The Grafton Girls - Annie Groves [45]
Somehow or other Diane managed to scramble to her feet, salute, thank the Group Captain for giving her a second chance and get herself outside and into the corridor without making a total fool of herself. She was in no fit state to go back to the ops room, though. Instead she hurried down to the ablutions block, where she locked herself in one of the lavatories and gave her nose a good blow to stem her tears, whilst making a vehement and silent vow to show the captain just how worthy of her second chance she truly was.
Back in the ops room she was conscious of her slightly pink nose and overbright eyes, and equally conscious of the cool hostility of the other girls as she took her place at the chart desk.
When it was time for them to go for their lunch break she hung back, not wanting to force her company on them or run the risk of being deliberately ignored.
‘Buck up,’ Susan told her briskly, adding not unsympathetically, ‘Hiding away in here won’t help. You’re going to have to face everyone at some stage and it might as well be sooner rather than later.’
‘It isn’t that,’ Diane told her. ‘I just wasn’t sure you’d all want me with you now.’
‘We’re all in this war together, and we owe it to one another to stick together. I dare say the captain gave you a pretty rough time?’ Susan enquired with pity.
‘It was only what I deserved,’ Diane admitted honestly, ‘and at least she accepts that my drink was tampered with.’
‘Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. There’ve been rumours about some of the Americans from Burtonwood and the way they behave towards the girls who are foolish enough to get involved with them. Like I said earlier, I wouldn’t have thought you were the type. It didn’t go unnoticed, though, that you were with Myra, and it’s well known amongst the girls what she’s like.’
‘You know I’d agreed to go to the Grafton with her and I didn’t feel I could let her down. I did let her know that I wasn’t happy about…certain things…’
Diane gave a small unhappy sigh. Perhaps she wasn’t as cut out to be the kind of woman who threw herself into flirtation and loving men and then leaving them as she had thought. Saturday night had left her feeling grubby and shamed, and it hurt that others obviously thought the same thing and were now blaming her for bringing shame on them all.
‘The best thing to do is to put the whole thing behind you,’ Susan told her. ‘You won’t be the first girl in uniform to make a bit of a fool of herself and you certainly won’t be the last. One word of warning, though. The girls here tend to think of themselves above the kind of vulgar hanging around outside dance halls and fish-and-chip queues, hoping to get picked up by GIs, that some of the local girls go in for. In fact, they tend to give the Americans a bit of a wide berth and only go out with our own chaps. That way we don’t get branded as cheap. You’d be wise to follow suit.’
‘Enemy sighted at…’
As the staccato voice, tense with deliberately controlled urgency, called out the grid references coming in from a naval corvette on convoy duty in code, the Wrens moved swiftly to check the convoy’s position whilst Diane and the other Waafs double-checked the position of the nearest aircraft.
It had already been an eventful day in a personal sense, Diane acknowledged, what with her interview with Group Captain Barker this morning, and now it looked as though the rest of her shift was going to be even more eventful, albeit in a far more important way.
‘Surely they’re too far north for Canada,’ Diane whispered worriedly to Susan, who was standing motionless whilst she watched the U-boat sightings being chalked up