Betty Walker, nee Gledhill, born Bradford 1923.
My mother enlisted in the WRAF as soon as she was old enough, seeing it as a big adventure then spending most of the war in Lincolnshire as a driver, and told me many stories about that time when I was a child. She was shown how to shoot with a rifle in basic training, and quite seriously told me one day that if she had come across a German and it was either him or her, she would have shot him.
Her time was spent in two main areas of work.
One was driving lorries loaded with bombs around Lincolnshire. She told me once how she got completely lost driving around at night as all the signposts were removed during the war. She stopped to ask an old man the way but, even though she had her unform on and was in an RAF lorry, he would not tell her the way to the airbase in case she was a German spy! One day one of the bombs fell off the back of her lorry. She waited for bomb disposal and an officer, a really large man, turned up with the attitude of ‘What was all the fuss about?’ and just lifted the bomb up in his arms and pulled out the fuse – much to the astonishment of everyone watching.
She also drove aircrew, mainly Polish airmen, to their planes and had to wait for them to return. Obviously, some did not, and I can’t help thinking how difficult that was for her as a young woman. One pilot tried to get her to go along with them one night as a stowaway on the raid. As a child I asked “Why didn’t you go”? It would have been a great story if she had!
On night duty she found a way to keep warm by wearing her dad’s combinations under her uniform. She said the other girls all laughed at her at first then they all did the same thing. After night duty she would return to her hut really hungry to cook herself breakfast. One morning she caught a mouse stealing her only rasher of bacon so she killed it to get her bacon back!
She always saw her years in the WRAF as an important, interesting part of her life. After the war, like a lot of women, she became a wife and mother; but with plenty of interesting stories to tell.
Died 2000
By Judith Walker