The Bomb Girls Read Free Page B

in the autumn of 1940, which was only six months ago but it already seemed like a lifetime. Even though her heart was breaking there’d been no choice but to let Esther go; evacuees were on the move up and down the land and a little girl suffering from polio was considered a priority case for a move out of London. Agnes had just about held it together as she was parted from hysterical Esther, who ripped at her clothes and clung onto her, screaming her little heart out.
    The nurses looking after the sick children on the train heading north to Penrith were kind, firm and determined.
Esther’s nurse unwound the child’s little fingers from her mother’s grip, stopped her mouth with a jelly baby then slammed the carriage door on Agnes. The last sight she had of sobbing Esther was swallowed up by a thick cloud of smoke as the train pulled out of Euston station. Wiped out by grief, Agnes had all but fallen to the ground. She had no memory of how she got home but she would never forget the sight of the empty flat when she did return. There on the lino floor was Esther’s little dolly with one leg shorter than the other. Agnes had knitted it herself and used it as a tool to explain to Esther why one of her legs was strong and healthy whilst the other remained limp and twisted. Clutching the dolly, Agnes crumpled into an armchair where she finally allowed herself to cry until her chest hurt.
    She hadn’t seen Esther at Christmas time, though she had received a charming card and photograph of her daughter from the old couple in Keswick who looked after Esther when she wasn’t having treatment at the local cottage hospital. Her little girl looked taller and stronger, though the sight of her daughter’s leg strapped into an iron calliper shocked Agnes.
    All winter she’d tried to get a few days off from the Woolwich Arsenal where she worked but nobody was granted leave, especially a mature, trained supervisor on a vital bomb line. It was the Luftwaffe who’d eventually done Agnes a favour. Their nightly bombing of the Woolwich Arsenal had become a cause of huge national concern. If the arsenal should blow the blast could reach the West End, leaving a crater over half a mile long and untold casualties. It was essential that bomb plants and Bomb Girls
were moved swiftly to places of safety outside London, places like Cardiff, Aberdeen, Poole, Glamorgan, Ellesmere Port and Lancashire. Agnes smiled as she dismounted from the bus swinging her gas mask.
    Lancashire, she thought to herself, the next county to Cumberland, that has to be a move for the better – only one county away from Esther.
    The foreman told Agnes that she’d be moved to Pendle by the beginning of May.
    ‘Could I take a few days off before, to visit Esther?’ Agnes enquired.
    The foreman shook his head.
    ‘Sorry, no dispensations for leave,’ he said with a guilty look.
    ‘You’ve been saying that since Esther left last year,’ Agnes said bitterly.
    ‘It’s your fault for being such a first-rate supervisor,’ he replied. ‘It was you who spotted that witless Vera wearing hair grips and earrings last week. One spark off them and the whole cordite line would have blown!’
    Agnes gave a grudging nod. Vera just couldn’t get it into her empty head that metal in a bomb factory was banned because of its sparking potential. It had taken Agnes some time to make Vera wear a turban; she said it flattened her permawave! Nobody argued with Agnes for long. Her dark brooding eyes behind her black bottle-top glasses and her determined jaw brooked no nonsense, and anyway the workers had big respect for their supervisor. It was common knowledge that her husband had been reported missing at the start of the war.
    Agnes would never forget that sunny, sultry morning,
Sunday, 3 September 1939. Everybody knew war was coming: Hitler had unleashed air and ground forces across Poland in direct response to Neville Chamberlain’s ultimatum.
    Sitting side by side, she and Stan