Born in Kingston Jamaica, Connie Mark joined the ATS in 1943 at the age of 19. She would serve out her war years in the Caribbean - in Jamaica. Although she does not regret her decision to join the ATS, Connie's enlistment was quite by accident. She recalls that as war broke out, an army of English officers descended on Jamaica, visiting every corner of the island on recruitment mission. She found herself unwittingly, but not unwillingly, drawn in by an elaborate recruiting machine:
I was just about to take my Associates Grade in book-keeping when my commercial teacher - her name was Miss Vie Petinaud, but we all called her Auntie V - came and said she'd got a request for some high class secretaries and the only one who was available at the time was me. She took me in her car, and she didn't tell me where she was going. All I knew is that I recognised us going into Up Park Camp. Up Park Camp is the Army HQ. So I said: 'Why are we going in here?', and she said, 'This is where you're having the interview.' When I went inside there were about 30 ladies in there and I think I was about the youngest one. But when I took my test I came first. So I went home and I said to my mother that Auntie V took me for a test for a job. But my father, like most Caribbean fathers in those days, didn't think their children should go to work - they wanted them to take exam after exam after exam. I had already taken, in my opinion, all the exams that I would want to take. Anyway, I got a cable the next day that I should come and collect my uniform. This totally amazed me because the last thing I expected was that it was the army.
I was in school still, and my mother had received the cable. She was worried about the cable coming because the first thing she thought was 'I wonder who has died'. When my dad came in later I showed him the telegram and told him that I went for this interview. He asked me why I didn't tell him anything and I told him that Auntie V got the telephone call and took me up to Up Park Camp, and I didn't think anything of it, and so didn't bother to tell him. That's how I came to be in the army.
Once in the army, Connie settled down to a routine which was completely different from anything she had experienced before. She was put to work in the British military hospital. She remembers being put off by the smell when she started work - she had always hated hospitals. But there were great advantages to her new lifestyle. Army life, and army pay, gave her a degree of independence she had not expected to experience so soon. Her memories of those days are good ones.
My first experiences were good - I enjoyed it. You came and got your uniform and then you got your training. Also, when you're young you don't have any hang-ups. My first salary was £3 6s 8d a week and I was rich! I'll never forget it until the day I die. I remember giving my brother-in-law a pound a week for the new furniture, and then a pound a week for material (for a new dress each week), and I gave my mother another pound and the rest of it could do for everything else.
People always ask me about the difficulties I experienced, and I think they're always surprised when I say I didn't have any difficulties. You see, what was on my side is that I have got a strong personality and I think they [the English officers] had more difficulties with me than I had with them. I was on my home ground, and when I finished work I went home to my house - we didn't live in barracks. So once you finished the job at one o'clock, that was it. I'm now seeing what difficulties I could have faced.
With her secretarial training, her ATS career was spent as medical secretary to the assistant director of medical services. This was a difficult job which required her to be on 24 hour call. Although the A TS paid relatively well, Connie was not paid all that was due to her, in her opinion, because she was black. This has left her with a bitter sense of betrayal.
I stayed at the military hospital, as a secretary, throughout my military career. After six months I was promoted to Lance Corporal, and then six months after that I was promoted to Corporal. Once you go from one grade to the next you get more money. I was entitled, as a Lance Corporal going up to a Corporal, to tuppence a day. When I asked why I wasn't getting my tuppence a day, I quoted King's regulations which said I should get it. But because I was Jamaican, although in a British regiment, I didn't get it. So the Queen owes me eight years of tuppence a day. We did all the work, and although we had Chief Clerks who would come down and serve a few months, they were only figureheads. We did all the dirty work and were the continuity in the Camp.
Pay for the Caribbean ATS had been a difficult issue from the outset. Whilst the War Office had argued that they should be paid less than the British ATS rates, the Colonial Office insisted on parity and got it. But although the rates were the same, there were ways of getting around it - as Connie's experience showed.
This resentment at not being adequately rewarded and appreciated was a profound one, and it has remained with Connie ever since leaving the ATS. To the English officers stationed in the Caribbean, this passion for justice and equality was completely misunderstood. To them, a black woman demanding to be treated as an equal to a White could only be explained by the supposed hypersensitivity of West Indians to rank. English women officers complained that they could not get ATS recruits to willingly clean their homes or perform other domestic duties. Connie was one of many recruits who refused to clean the homes of officers - she explains why:
I was in the second batch of ATS recruits, and when you're in the army you don't have any choice ... If they told you to scrub you had to obey ... But all the Jamaican ATS in the army only did one thing - we worked as secretaries: that's all they asked us to do. What they may be implying is that when they came there they may have wanted us to come to their houses and clean it - because this happened to me. I was supposed to get the BEM and that's why I didn't get it. My commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Arondell, put me up for it, but the ATS officers hated my guts so much that they are the ones that turned me down. And the girl who got it came in long after me - didn't do what I did - but she used to go to the ATS officers and clean their house. I'm not going to anybody's house to clean their house when I'm paying somebody to clean mine.
If they're saying that we were proud, that's what the white people couldn't deal with. A lot of them went to Africa where they boasted they held 'kangaroo courts' with the natives, and when they came to the West Indies and saw that a lot of us were more educated than they and the Africans were, they couldn't handle it. Of course we have a class thing in the West Indies, and I'm not going to apologise for it. If we were white they could have handled it, but because we were black they couldn't understand these black people saying we didn't want to come to their house and clean it.
War affected the West Indies deeply. The 5,000 miles separating Britain from Jamaica was not a great enough span to isolate the colony from the pains of war. Connie remembers how her family and community were affected by the casualties:
Of course, we had hundreds of thousands of West Indians fighting the War. After I left my girls school I went to a mixed school to do my commercial course and sat next to a young man who later went to England to join the RAF. I saw his name on the list of the War dead which was regularly posted in Kingston.
We used to post nylon stockings to England - putting one foot in each envelope and hoping that both envelopes would arrive. We were very involved in the War effort. And don't forget, we were an island and if a boat was torpedoed (as happened off St. Lucia) when you were expecting oil, then the island would be short of oil. And this meant we would have to get cork, put it in a bottle, and the little oil we could get from that we would use to get light. .
War memorials are still to be found in towns and villages throughout the West Indies, with the names of thousands of dead. In Jamaica, there was an extra reason for the populace to feel vulnerable: 'We were vulnerable because the Americans had a base in Jamaica at Sandy Gully, and we were close to Cuba, which meant that we were a strategic target.' An extremely dangerous aspect of war life was travelling across the Atlantic. German U-boats inflicted substantial casualties on passengers and freight attempting to make this passage:
I had a friend who went to England to take her piano finals, her Associate of the Royal College of Music, and when she was coming back her ship was torpedoed.
I was a medical secretary ... and had to have my uniform permanently hung-up. Every time a boat came in I would go with the doctor to the sick-bay to collect all the documents of the patients. One pilot was so badly injured he was put in a plaster-cast, and to live in a plaster-cast in the West Indies was really bad.
As a result of such casualties, the war was felt deeply in the Caribbean. It was not a distant irrelevancy, but a very close reality. The people of the region saw Britain's fight as a fight to defend not only the United Kingdom, but also their own islands, from German occupation. They were generous in their donations to the war effort, and provided military hardware and other much needed war supplies.
Jamaica gave a tank to England. All the islands donated a tank or something. The church was very active in the West Indies. Through our churches we arranged functions and fundraising for the war effort. The schools were also very active in this area.
In addition to all of this, the Caribbean was a vital source of food supply. |
