大象传媒

I was 21 years old, and my old school friend introduced me to her brother when I stayed at her house. Although we didn't think about the war, the firm I worked for, Charles Letts the diary people, were asking for volunteers to take first aid courses at the local training offices nearby in London SE1. I went along and found it very interesting. I was in the St John's Ambulance group, and I was to represent the firm, pending enemy action in 1939.

We were asked to find other employment. No redundancy payments then, so my oldest sister, who was in Woolwich Arsenal in World War One was still young enough to volunteer for the last one, so i did the same, and was one of the first women to go into munitions in may 1940.

In September 1940 we were on duty waiting to punch our clocks for the 5 o'clock shift, when the warning went. We were used to the odd dogfights etc, but when we made for the air raid shelters, German planes were coming up the Thames, machine guns blasting at us, and the battle of Britain had begun.

We were asked to get out if we could, so my friend who knew the engineers for OICS (C.I.A) the small arms examinations machines managed ro get through the wreckage, fire engines and heavy hgh explosive bombs falling.

We made our way home, and waved over the gardens to the people who had been in the shelter that we were alright. Afterwards someone made us some tea. My friend, who was married, said we could go to see if my house was still standing, so we made our way to Plumstead Common. Wally, Hilda and I spent the night in her shelter watching London burn. All along the thames were factories, railways, and of course the Docks.

We registered for work on Monday morning and were put on three day's leave, pending the clearing up stage of the disaster, and were finally sent to outstations somewhere in britain.

Between 1940 and 1943 I worked in numerous towns, travelling with my husband, who was a skilled electrician in the war factories, and i managed to get my release at each town to follow him, so I missed out on expenses, and my service was always broken. We had some awful lodgings, but we were newly weds with no home ties.

I went back to London, to the rockets and doodlebugs in bomb alley again in Brockley and New Cross. I trained as a lady engineer for the GPO. All top secret - London embassies, war office, monitored trunk call, Faraday House etc. The boys returned home from Dunkirk.

After the war, from 1945 to 1947 I worked as a GPO telephonist. I left in 1947 to have our daughter. We moved to Bedford in 1956. My husband Reg Daniels was an electrician in war factories (21 years RAE) somewhere in the provinces including Sellafield.

Reg died from Emphysema, it was throught at first he had bronchitis. There was no allowance for industrial injury, but his illness must have been caused by the work he did in the war.

Two years ago I took the early bus from Bedford to London to pay my respects to Her Royal Highness the Queen Mother. When I arrived, a policeman told me that it would be a ten hour wait, so I turned to go. But the policeman was very kind and took me inside the gates of the palace, into the changing rooms where all these Chelsea pensioners were putting on their red coats, and through a side door into Westminster Hall, where I stood right next to Prince Charles and a few feet from the coffin.

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