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This story is posted on behalf of my mother Agnes Smith [nee Dudley].

It was September 1939 I had just passed my 16th birthday and was enjoying life as teenagers will and going out with friends to the cinema a couple of times a week. Although we hadn’t got radio or television at home we heard about this bloke Hitler, and what he was up to, from newspapers and the Pathe Newsreel in the cinema. Quite honestly at that age we didn’t know a lot about wars, especially like this one was going to be. So when we did go to war with Germany the consequences of it all were a complete mystery to me.

It didn’t hit home how things were going to change until one day a letter was delivered to me from the local employment exchange telling me I had to do war work in a factory. We weren’t posh, far from it, we were a working class family but my parents would not have allowed me to consider factory work before the war. Factory girls had a bad name they were considered rough, used bad language and my parents would have killed any of their daughters who acted in that way, although not their son. How times change.

Up until that time I’d had a job for about 2 years [a little maid of all work] for a lady, Miss Huxtable the local dance mistress. She paid me 7s 6d [37 ½ p] for a 40 hour week but I enjoyed the job as she was very kind to me. I had been with her since leaving school and from her I had learnt a lot. The job was not a live in position and so I was still living at home with my elderly parents not far from the River Thames in Erith Kent. At that time both banks of the Thames, were lined with many factories and industries right up to London.

But the authorities deemed that I now had to leave my nice little job with ‘Hux’ and start work at one of these factories. So it was that I was sent to Turner Newell’s asbestos factory, where they made parts which were assembled into huts to be used by the services. I got paid double the amount 'Hux' gave me and worked 48 hours a week over 6 and a half days. But the work was dirty and dusty and I used to go home with painful and bleeding fingers because working with dry asbestos dehydrates your skin.

When the Luftwaffe started its campaign to invade Britain we were subjected to repeated air raids day and night. Being near the Thames was dangerous as the German air crew used the river as a pathway to London, bombing the factories en route to and from the city centre. One particularly bad raid took place at night but luckily we girls didn’t work nights, although my boy friend Harry [now my husband of 63 years] was on duty that night. Thankfully he was in the works canteen and was able to shelter under a table when a high explosive bomb fell on the part of the factory where I worked. When I reported for work the following morning my part of the factory had been blown clean away. But we were reassured that there were no fatalities because no one worked in that part of the building at night. We girls had to be transferred to the new factory across the road to carry on with our work.

But it could have been such a different tale. Harry was in the habit of visiting my work bench in his tea break to leave a note or a gift which he would wrap in my work apron for me to find the following day. But despite company rules something made him decide to visit my workshop earlier that night and so he was in the relative safety of the canteen when the bomb fell.

Once I knew he was safe the thing about that raid that really upset me was that my gift that night had been a chocolate bar, which was very hard to get at that time. And my bar of chocolate had gone up with the factory.

I worked at Turner Newell's for over 2 years until my marriage in August 1942. We spent our honeymoon in Scotland with the family of a friend my husband had met in the Navy. Upon returning from honeymoon I went to live in Isleworth close to where my husband was stationed in HMS Shrapnel. But after only a few weeks we had to move out of our first home, a little flat with shared kitchen and bathroom. My new husband was horrified to find that our landlady was 'entertaining' men on the premises.

We hadn't been back from honeymoon a week when the letter arrived from the labour exchange. This time I was sent to Siemens Isleworth where I worked on an assembly line. I was only there a short time and I never did find out what the end product was. When we decided we needed to leave our flat quickly we went to live with with my older sister, Edith, who lived in nearby Bedfont.

I then applied to the labour exchange to be moved closer to my new home and was sent to AB metal products where I operated a hole punch machine. Another assembly line but this time I did know we were making radios.

It was whilst working at AB that I realised I was pregnant with my first child. After giving birth to my daughter Tricia in November 1943 I did not return to factory work. So that was the end of my conscripted war work.

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