The Light Over London(39)

After all of the examinations and waiting, I have finally received an assignment. I have no doubt there will be a great controversy over it, because you’ll never believe what it is. I’ll be working on the anti-aircraft guns! I can’t tell you how excited I am. It’ll be something real and concrete that I know will help win this war.

I miss you dearly, and I hate not knowing where you are or what it is you’re doing. I suppose, however, that you must be feeling a bit like that right now too, because soon I’ll be on a train to my new camp for more training. Just know that your girl is going to do everything she can to make you proud.

Yours always,

Louise





10


LOUISE


Almost four months later, Louise had to admit that Brigadier Melchen had been right. Life at Oswestry was hard.

After tumbling off the train at Oswestry at nearly four o’clock in the morning, the women had been given one day to settle in before their training started. Since then, they’d woken up at seven to drill and then spent hours attending classes, learning to identify every known German aircraft. Although it was important that all of them had a basic working knowledge of the Luftwaffe’s craft, this would be the responsibility of the spotter, a woman assigned to peer through the powerful binoculars and call out approaching aircraft. Two more women would operate the height and range finder by pinpointing the aircraft through their eyepieces. Finally, the two predictors would turn the dials to calculate with exacting precision how far the gun would have to fire, and the woman on the Sperry would set the fuse so the shell would explode at the precise moment to enact maximum damage. Then the Sperry operator would yell when there was a read, and the information would be relayed automatically from the predictor to the guns, and the gunner—always a man—would fire.

The entire operation was supposed to take a matter of seconds. The first time Louise and the women of B Section, 488 Battery, had tried to put all of the theory and learning they’d absorbed into practice, it had taken them two minutes and thirty-eight seconds.

“Congratulations, ladies. The Luftwaffe just dropped a high-explosive bomb on an East London tube station entrance and killed the forty-one people sheltering there because you didn’t stop them,” Bombardier Barker, a hard woman who lived up to her name, shouted at them. Louise had seen Charlie pinch Nigella to keep her from crying. The gunner, a hangdog-faced man named Cartruse, had lit up a cigarette and watched with a shake of his head while the two men who loaded the gun, Williams and Hatfield, snickered.

But under the unrelenting drilling of Bombardier Barker and her male counterparts, the women of B Section had grown faster and more certain in their actions. It quickly became clear that Mary had something of a photographic memory for German planes and proved herself to be an excellent spotter. Nigella and Charlie worked quickly on the height and range finder, and Louise, who could sometimes calculate sums faster than she could turn the dials, worked the predictor with Vera as Lizzie used the Sperry to set the shell’s fuse. Slowly but surely, Cartruse had stopped sighing and asking, “You sure?” every time Lizzie called, “Fuse!”

Over their four months together, the six women had grown close, thanks to a mix of genuine affection and long shifts into the night that were part of their training in preparation for air raids. They would be alert and working when the rest of Britain tried to sleep in their beds and bomb shelters. Louise, Vera, Charlie, Lizzie, Mary, and Nigella lived together, ate in the canteen together, and moved around the base in a pack. They were the Ack-Ack girls, the gunner girls, and, still a novelty among the RA, they were watched wherever they went. All of the stares might have bothered her once, but as part of this tight-knit troop of women, Louise hardly noticed.

One Thursday afternoon in late July, after a training session that had seen B Section hit eight out of their ten targets, all of them except Lizzie sat in the canteen, sipping cups of strong tea. Nigella had a bit of knitting on her lap and was clicking away with her needles, while Mary read out tidbits from a film magazine someone had left lying around on one of the tables. Charlie was sketching Vera’s patrician profile with quick, efficient strokes of a stub of pencil in a plain paper notebook she kept in one of her uniform pockets. Louise, however, was absorbed in her own world, a letter from Paul dated five days earlier. Although she wrote to him every day, he wrote less frequently because he was in active combat. When his letters came, however, she always treasured the tenderness in them.

You must understand why I worry. Being part of an anti-aircraft battery means being closer to the action than any man would wish for the woman who holds his heart. I wish you would consider a transfer, for my sake as much as your own.

She chewed her bottom lip, stuck somewhere in the difficult space between happiness and disappointment. They’d had this argument too many times. Ever since she’d told him she’d been assigned to Ack-Ack Command, he’d started to fret. The work was too dangerous. She would be shot at. She didn’t really know what she was getting herself into.

Each time she’d written him back. Yes, her work was dangerous, but so was his. Yes, she would be shot at, and so would he, when he was flying his missions. Yes, she knew what she was doing, and arguing was pointless. The ATS had selected her. The RA needed her. She was a gunner girl, and there was nothing Paul could do about it.

All of that logic laid out for him would calm him for a letter or two, but then he’d start again, pushing and pushing. This talk of a transfer, however, was new.