大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Dunstable At War Team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was eighteen years old when the war started and working in London at Melbourne House in the intelligence department for the Inland Revenue. It was very boring and travelling to work was very difficult on the train. There were often delays; all the trains had to be blacked out in the evening and they often stopped in the middle of the countryside, and none of us knew where we were. In the end I asked for a transfer and was relocated to the Luton tax office.

In 1940 I became part of the watch team at Grove House. I have a picture of all the girls and boys in uniform. We used to keep watch in case any incendiary bombs dropped on the house. We did this once or twice a week and slept on camp beds. We had no real training but it was good fun. I did this with two friends called Evelyn, Eva and of course I鈥檓 called Yvonne, so we were called the Three Eves! Luckily we had no problems.

My parents lived in Beecroft Way in Dunstable. It was at a time when people were buying plots of land and having their own houses built. However, the war put a stop to that and my parents found themselves marooned in a far corner of a field. The road hadn鈥檛 been made up and we used to come home at night in absolute trepidation, because there were no lights anywhere near us. Some friends came to visit us for supper once, and were about an hour or more late arriving because they become completely lost, wandering around the hedgerows with lighted matches trying to find us. The Met Office was built at the bottom of our garden and we had people working there, billeted with us. We had WAAFs, young air force men, a middle aged coloured gentleman who was a civilian worker and various other people. The Met Office was made up of a collection of huts, which were taken down after the war.

I wasn鈥檛 in a reserved occupation and I didn鈥檛 want to work on the buses or in a factory so I joined the WRAF to become a wireless operator. After completing our square bashing in Wilmslow in Cheshire which was torture really, I was sent to Honeybourne in Worcestershire which consisted of a huge training aerodrome. About 1,000 pilots were in training there from all over the world - New Zealand, Australia, Poland and Canada. We were just used as skivvies really while we waited for our training. We had a woman flight officer and a WRAF flight officer who were real battleaxes and if they didn鈥檛 put us on lavatory duty they found some other horrible job for us. One day we had to take the dining tables out of the huge mess hall, turn them upside down and remove all the chewing gum stuck to them. It was a very hot summer and sometimes we went to the local farms and picked fruit to earn a bit of extra money. In July some of us were sent to Blackpool to do our wireless operator training. I went with 6 other girls and was billeted with a lovely family.

We then stayed in a boarding house where there were 14 of us and only one bathroom. Even then, we were not allowed to use the bath! We had to wash using just the hand basin. There were 3 of us in one bedroom and 2 of us slept in a double bed. There was very little light in our room so we bought a lamp from Woolworth鈥檚 and left it in one of our bedroom cupboards, but while we were working the old boy came in and pinched it. The owners also used to pinch our rations and we were given really awful food. When on washing up duty we found our rations hidden away in the cupboard. We were very unhappy there. Once or twice a week we used to march with a band from central Blackpool where we were based, to the Derby Baths in north Blackpool with our towels under our arms. I remember all the holiday makers used to line the streets when we did that! A few days before Christmas we moved to Wiltshire and missed all our Christmas mail that year. This upset some of the girls as many felt very homesick. I was jolly lucky because I was courting Bob and while we were stationed in Blackpool, he was also sent there on a course for a few weeks. He took me out to the pictures and the theatre and stopped me feeling too miserable. He had some relatives in Bath and they asked me to stay for Christmas. I hitched a lift in a lorry to see him then.

When I was qualified I was sent to Chatham in Kent to the fleet air arm headquarters which was built underground. Just before D Day the two girls that I worked with and myself were sent to Manston in Kent. We had to take messages from the fleet air arm reconnaissance planes. We were there for about 3 or 4 months and during that time we saw the first VE bombers (the buzz bombs) coming over. They made the most peculiar noise that we had ever heard, a bit frightening really. I then went back to Chatham until I was demobbed.

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