For the Duration: A Lighthearted WAAF Memoir

10. Winding Down: 1945

145 10.Winding Down 1945 It was in February 1945 that I arrived at RAF Cranwell.1 At about the same time, Roosevelt and Stalin sat down together at the Yalta Conference to plan Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. British troops were reaching the Rhine on a ten-mile front, General Douglas MacArthur was entering Manila in the Philippines, and massive air raids on Tokyo were just beginning. Cranwell was a very different kettle of fish from the last three stations I had been on, all of which had been small. Here I was one of forty-five WAAF officers of all various trades and professions. We were in a couple of the larger peacetime brick houses, which by their sizes must have been for the most senior officers and their families. We had a dozen or so Code and Cyphers, Medical Officers, Accountants , Equipment and Catering Officers as well as us, the Admin types. There were some half dozen or so of us and we were already beginning to get memos from on high about the first steps in the incredibly complicated business of the return to civilian life. Just how the gradual winding down process was to be initiated and organised, and what our role in it as Admins was to be, began only to emerge as the days and weeks passed. I set to work acclimatising myself to being one of a team again, which I had not been since Middle Wallop after my initial transfer from Intelligence to Administration, and it took a bit of getting used to after the 1. RAF Cranwell still operates as a training base. It hosts the RAF College, the Directorate of Recruiting, and the No. 3 Flying Training School. Other units provide training functions for the Air Cadets, non-RAF Armed Forces personnel, and military personnel from abroad. 146 | From the Sticks to the Cradle chummy, almost family atmosphere of Stenigot. But I was very busy from the word go because the Squadron Officer Admin, known to all as “Squoff” Owen, who seemed to me to be quite an old woman, was soon to be discharged herself and was obviously not interested in detail. Actually she was an unusual and courageous woman who had lived in Spain through much of the Spanish Civil War (between 1936 and 1938). In spite of marital difficulties she had borne and reared five children, the eldest of whom was a much-decorated Pathfinder Squadron Leader. She was only too glad to let me get on with things and handle the problem cases that came up without constant reference to her. These were usually to do with pregnant WAAF whose condition was often only discovered in the sixth or seventh month of their pregnancy. It was a continual surprise what a WAAF uniform, even battle dress and trousers, could conceal. By then there was precious little time left to get the unmarried mother-to-be fixed up somewhere to have her baby. Usually it had to be one of the voluntary societies, most of them religious, who retained a Victorian censorious moral attitude as often as not, totally insensitive to the circumstances in which the girls had “got themselves into trouble.” I remember one girl, a lively, north-country, Gracie Fields type, a Telephonist in her late twenties who confessed to her pregnancy only at nearly six months, and then very reluctantly. Having found out that she was not 34. College Hall, RAF Cranwell, 2010. Photograph by Chris Lester, Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology. Winding Down: 1945 | 147 a Catholic, I was about to word the letter to the Church of England Society asking for their help when it transpired that it was not her first slip. The details I had to give made this difficult to conceal, but when the reply came from the Society that as it was the girl’s second “fall” they would not consider taking her into any of their Homes for Unmarried Mothers, I was enraged. Where was she to go to have her baby? I was faced with a huge problem of finding any harbourage for her at that late stage. And there was the sad case of Groves, one of the many humble ACWs from the cookhouse, whose overweight, lumbering form concealed her condition almost until the last moment. When she was finally forced into admitting that she was probably eight months pregnant, I...