大象传媒

Continued from Part 1 - 'The Siege of Malta' - Story A4547847

This story has been written onto the 大象传媒 People's War site by CSV Storygatherer Alison Lear on behalf of Suzanne Kyrle-Pope. The story has been added to the site with her permission. And Suzanne Kyrle-Pope fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

In April 1942,when I arrived back in England at Liverpool, from Malta, I brought with me boxes and bags of food which I had bought in Durban and Capetown where we briely visited. I took these to my mother and two sisters who were living in a cottage in Staffordshire with their babies. Both my sisters' husbands were serving officers, whom they seldom saw, and they had a tough time bringing up their babies in strict wartime rationing. My mother had joined them on her return from Singapore, where my father had been stationed up to the time the Japanese captured it.
Amongst other things I brought a small sack of lemons and one of oranges, neither of which had been available in England for years. The sack of lemons burst outside Liverpool Station and lemons rolled all over the road! Thay were picked up in a flash by people who handed them back to me with pathetoc expressions which said "we haven't seen one of these for such a long time!". After that my luggage was a
lot lighter!
After a period at home I had to find a job. My husband was still in the Middle East and took part in the landings in Sicily and Italy. I wanted to work in naval intelligence this time and applied to the Admiralty from where I was appointed to the Inter-Services Topographical Department ( ISTD ) in Oxford.
The Admiralty had asked for holiday photographs to be sent. Floods of albums arrived at the New Bodleian library and had to be examined so that any snapshots of interest could be printed off before the albums were returned to their owners who never knew which had been copied!
The Naval Photographic library was stored in hundreds of identical boxes, filed on shelves, in geographical, alphabetical order. I was one of the team working on the selection from the albums and it was amazing to find several belonging to my friends
Photographs of beaches,towns,roads and their services all were of interest and commandos, and others about to be dropped in ,or landed on, enemy territory, would come to look up photographs of the areas in which they were to operate.
After a while (a few months) I asked to be transferred to the other department in Manchester College where the topographical reports were being written up and prepared prior to landings in enemy held territory. I was appointed to Section C which worked on France and in particular the area of the Normandy Landings to come. My job was to prepare panoramic profile strips of the coastline with all possible landmarks annotated.
The RAF would fly reconnaissance sorties at 0 feet (under 1,000 feet) and would photograph the coastline for us. I would be given packs of hundreds of photographs from which I had to select and match up a continuous strip of each stretch of coastline glueing photographs together with a rubber solution called "cow". I then had to identify all the landmarks and annotate the photographs with indian ink and small, clear script. Others were doing the same work on other coastlines.
We had to help us complete sets of Michelin road maps, Baedeker and other tourist guides, Admiralty charts and pilots and of course our own photographic library.
Others worked on the written topographical reports which were typed and roneoed off onto foolscap (A4).
It wasn't until these reports for the first Sicily landings had been roneod that it was realised that the sheets of paper had no holes so could not be tied or laced together. Each report was about one inch thick. Quandry! I suggested we could use a bit and brace (there were no electric drills then). John Boex. a young naval lieutenant in the department, and an amateur carpenter, jumped on his bike and rushed off to his digs to collect a bit and brace. This was at 11 o'clock at night. We were working against time as the landings had been brought forward. The reports had to be ready to go to Northolt by 6am the next morning.
John returned with the bit and brace but found that when trying to drill the hole in a stack of paper one inch thick each sheet would swivel round even with two people holding the pile. I said I would sit on it as I was the heaviest in the office and so John held his bit and brace centemetres from my backside to get the job done!

The reports were collected in the naval jeep at 6am and John escorted them clutching a loaded revolver. I am told that each landing craft had a copy of my concertina folded photographic profile to enable their accurate arrival at their destination.

I stayed in ISTD until November 1943 when my husband returned from the Middle East and started his training with the Malta brigade for the D-Day landings in June 1944. Our baby was born in September that year and I then lived a domestic life until the end of the war.

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