.

By the time they were all kitted out, the new recruits were ready to retire for the evening, but first they had to face the dreaded Free from Infection parade, or FFI. Lining up one by one, the girls were asked to pull their knickers down as the doctor inspected them for parasites and venereal disease, before their armpits were checked for lice, their hair gone through with a nit comb and their chests and backs examined for rashes. For the sorry few who failed the nit-comb test, the treatment offered a further humiliation: their hair was cut short and covered in a thick black paste made from coal tar, paraffin and cottonseed oil, before being wrapped up in a turban.

Finally, once the FFI was over, Jessie and the other girls were issued with a pair of sheets each and led to the large wooden dormitory huts, each containing 30 hard iron beds, which were to be their home for the coming weeks. Each bed had a mattress made up of three separate square parts or ‘biscuits’, as well as an uncomfortable-looking straw bolster for a pillow, and three grey blankets for warmth.

Jessie was disappointed to find that she wasn’t sharing a dorm with Olive or Mary, who were both in the next hut along. Instead, she was bunking with a group of strangers, who, judging by their accents, hailed from every inch of the country, from Lands End to John o’ Groats. The cacophony of different voices was quite something, but it was the Londoners who really stood out to Jessie. Whether cut-glass or Cockney, they all sounded so confident and loud, and beside them she felt like a bit of a country bumpkin.

The next morning, Jessie packed up her civilian clothes in her suitcase so that the Army could post them home to her parents, and dressed in her new ATS uniform for the first time. Then she and the other girls in her hut grabbed a quick breakfast in the canteen before they were introduced to one of the staples of basic training: drill practice.

The girls lined up on the parade ground as a red-faced male sergeant strode up and down in front of them. From the sour expression on his face, he obviously wasn’t too impressed with what he saw. ‘When I call “Attention!” I want you to bring your left foot in to your right,’ he announced. ‘Ready? Atten-shun!’

Jessie instantly snapped to attention, her back as straight as a pole. Thanks to her father’s example, she had a pretty good idea of what military posture looked like.

‘As you were,’ the sergeant shouted. ‘Now, ri-i-ght turn!’

Jessie pivoted 90 degrees to her right and sharply brought her feet back together. But, looking ahead of her, she could see some girls were facing the wrong way.

‘Don’t you know your right from your left?’ the sergeant shouted at them, exasperated. The confused girls giggled, and awkwardly shuffled round to face the front.

‘Now, when I say, “By the left, quick march,” you’re going to leave on the left foot with the right arm up,’ the man told them. ‘Forget what your mothers told you and make sure you open your legs.’

There was barely time to take the information in before he bellowed, ‘By the le-e-ft, qui-i-ck MARCH!’

The girls began moving forward as the sergeant bellowed, ‘Left! Right! Left! Right! Left! Right!’ Thanks to her dancing experience, Jessie found it easy to keep in time, and to make sure her arms were swinging alternately with her feet. But not all her colleagues were finding the training so straightforward. The basic marching movement was too much for some of them to grasp, and they were waddling forward with arms flailing out randomly.

Their posture didn’t exactly match Jessie’s straight-backed bearing either. ‘Stop slouching, and keep your legs open,’ the sergeant bellowed at the group. ‘What are you, a bunch of pregnant virgins?’

In the face of such a nonsensical insult, the new recruits struggled not to laugh.

When they weren’t drilling, the girls spent much of their time at the training camp in lectures, scribbling down notes in little exercise books. There were talks on the history of the local regiment in Leicester, and on the basics of Army discipline. ‘You won’t be asked to do something, and you won’t be told to do it either,’ they were informed. ‘You’ll be ordered, and you’d better know the difference.’

Among the many topics covered in the lectures was the uncomfortable subject of venereal disease, or ‘VD’. Many girls who had yet to learn the facts of life were shocked at being told about the virtues of ‘French letters’, and even the more worldly wise were horrified by the grisly photographs of syphilitic sores that flashed up on a giant screen in front of them. But for the ATS, sexually transmitted diseases were no laughing matter. National rates of gonorrhoea and syphilis had more than doubled since the start of the war, and it was estimated that one out of every 200 ATS girls had already been infected.

Of all the lectures that Jessie attended in her first week of training, the one that made the strongest impression on her was a talk about Anti-Aircraft Command. To begin with, the Royal Artillery’s ‘ack-ack’ gun-sites had been strictly male environments, but the drive to free up men for fighting roles abroad was seeing the formation of a number of mixed heavy gun batteries. The prime minister’s daughter, Mary Churchill, had been among the earliest ATS girls to join one of them.

The Army was keen to boost recruitment among the current cohort of ATS trainees, and as the girls sat and listened, the speakers pressed home the importance of the guns in defending Britain’s cities against German bombers. ‘When you’re asked what job you’d like to do in the Army,’ they told the hut full of young women, ‘we want as many of you as possible to request ack-ack.’

Jessie was very much taken with the idea of serving on the guns. She had joined the ATS keen to do something meaningful for the war effort, and helping to shoot down German planes sounded a lot more exciting than answering the telephone or working as a kitchen orderly like her old schoolmate Peggy. And the idea that, like Jim, she would be serving in the Royal Artillery appealed to her too. She decided then and there that when the time came, she would put her name down for ack-ack.

After a week of daily drill, even the most uncoordinated recruits had begun to master the basics of marching, and were able to about-turn at a moment’s notice, salute to the side while still moving forwards, and halt without piling into each other. Now that she wasn’t the only girl capable of keeping in rhythm, Jessie was enjoying the regular practices more than ever. She might be petite, but she felt like a small cog in a very powerful machine, and the sound of a hundred feet hitting the ground together was exhilarating.

Jessie was also growing used to the regimented nature of Army life, which infused every hour of her time at the training camp. In the mornings the girls had to dismantle – or ‘barrack’ – their bedclothes, stacking them up in perfect piles. Then they were subjected to kit inspections, in which each item had to be laid out in a prescribed pattern. At night, they had to polish their shoes and tunic buttons until they shone.

Every moment of the day was accounted for – the girls were told when to wake up and when to go to sleep, even when to visit the communal washing facilities, or ‘ablutions’, where they were allowed to shower three times a week. The lack of privacy there was just part of the ATS way of life – a reminder that, like every item of kit, the girls’ bodies belonged to the Army.

The one small touch of individuality they were allowed was a little shelf above each bed, where they could place a few personal items. Jessie had proudly displayed a photograph of Jim, and she saw that many of the other girls also had pictures of their sweethearts back home.

Despite the busy training schedule, Jessie wrote to her fiancé every couple of days, but she was kept so busy that she barely had time to miss him. In the evenings the girls in her hut would stay up singing and chatting together until lights out at 10.30 p.m., and if they weren’t cleaning and polishing their uniforms while they did it, they were doing embroidery. There was a concession in the barracks that sold the patterns, and Jessie was working on a tablecloth.

If the first part of ATS training was about instilling a respect for Army discipline, the second was for sorting the wheat from the chaff. The girls lined up in an exam hall to sit a series of intelligence and aptitude tests, with questions on general reasoning and mathematics. There they were asked to write an essay about their lives before they had signed up, to assess their spelling and grammar.

When the written exams were out of the way, they were given eye checks to establish how far they could see, and a steady-hand test where they had to avoid setting off a buzzer. Then there were memory and visual recognition tests, in which cards showing various German planes were flashed in front of them and they had to try to remember which was which.

By the time Jessie was led into a little room and asked what trade she would like to be considered for, her head was spinning, but she confidently proclaimed, ‘Ack-ack, please.’ A corporal made a note on a clipboard and sent her on her way.

Finally, at the end of their time at the training camp, the girls all gathered to be assigned to their postings. As a corporal read their names off a list one by one, they waited anxiously to hear what their future in the Army would be. Some trades, such as cook, were so unpopular that girls had been known to go to extreme lengths to get out of them, as evidenced by the occasional dollop of mustard in the morning’s porridge.

Since Jessie’s surname was Ward, she was one of the last to hear what role she had been assigned to. Mary and Olive had already been told they were going to an ack-ack training camp in Berkshire, and she crossed her fingers, hoping that she would be setting off with them.

Finally, the corporal came to her name. ‘Private Ward,’ she called out. ‘Anti-aircraft.’

At that moment, Jessie couldn’t have been happier. She was joining the artillery, and would soon be giving the Germans what for.