Chapter 2
Island Farm Camp hadn’t always been a prisoner-of-war camp – no, indeed. It had been constructed so close to where they lived that Cora thought of it as an unpredictable neighbour because you never knew who was going to turn up next.
Average pay
in South Wales
SIGNING ON NOW
Light work on munitions
Here in South Wales we are making munitions. Guns and shells. Some for the Red Army. Some for our men going overseas. Some for this island which has to be a fortress.
We must help Russia. We must equip our own forces.
We have all this to do and it has to be done fast.
Come and help us. Take one of these jobs.
There are good jobs with decent pay and conditions.
Light work that any woman of 18 to 60 can do.
The first week the hours are seven and a half a day: second week eight; third week nine and a half a day, then back to seven and so on.
Pay is by the hour and averages three pounds a week.
The factories are in the district served by buses and trains (exact locations cannot be stated, for obvious reasons).
Excess of fares over three shillings a week is paid.
Excellent hostels are available. Time for shopping can be arranged.
Taking this job may mean a change to your way of living – but it’s to prevent a greater change – it’s to save us all and our children from passing into Nazi slavery. We can defend ourselves only by making the arms to do it.
Don’t wait until it’s too late –
APPLY NOW
at any employment exchange.
Cora, Gladdie and Megan did their duty and signed up together to work in the filling factory where Cora quickly learnt that the advert, like all good adverts, had put a bit of a gloss on things.
It didn’t mention the inescapable din of machinery, and the relentless monotony of the work, or the way the fine yellow TNT powder that they filled the shells with coloured everything it touched bright yellow.
First Cora’s hands turned yellow, then her face, and despite the protective cotton overalls and turban, the powder got into her blonde hair and turned it green.
It wasn’t just her, either. Gladdie’s lustrous black hair turned bright orange and Megan’s wild, frizzy brown hair became such a startling shade of yellow that she could have doubled up as a dandelion.
Cora tried bleach on her cheeks and vigorous scrubbing, but it turned her yellow skin raw, so if they were going dancing or somewhere special, they disguised their yellow complexions with Miner’s pancake make-up and Coty face powder.
Funny, she thought, how they got used to it.
They got used to the noise, too, and the radio blaring in competition, and they learned to stay calm if there was a ‘blow-up’ in their section.
Cora sometimes wrote messages on the gleaming shells for servicemen to read.
Good luck! she wrote, Keep safe! She concentrated on working efficiently, knowing their lives were in her hands.
In the same way that the enrolment poster had put a gloss on the ‘light work on munitions’, it had exaggerated the ‘excellent hostels’ as well.
When it first opened, Island Farm Camp housed workers from all over the country; a community of men too old to enlist and lively women who drank in the local with three pounds a week to spend.
However, none of them stayed there very long.
It was safe to say the Island Farm accommodation was a bit of a rush job, hastily built, function over luxury.
The problem was that the camp was designed on the lines of an army barracks.
The huts were built on clay overlooking fields and bordered by woods.
Beyond them lay the bare and desolate hills in the distance.
They were cold, soulless and slightly damp.
Cora heard rumours that the camp was haunted, even though no one had lived there for very long, never mind died there.
Gradually the stream of people being ferried to and from the camp dwindled and the war workers opted for travelling on the buses and trains instead.
Much better. The atmosphere inside the buses after a hard day’s work was over sounded wonderful, as carefree as a chapel’s Whit Monday Mystery Trip.
There was singing, a knitting competition, gossiping and a cheerful community feel because they were doing their bit for the war effort, and better still, for the first time in their lives, making good money as well.
Better money than the miners were getting, as a matter of fact. Sore point.
The huts gradually fell into disuse. They remained empty until one day the Americans came and made them interesting again.
What a shiny bunch of men those GIs were, wolf-whistling at them as they passed on their way to work! Gladdie fell recklessly in love with a Texan named Charles who courted her with gifts and their romance was straight out of a Hollywood film, a movie, as Charles called it.
Cora smiled when she thought of the GIs.
Clean and bright and cocky, they were, with sweet chewing-gum breath – boldly showing off their moves in the Star Ballroom and teaching them to jive on a Saturday night, seducing them with their loud film-star accents.
For a while Island Farm was the most glamorous place in Wales – Cora would go as far as to say the most glamorous place in the world outside of America – until the GIs were re-mobilised to fight in the D-Day landings. Whoosh!
They left as quickly as they’d come.
And after the vast and terrible slaughter on the beaches of Normandy, Cora tried not to dwell on what happened to them after that.
After D-Day, Island Farm filled up again. It became a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Italian soldiers.
Lovely they were, Cora thought, with their tanned skin and their smooth hair and eyes dark as Welshmen’s, standing behind the railings and barbed wire saying beautiful things in Italian, or at least things that to her sounded beautiful.
They were happy to be there, happy to smile at Welsh girls, happy they didn’t have to fight.
But lovely as they looked, they were reluctant to work on the farms and when encouraged to put their backs into it, they sabotaged machinery to remind the Welsh exactly whose side they were on.
See? The thing about people, even good-looking ones, was that you never really knew.
And one evening, as Cora walked past on the way home, she saw the huts were deserted again.
The Italians had left as quickly as the GIs.
A short while later, in November 1944, when the days were short and the nights were bitter cold, the German prisoners of war arrived by special train in Bridgend station, and Island Farm was renamed Camp 198, and everything changed.