Lizzy May – Chapter 5

Under Attack

‘Masher’s Bane’ by Steve Fendt

Summer 1975

Remind me, Pauly. Did I ever tell you what it was like, living in London during the Great War?

Not really? But I told you all about the Girl Clerks School?

No? I thought I had. Deary me, where to begin …

Well, the Great War truly was a new sort of war. People didn’t know what to make of it at all. It seemed that the whole world had gone mad.

If the awful casualties from France and Belgium weren’t enough, the sinking of the Lusitania showed us, alright. A great big ocean liner, she was, a beautiful ship and fast.

Not fast enough, though: a German U-boat lay in wait for her, sank her off the south coast of Ireland. She was on her way from New York to Liverpool with two thousand men, women and children on board. All civilians. Over a thousand drowned.

That was in May 1915. I remember reading about it in the newspapers – a terrible thing.

Meanwhile, the first Zeppelin raids were making Londoners frightened and angry. It was considered barbaric in those days, to attack your enemy’s civilian population. Actually, very few people died in the early raids, though the damage to property from firebombs and explosives was quite bad.

The Zeppelins were terrifying things: huge dark airships with gondolas hanging below them, armed with up to ten machine guns and carrying tons of bombs. You could hear them droning towards you, high in the night sky, but you had no hope of seeing one unless it was a very clear night with a full moon – and they tried to avoid that sort of weather, of course.

Menacing, they were.

With hindsight, the air raids weren’t anything like as dangerous as the Blitz in the Second World War. Of course we didn’t know that yet, and it gave us a fright every time the Germans came over.

You have to remember, nobody had ever experienced war from the air before. It was like science fiction – as if the Martians had come to attack us, in War of the Worlds or something.

Britain’s air defences improved slowly, by trial and error. Our aircraft would go up and fly around, looking for the Zeppelins. If they found one, they’d try to shoot it down, or even drop bombs on it. That was difficult to do, though, and very dangerous for our pilots.

The details were hush-hush at the time – the newspapers weren’t even allowed to say where bombs had fallen, or what they’d hit. Didn’t want to give the enemy useful information.

Your grandfather told me all about it, after the War was over. He was in the air force, you see, the Royal Naval Air Service and then the newly formed RAF. This was much later, though, that I met him.

I’ll tell you about that another time, if you’d like.

Anyway, they came up with the idea of lighting up the sky with powerful searchlights, and shooting away at the Zeppelins with guns – ‘pom-poms’, they were nicknamed, because that’s what the shells looked like when they burst, high in the sky: little fluffy pom-poms. Or maybe it was the sound they made.

Well, they were hopeless. I don’t know if they ever brought down a Zeppelin, and I know for a fact that several people were killed by falling shrapnel from our guns. Still, they gave us the feeling that the authorities were doing something.

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So we had all that going on when I started at Fulham.

I was terribly nervous at first, in class, but the pupils and the teachers too, mostly, were very kind to me. I was the baby of the class, I think I said that already, didn’t I? The other girls – or young women, really – took me under their wing. I was quite innocent, you see, didn’t have much idea of the ways of the world.

Well, they soon enlightened me about a lot of things.

One of them was that a hatpin is used for more than keeping your hat on. Nine inches of sharp steel, you see? I still wear them, like this one here. Some were over a foot long, until the men got scared, and put a stop to that.

What were they used for? Self-defence!

‘Mashers’, that’s what they called men who used to lurk in dark corners, and got too free with their hands. Well, a nice sharp hatpin will teach a masher a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.

It was a terribly long walk to the Girl Clerks School if the Underground was disrupted. Past Clapham Common, all the way north to the Thames, and over Wandsworth Bridge. Over an hour each way.

In the winter, I’d leave home in the dark and by the time I got home, it was dark again. The streetlights were dimmed, so as not to be a target for bombing raids, and night-time in the War was a lot darker than before.

In those days, we had horrible thick fogs, too. Pea soupers, they called them. So it was often a scary journey home for a fourteen-year-old girl, across foggy, wartime London, and I was glad of my hatpin. Although I never had to use it, thankfully.

In school, we learned to touch-type – that’s typing without looking at your fingers, using all your fingers and your thumbs too – and to take dictation using the Gregg shorthand system in English and French. It was just little squiggles, if you didn’t know how to read it, but with a bit of practice, you could write down a conversation as fast as it happened.

No, I couldn’t write shorthand now to save my life – or type, with these arthritic old hands. But I was quite fast, back then.

We had tests every week, and there was trouble if we didn’t keep up. On Wednesdays, we learned the principles of book-keeping. Fridays were for filing.

We were taught how to keep our typewriters in good working order, clean them and do basic maintenance. They were expensive machines, and the latest technology in those days, just like computers nowadays. Spare parts for typewriters were impossible to get, in the War, so you had to treat yours with respect.

By New Year 1916, supplies of all sorts were getting noticeably short, in fact. Envelopes, pens and ink, even writing paper, and nothing was to be wasted. Our old exercise books and papers were sent to be pulped, to help the war effort. Gas and coal were rationed, and we had to keep the lights and the heating off as much as possible.

Tutors began to be in short supply too.

Some of them left to fill vacancies in banks and the Civil Service. The few male teachers of fighting age were called up, or went of their own accord. Soon our instructors were girls barely older than us students, or old men. Classes were amalgamated and courses were shortened so the newly trained clerks could get out to work.

Office work was an important part of the war effort too, you see, and we women were going to play our part.

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In the New Year, our worst fears were realised. The stream of eager volunteers for the Front had dried up, despite the propaganda campaigns. So the Government brought in conscription.

Every unmarried man between eighteen and forty-one was called up, except for those in jobs that were important for the War, like coal mining or farming. From the start of March 1916, they were all in the British Armed Forces, whether they liked it or not.

A lot didn’t like it at all, and there were demonstrations on the streets.

My brother Ernie had been cured of his romantic ideas about soldiering and patriotism by now, but he still didn’t want to be thought of as a ‘slacker’. He’d already been picked on, for staying at home, though it wasn’t his fault at all.

I’m sorry to say it was mostly women who gave him a difficult time for not being in uniform, and for a young man, that was hard to bear. The social pressure on men to fight, well it was awful, actually.

Ernie had been rejected as medically unfit, of course. But rejections from before August 1915 were now ruled invalid, so he got called up along with all the others. This time, the Medical Board found him fit for service.

They put him in the London Irish Rifles. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t Irish. They just needed to fill the gaps.

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Coming up:

This Friday in Tales from the Wood: The Tirpitz meets a fiery end, and Pauly isn’t thrilled by his literary nickname. (Paid subscriptions.)

Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: Lizzy May completes her training at the Girl Clerks School and contemplates her future. Ernie sends news from the Front.