Threshing out my own bit of history

SOME years ago, my late husband took me back to The Elms, a grand house in Hereford used as Wrens’ Quarters during World War II, where some of my days in uniform were spent.

We Wrens slept in the ballroom resplendent with floor-to-ceiling mirrors in ornate gold frames fixed at intervals around the walls. Magnificent chandeliers once hung from the ceiling. The dozen or so black iron bunk beds looked incongruous in such a room.

A staircase in the dressing room went up to a flat roof from where, so I was told, seven counties could be seen. It was easy to imagine ladies in elegant ball gowns and men in black ties taking the evening air.

But it was the petty officers’ bathroom that fascinated me. Two platforms, one smaller than the other, formed steps up to the creamy coloured old bath, boxed in with mahogany panels. Over the years constant scrubbing kept the top wooden surround and steps white. There were two huge decorative brass taps.

AT THE opposite end to the taps the filigree brass outlet set in the bottom of the bath looked like a horse brass. To control the in-and-out flow of water, on the wooden surround a brass handle turned round over another tea-plate- sized horse brass look-a-like. This mechanism did do away with the need for bath plugs — plugs which, in Wrens’ quarters, often went missing. Wrens bought their own and carried them around.

When coming off duty there was always a rush for a bath. Grab a plug and you had control. We cooks became adept at sculpting potatoes to fit plug holes. That day my husband and I walked up Aylestone Hill to the corner where the house stood. It had gone. All that was left was an abandoned patch left by demolition men.

I found the unusual slate blue tiled courtyard intact. My mind went back to the threshing machine that once stood there because of me.

It was the winter of 1944/45. Three or four days of hard frosts followed by a light covering of snow had made the roads treacherous.

As duty cook I answered a knock at the back door. It was a local farmer asking if he could leave his threshing machine in the courtyard. He had got halfway down Folley Lane, a narrow lane that ran alongside The Elms, and dared not risk trying to get back up the hill or continuing to the bottom in such conditions.

What was I thinking of? Where was my common sense? I told him it would be all right. The farmer and his son manoeuvred the machine into the courtyard and closed the heavy wooden doors behind them. I knew I was in for big trouble. I knew I should have gone to Ma’am in her office.

I was summoned to the inner sanctum to appear before the First Officer. I was well and truly put in my place.

I, a mere Leading Wren, had assumed authority beyond my rank. I was confined to quarters for a month and lost my leave.

The severe weather continued and for three of those four weeks the threshing machine stood outside the galley window blocking all else from view — a constant reminder of my misdeed. I wished the earth would open up and swallow that monster machine and me in one big gulp.

WALKING home that day with my husband, unanswered questions plagued me. Why was such a fine house destroyed? Where were the mirrors and, most of all, where was that marvellous bath, the likes of which I’d never seen before or since?

I could not be that young girl in naval uniform again, spending romantic moments with a handsome airman in the moonlit rose garden. That girl had disappeared and so had the house.

Some years later, I again climbed Aylestone Hill. Where The Elms had been there was a close of identical red brick houses. The fields that bordered Folley Lane, where my threshing machine got into difficulty, were now packed with houses.

It is many years since that young girl encountered that threshing machine. Older and wiser now, I hold my memories knowing I can never go back to life as it was. And I certainly wouldn’t want to see that horrible threshing machine again …

Sylvia Rowley, Manchester.