Have You Got Your Irons?
It's a Waaf's Life

In 1942, desperate to get away from her domineering father and a hated typing job in the Civil Service, 19-year-old Yvonne decides to join the WAAF and be independent for the first time in her life. On her first day, she and the other recruits are issued with a knife, fork and spoon each – their irons. These, it is impressed upon them, are to be guarded with their lives. If they lose them they will not be issued with a second set. Metal is so valuable to the war effort that they will either have to eat with their fingers or go hungry. Hereafter, the first and last question whenever she is posted to a new place is "Have you got your irons?"

After basic training, Yvonne fails a WAAF shorthand typing test and is asked to choose between photography and cooking. She picks photography on the grounds that she knows how to work a Box Brownie camera. Soon she is in her element, relishing her newfound freedom and the company of her fellow Waafs. A convent-educated girl, she starts to meet young servicemen (on a strictly 'above the waist' basis). One of them warns her about the way airmen talk about girls with loose morals and she promises him that she will never 'do it'.

She comes top of her photography course in Blackpool and is sent to No 13 OTU (Operational Training Unit) at Bicester in Oxfordshire, where her job is to develop and print film taken by trainee Blenheim pilots learning to carry out aerial mapping. In spite of the Air Force's petty rules she loves her work and begins to grow up. Then illness strikes at home...