The Bomb Girls Read Free Page A

of a girl in front of her. She was barely five foot tall and a bag of bones. Lank brown hair framed a delicate heart-shaped face that would have been lovely if it hadn’t been so bruised and tired.
    ‘I heard the news just now,’ Elsie started nervously. ‘Mr Bevin asking lasses to register for war work.’
    The lady behind the desk nodded and smiled.
    ‘What did you have in mind, pet, farm work or filling shell cases?’
    ‘Will I have to go away?’ Elsie asked in a tight, tense voice.
    ‘If it’s a problem, pet, I’m sure we can find work for you locally.’
    ‘NO!’ Elsie almost shouted. ‘I want to get away from …’ She blushed and stopped short as heads turned in her direction. ‘Send me as far away as possible,’ she pleaded in a whisper.
    ‘Sign on the dotted line, pet,’ the lady said as she pushed a form and a pencil across the desk. ‘There’s some bonny munitions factories a wee way down south.’
    Elsie’s feet barely touched the ground as she walked away from the Labour Exchange.
    ‘I’m going away, I’m going away! Thank you, Mr Bevin; thank you, Mr Churchill; thank you, God!’ she chanted under her breath as she skipped towards her front door, where she stopped dead in her tracks. Taking a deep breath she pushed open the door. Next time she walked out of here, she thought to herself, she would either be in a coffin or carrying a suitcase.
    Mr Hogan got his daughter in a stranglehold and all but throttled her when she broke the news.
    ‘You’re going bloody nowhere!’ he roared. Slamming her slight frame against the kitchen wall, he hit Elsie repeatedly around the head until she saw stars.
    Terrified she’d lose consciousness, Elsie cried out: ‘Dad! Dad! It’s the law. Churchill wants women workers.’
    Mr Hogan stopped his hand mid-punch.
    ‘CHURCHILL!’ he bellowed. ‘What the ’ell’s he to do wi’ owt?’
    Not daring to open her mouth, Elsie cowered on the
stone floor with blood trickling from her nose. Amazingly her stepmother had saved her from another swipe, not because she had an ounce of human kindness in her but just because she enjoyed showing off her knowledge to her slow, doltish husband.
    ‘Female conscription,’ she announced. ‘There’s not enough men left to work, apart from the likes of you,’ she added with a sneer. Mr Hogan always claimed he was exempt from active service because of his miner’s lungs but his wife knew he’d bribed somebody to fix his papers. ‘Lasses are being put to work; it’s good money, mind, anything up to four pound a week.’
    Mr Hogan’s bullish eyes all but rolled out of his head.
    ‘That’s bleedin’ more than I earn!’ he roared.
    Elsie slipped into the wash house where, as she wiped blood off her face, she strained her ears to listen to the conversation in the next room.
    ‘It’d be one less mouth to feed and she can send her earnings home every week,’ her stepmother said.
    Elsie nodded in agreement; she might get a few more slaps and kicks before she left home but she was leaving all right, that was
the law
. As she dabbed the last of the blood away, she smiled slowly to herself. What neither her father nor her stepmother knew was that she was
never
coming back!

CHAPTER
4
Agnes
    Sitting on the lower deck of a London bus with her long dark hair plaited tightly under a thick net and a thin coat pulled around her tall angular frame, Agnes scowled at the April shower that battered the bus bouncing over the rutted road to Greenwich. Exhausted after a twelve-hour shift supervising a line of Bomb Girls all aged under twenty, Agnes grimly pondered her options. She could stay in London and get blown up or she could move to Lancashire where she stood less of a chance of getting blown up. It was a lose/lose situation apart from the singular fact that by moving north she would be in the adjoining county to Esther.
    Just thinking of her little daughter brought tears to Agnes’s eyes. She’d been separated from her