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Memories of World War Two in Ealing

This story was submitted to the WW2 People's War Website by the London Borough of Harrow Housebound Library Service on behalf of Mrs Joyce Allwright, and has been added with her permission.

Just before the War I was living in Craven Road in Newbury, and then my sister Betty got married, and to help, I rented a house with her in Curzon Road Ealing. I got a job at Sainsbury’s in The Broadway and then as first clerk at the West Ealing store. I managed the office and did all the banking and wages and petty cash, for £3 a week. We took so much money I had to keep collecting it from the various tills (there weren't any cash registers then) and bank it twice every day! We kept thousands of coupons, which we had to take from customers, for butter and bacon, meat and eggs and cheese. I had to count them all up and send them to the town hall. According to how many you sent in, the shop was provided with that amount of food. It was surprising how you could manage with your coupons. When my sister and I lived together before the war started we weren’t very well off then, so we used to make a list of what we wanted for the week, and it would probably come to about a pound. 2/6 for a joint of meat, and bread wasn’t dear. We were so used to managing.

Then my little niece Ann was evacuated down to Wales, my sister went out to work again, at an ammunitions factory in Boston Manor, and we could no longer keep the house going. I went into digs in West Ealing, to a house backing onto the railway, and we were bombed out! Fortunately I was sitting in the back room, though my room was in the front. There was an almighty bang, and when we went to look we found we couldn’t get out of the house. The front had all blown in, and shrapnel had gone right through my wardrobe and all my clothes had holes in them! I had to move out of there because you couldn’t live in it. I had to get some other digs, and when I came home from work one day somebody had robbed the house. They took some jewellery, including half of a brooch that Ron had bought me in Calgary. I still have the other half! I had to move house several times, and eventually found a flat in Kingsley Avenue.

Before the war my sister Betty was a lady’s maid. She met all the Royalty, and knew all about Mrs Simpson. She went to Fort Belvedere, the Duke of Windsor’s home, when Mrs Simpson was there.

We used to get incendiary bombs dropping. We would hear them coming, and we would be evacuated in the middle of the night and have to find some other place to sleep. And do you know, we thought nothing of it. It was the war, and we had to get on with it. It was no good feeling sorry. We just used to go to work and we’d think ‘Oh well, I wonder which way we’ll go to work today!’ Sometimes I’d set off to go to work and find I couldn’t go down a certain road because a bomb had fallen. It was an incredible time.

Life was very difficult and dangerous. I wouldn’t go down an air-raid shelter. I was frightened of that. We used to have to black out everything at night, all the windows and doors and everything. It was a bit creepy going home, we didn’t like it, and you couldn’t even take a torch, you had to know you’re way home. When looking back you wonder to yourself how you lived through it. We used to get awful pea soup fogs as well. You lived at such a different pace. You were frightened all the time, and yet you knew you could do nothing about it. You were thinking of your husband and friends and what was happening to them. Your mind was taken up with that, and writing letters, listening to the news.

We weren’t going to stay at home doing nothing, so my friend Tegwyn and I used to take our chance and go to London. On Sundays and Wednesdays we would to the cinema, shopping and to the Corner House for tea, where the band would be playing. It was lovely. We used to ask them to play requests. We’d go across Hyde Park and sometimes to Westminster Abbey for the church service in the evening. Then we’d come back at 11 or 12 at night, catching the last train home to Ealing from Leicester Square or Oxford Circus. It was funny going down into the underground station and seeing all these people lying down. They used to go there for the night, and take their mattresses, lying about all over the place.

I loved Ealing Broadway, and the shopping there. Zeetas used to be there — it was a lovely cake shop. Next door to Sainsburys was the Police Station, which was how I got to know Ron Layley, who became my husband, as he used to come into the shop.

Ron was with the Metropolitan Police, T Division, and as soon as war started he joined the Air Force and trained to be an Elite Pathfinder. They had these thousand bomber raids, and you couldn’t train a thousand navigators, so they selected a certain number that they thought could do it and sent them to Calgary in Canada and other places to be trained quickly. Ron became one of these navigators, or observers. We got engaged before he went to Calgary, and while he was there he bought my wedding ring. I sent him a curtain ring of the right size! When he came back we were married at Kingsclere church near Newbury, where Ron's family were farmers.
Ron was on Lancasters, and went on twenty-seven operations. Every night so many bombers would go out and so many would come back, and he would phone me when he got safely back. He had to phone me at friends or at work as I don’t think I had a phone where I was living. I would go up to visit him at weekends, and stay at Cambridge, near where he was serving at Oakingham. We never knew when he’d be flying. They weren’t told, you see: we could be chatting like this, and he’d get a phone call to go and be flying that next night. Then, after one such weekend when I came home I heard that he was missing. On his twenty-eighth operation he was shot down over Brunswick in Germany. It was awful; you don’t realize how terrible it is, but you still hang on to hope. His mother had already lost Ron’s brother Geoffrey.

After Ron was reported missing in 1944 I went to stay with my friend Margaret Jessett at Kidbury in Berkshire. She worked at Croppers factory in Thatcham, and I went for an interview and got a job at the same factory. I used to live with Margaret during the week and went home to mother’s at Kingsclere at the weekend. At Croppers I met my second husband Gordon Allwright. He was working at Croppers before and after the war; in fact he was the first out and the first back! After we were married Gordon was transferred to Birmingham as a rep, so we moved there, and eventually to Eastcote.

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