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The War of Aircraftwoman 2146391

Mary Lee Settle is best known as the author of a quintet of novels set in her native West Virginia. But her memoir All the Brave Promises: The Memories of Aircraftwoman Second Class 2146391, published in 1966, is set in another world. In 1942 Mary travelled to Britain to volunteer for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force of the RAF and the book is an account of her time in the WAAF. I first came across it in 1985 during events to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I had never heard of the book or its author but I was intrigued to discover a war memoir that was not about combat but about women in the support services. Their experience appeared to be missing from the national story that was being presented. So an account like this seemed unusual if not unique.

Mary describes herself as being a ‘precious, innocent American anglophile snob’ when she arrived in England, and life in the WAAF came as a shock. The cold and damp of the Nissen huts made her want to cry and she never overcame her disgust at the sausage and mash, ‘marg’ and glutinous porridge of the canteens. Her previous British acquaintances had been on the cocktail circuit but now she was among the working class and could barely understand a word anyone said.

Tall and healthy ‘from protein, sport and sun’, she was working alongside younger girls who were products of ‘the dole, the war and slum life’. Her attitudes to cleanliness and underwear marked her out as different, and unexplained differences could be dangerous; not realizing she was American, some girls called her a ‘ten-bob tart from up West’. Before long, though, she and they adapted and she began to make friends. Nevertheless, as the only American on a big RAF station in England, her difference is a persistent theme.

She rejected the opportunity to become an officer, realizing that selection was based not so much on skills as on being ‘officer material’: me

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Mary Lee Settle is best known as the author of a quintet of novels set in her native West Virginia. But her memoir All the Brave Promises: The Memories of Aircraftwoman Second Class 2146391, published in 1966, is set in another world. In 1942 Mary travelled to Britain to volunteer for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force of the RAF and the book is an account of her time in the WAAF. I first came across it in 1985 during events to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I had never heard of the book or its author but I was intrigued to discover a war memoir that was not about combat but about women in the support services. Their experience appeared to be missing from the national story that was being presented. So an account like this seemed unusual if not unique.

Mary describes herself as being a ‘precious, innocent American anglophile snob’ when she arrived in England, and life in the WAAF came as a shock. The cold and damp of the Nissen huts made her want to cry and she never overcame her disgust at the sausage and mash, ‘marg’ and glutinous porridge of the canteens. Her previous British acquaintances had been on the cocktail circuit but now she was among the working class and could barely understand a word anyone said. Tall and healthy ‘from protein, sport and sun’, she was working alongside younger girls who were products of ‘the dole, the war and slum life’. Her attitudes to cleanliness and underwear marked her out as different, and unexplained differences could be dangerous; not realizing she was American, some girls called her a ‘ten-bob tart from up West’. Before long, though, she and they adapted and she began to make friends. Nevertheless, as the only American on a big RAF station in England, her difference is a persistent theme. She rejected the opportunity to become an officer, realizing that selection was based not so much on skills as on being ‘officer material’: meaning that, as she puts it, ‘one’s voice was careful, one’s bearing was genteel, that one was, at least in form, a “lady” – all of which qualities I was trying to buff off as quickly as possible, unneeded and awkward in the world I was trying to live in’. Instead she trained as a radio-telephone operator in the control tower. The closer the ground personnel were to the flying, to the actual war, she recalls, the higher was their morale. This feeling of contributing to the war effort helped to offset the subjection to arbitrary authority and inflexible regulation that marked the wartime WAAF. Radio-telephone operators listened through enemy jamming for the call-signs of returning pilots and guided them in to land. Mary still possessed some of the notes she had written during her shifts in the control tower. Though she could no longer remember what they meant, ‘the crumpled wartime paper, torn from an RAF issue notebook. . . brought back the smell, the cold, the space of the night’. Inevitably, some of her memories involve tragedy. One day the station is enveloped in thick fog and the many training flights in the air are called back. An aircraft lands and all in the control tower are too busy to give the pilot his order to switch off engines; he cannot do so without the order. A ground crew begins refuelling the plane, in line with their standing orders. A man slips on the wing and is decapitated by a propeller. Procedure and training are so rigid that no one involved has been able to act on their own initiative, despite the danger. What prompted Mary to write the book? Her war had been spent among the thousands of unknown people for whom the conflict, in personal terms, had less to do with historic events than learning to survive ‘by keeping quiet, by getting by’ in an organization into which they had been ‘conscripted, shunted, numbered’. It was their story she wanted to tell. So when recalling an impersonal world of discipline and ruthless order she celebrates the ‘anarchy’ and ‘dumb insolence’ to which those at the bottom of repressive hierarchies resort:
I grew to love the brave, the tough, the proud. They could be recognized by their clothes first, the high pompadours grown back after initial training so that their WAAF caps sat at an angle on the backs of their heads, defying gravity as their owners defied authority, by clinging to just enough of the rule to get by. Cap off with a grab, standing straight, with a kind of ease just within the stance demanded by the sergeant . . .
Mary is appalled by an officer who absolutely forbids her girls to be seen talking to ‘American niggers’, bigotry she has not encountered since West Virginia. But she is heartened by the muttered response of a Cockney WAAF, ‘She’s not f—g telling me ’oo to see!’ A new WAAF CO introduces pack-drill. Offenders, wearing full kit, are to be marched and drilled by yelling sergeants, alone on the empty parade-ground in full public view. The first woman sentenced had been two hours late returning from leave. The men and women on the station deliver their own verdict on this harsh punishment:

On that day, two hours before black-out time, without, so far as I could tell, a single word being said, every black-out curtain that abutted the parade-ground was drawn – in the mess, the Sergeants’ Mess, the barracks windows. There was not a soul to be seen. The station had a dead, waiting silence about it. I saw, only by glance, the WAAF, tiny on the huge square, heard, far away,the faint voice of the sergeant drilling her, and, as the others did, turned away . . . There was no more WAAF pack-drill.

These anecdotes of resistance emerge as she reflects on the paradox of a war being fought against tyranny in which tyranny is exercised over the aircraftwomen themselves. Many senior officers seemed indifferent to the ordinary WAAF, and the war had provided ‘the stupid and the vicious’ among their subordinates with some power over others for the first time in their lives. There was the ‘obscene, loud-mouthed, filthy man in charge of our food, whose small power had grown in the cookhouse until he ruled as a Tzar in a food-streaked apron over the few frightened cookhouse girls who could not fight back because he was a corporal. In their jobs he was the only NCO they came into daily contact with.’ Such people ruled through victimization or by generating a fear of it. Nevertheless Mary records plenty of humorous episodes too. She is brought up on a charge, after drunkenly telling Sergeant Smerd ‘where to shove it, and indeed where it was’. On another occasion she is instructed to conceal herself and play Russian records for the benefit of Red Army visitors. And one day she hitches a lift to London on a petrol lorry, all the way to Claridge’s, where a top-hatted doorman climbs up to open the lorry door with a formal ‘Good evening, madam’. She can sketch a personality in a few lines, make a point through suggestion or implication, and demonstrate angry compassion for those trying to maintain their self-respect. She is interesting on the British class structure which both irritated and amused her. Mary’s Anglophilia survived her service in the WAAF. Two of her three husbands were British and she lived in this country until 1955. She died in America in 2005. It is now twenty-eight years since I first read All the Brave Promises. Despite the steady flow of memoirs and television documentaries about the war since then, this account still seems to me unusual, if not unique.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Don Watson 2014


About the contributor

Don Watson enjoys reading and writing about history. He wonders if this is just to escape the present. His piece is the last of the four winning entries in our Older Writers’ Competition.

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