大象传媒

This story was entered by Tricia Humphrey, Librarian, Wells Library, Somerset on behalf of Lady Bowman.

It wasn't all darkness and pain and horror, the Blitz of World War Two - there was also bright lights, music and dancing and above all, romance. I had been a debutante in that last glorious carefree summer of 1939, when every night was party night - dazzling balls in great country houses, or hardly less great London residences of the aristocrats and the rich. Suddenly all that was over and I found myself, aged 18 and totally untrained for any sort of useful work, keenly searching for a job in which I felt I could back up my brothers and my boy-friends, all of whom - to a man - had joined up in the very first days of the war that had so suddenly overwhelmed us. I asked the advice of one of my brothers (who himself ended the war as an Assault engineer, one of the first to land on the beach of Normandy on the then-far-away D-Day).
Seeing which way the world was turning, he suggested that I look for a job in the aircraft industry. This was how I found myself working in a factory in North London, helping to make four-engined heavy bombers named Halifaxes. For a pampered girl, who rarely got out of bed before noon, the 7.30am start of work in that airless, noisy, dirty factory was testing enough and the physicla hardness of the work that I was called on to do (there was little help from machinery or automation in those days) soon turned my soft hands into oil-grained little claws, while the muscles of my arms ( accustomed to nothing more strenuous than a gentle game of lawn tennis) became so taut that I remember how a doctor trying to give me an injection against tetanus had difficulty getting the needle in. My working day did not end until 6.30pm (5.30pm on Saturdays, as a concession). It was hard physical labour for ten hours a day (an hour for canteen lunch, usually just lentil soup and a lump of bread tea-breaks were taken standing up by one's bench or machine, gulping down scalding, bitter tea from an enamel billy-can). But when the 6.30 hooter sounded - oh, how different life became. Close to my factory was an underground station, with a direct line to Green PArk. Adjoining Green Park station was the Ritz hotel, in the below-ground bar of which I and my friends used to gather almost every evening. Young men still stationed in London or on leave from other centres, gloriously handsome in their evening "blues" (having changed out of their day-time khaki uniforms) and us girls, making the most of whatever pretty dresses and make-up we could find or,in my own case, very often still in the denim "boiler-suit" I wore at work. We would meet in that brightly-lit underground haven, pair up and disperse to other havens, to dance and feast on meagre banquets and to laugh and sing. And fall in love.

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