They called her ‘Lucky’
While bombs rained down on London, Connie Bickford dreamed of a life filled with adventure intrigue, excitement and purpose. Now, as she prepares for her 100th birthday, the Palmerston North woman tells Greer Berry about why the war was the best time of her life.
They called her Lucky. No-one used their real name in her line of work. In fact, no-one spoke a word. Life inside the operations room in the south of England, playing a crucial role in British efforts in World War II, was a far cry from window dressing shopfronts in central London.
But Connie ‘‘Lucky’’ Bickford couldn’t feel more fulfilled.
She left school at 14, a forced move due to the death of her father, who was wounded during WWI.
She worked at British Home Stores to support her mother and siblings, but it was a thankless role in wartime, given her beautiful shopfront designs were frequently levelled to rubble after enemy bombs landed.
‘‘Everything still went on as usual. Cinemas were open, night clubs were open, until [the bombing] got too close, then they’d shut up,’’ she says.
‘‘It was just a matter of waiting for the bombs to come over. You prayed for a foggy night.’’
Bickford was on community fire watch duty the night five landmines were dropped on central London. ‘‘We got bombed in. The blast came in . . . We had to get someone to whistle for help so we could get out and go to work. And there was no point going to work and saying ‘I’m tired’, because so is everyone else.’’
The truth was, Bickford was tired.
She was 20 by then and tired of relentlessly fixing shopfronts, showing others how to board up the windows in such a way that shoppers could still peek in through a gap to see the wares on offer.
People were still out shopping while the bombs were falling? I ask. ‘‘Of course,’’ she retorts. ‘‘Life went on as normal. We had to adapt to the circumstances.’’
She craved more from life and a chance discussion at the one communal water tap in the house where she lived changed the path of Connie’s existence.
Her name was Lulu, she was from a higher class and Bickford confided in her that she wanted a change.
‘‘I said to her: ‘This window dressing is a dead loss. I have to spend half my time going across London to help them cope with bomb windows.’ I said: ‘There’s no future in this. I’m not having this. I want to join the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force].’’’
Lulu told her she had a cousin in the Air Ministry.
‘‘I told her I don’t want to be in the cookhouse peeling spuds. I want to do something important.’’
Turns out Lulu’s cousin was Sir Archibald Sinclair, one of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s offsiders and secretary of air during the Battle of Britain.
A letter soon arrived confirming Bickford was accepted into the auxiliary force. It simply read: ‘‘Special duties.’’
‘‘You didn’t know where you were going. You belonged to them, body and soul.’’
Bickford’s career in the Air Force saw her initially train as a plotter, standing silently around a table pulling on strings with wood tied on the end, listening to numbers being told to her through a headset while the other women stood around doing the same. ‘‘And then where they crossed. That is where the enemy was.’’
This allowed the controllers to ring ahead when they were able to see the direction of enemy attack.
Bickford soon worked her way up to the role of a radar operator, a position normally reserved for university-trained people, not a school drop-out. ‘‘Nobody ever asked me what education I had. As my mother said: ‘You haven’t had the education, but you’ve got plenty common sense and for God’s sake use it.’’’
Can you tell me about one of the scariest nights when you were working? I ask.
‘‘I tell you what, it was never scary. It was too intense. It was a job you just did,’’ she says.
‘‘That’s what was so lovely about the war. The more dangerous position you were in, the more interesting it was.’’
And there were dangerous moments, times when Bickford thought she might have to destroy all the radar equipment as per procedure when a direct attack was imminent, only to be saved from such a situation at the last minute.
Danger crept up on her again in the lead up to D-day, the 1944 Allied invasion of France, when the controller handed them all a pen and piece of paper. ‘‘He said: ‘Write a nice letter to your next of kin because it might be the last letter they ever get from you,’’’ she recalls. ‘‘We weren’t stupid. They knew what was coming.’’
Bickford was so close to the action that on D-day, after her shift had finished, she and her colleagues were able to go outside and stand on the cliff edge and watch the action across the Channel.
‘‘We were on the nearest point to the enemy. Everyone was praying. You could see all the ships. You could see all the gunfire.’’
People often used to say to Bickford: ‘‘Wasn’t it an awful life?’’
‘‘And I always say: ‘No, it was a jolly good life, thoroughly enjoyed it.’ Because the camaraderie in those days, oh, it was wonderful, no-one was horrible to anybody.
‘‘People have criticised us very, very badly when they ask you what the war was like, and I say some of the best times in my life, because they weren’t there, they didn’t know. They were living an ordinary life, especially out here, so removed from the war.’’
I ask her: So when you look back on the 100 years of your life, especially the war, do you feel sadness? ‘‘No, because people say: ‘What was the war like?’ and I say: ‘Whose war?’ Everybody’s war was different. On the other hand, it was the happiest time because there was no class distinction. They just treated you for who you were. If someone had told me when I left school at 14 that I would become a radar operator, I never would have believed it. But you know what? That’s given me a lot of satisfaction in my life, because unless you were good, you never got on to radar.’’
Bickford found solace through the darkest days in the tone of Churchill’s voice, echoing through the radio across the nation every night at 9. ‘‘And he always used to finish up with the line: ‘We will never surrender’,’’ she says, lowering her voice in to a Churchill-esque growl.
‘‘And you know, that lived with us through all those bad days through the war and we thoroughly believed that we would never surrender. He carried us . . . It was just the tone of his voice. And no-one doubted it. You never doubted it, even through the darkest days.’’
Churchill wasn’t the only man in Bickford’s life. There was darling Jack, her dashing Spitfire-pilot husband who was posted in the Shetland and Orkney islands, and Australia, for much of the war. ‘‘Ahhh, let me have my lovely husband,’’ she says as she lowers herself to the couch, arms outstretched for the framed photo of her man.
Bickford now lives independently in Palmerston North, proudly stating she has moved 44 times, living in various parts of Africa and New Zealand.
Jack died about 16 years ago, but her love for him is something else. ‘‘I didn’t know him from a bar of soap. He could have been an outand-out rotter,’’ she says, recalling their brief time together before he was posted to Darwin for two years during the war.
‘‘He was the most wonderful husband, reliable, and he came from not a rich family, but a lovely family. I had the most wonderful mother-in-law.’’
‘‘You were lucky,’’ I say. ‘‘My nickname was Lucky,’’ she says, laughing.
Why? I ask, already suspecting the answer might have something to do with her mischievous nature.
‘‘Because they said I’d get my way out of any trouble I got in to.’’
While others were told to peel spuds as punishment, Bickford says she was always several steps ahead.
‘‘I had an answer for everything, so they used to say I was Lucky, always Lucky, and it stuck’’.
Do you still feel lucky now? I ask.
‘‘Yes, I’ve had a very lucky life.’’
She turns 100 in October.