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World War Two. The People鈥檚 War. ( Mary Matthews )

I was almost fifteen years old when World War Two started.
We were living on the outskirts of Coventry, we being my mother, father, older sister Margaret and younger brother John.
I was a pupil at 鈥� Barrs Hill Secondary Modern School for Girls鈥�, Margaret worked at the 鈥� Swagen鈥� ( a chain making company ), John was a pupil at Whoberley Junior School, Father worked at 鈥楥oventry Gauge and Tool鈥� an engineering company.
I had to cycle to school a matter of around five miles each way, Father, Margaret and John were able to walk easily to their work and come home for their lunch..

Father became a warden in the local A.R.P. post and we helped him to erect an Anderson Shelter at the bottom of our back garden. I was too old to be evacuated but John along with his friend Gerry was sent to a small village called Tamworth for safety. The couple he was with were very kind but they had a small holding and John had to help with some of the chores, which he did not enjoy. He was always a bit finicky with his food too, spoiled really by our mother who had been a cook general at one stage of her life..
Transport was difficult and it fell to me to visit John on a Sunday cycling there with Gerry鈥檚 father. One meal I had there was stuffed marrow. When I saw this awful soggy, green thing with the centre stuffed with pink mince meat, ( I am sure it had not been cooked through ), I understood why John wanted to come back home.
He did return in an unexpected way. There were bombing raids happening but not too much where we were but as we now know the German bomber crews used to drop the bombs they had not used haphazardly on their way home and some fell on Tamworth. Quite a lot of damage was done and all the children were sent back to their homes.

At first when the raids started I still managed to cycle to school as we lived in the Tile Hill district which was on the outskirts of Coventry, and Barrs Hill was on the fringe of the town. But the bombing became worse and after a very bad raid, I struggled to school on my bicycle and can remember the smell a mixture of burning and other things and the wreckage and dirt.. At school not many of the town pupils had turned up those attending being mainly out-of-towners like me. I will not dwell on the bombing and its effects it was too horrifying, enough that so many pupils never did return to school. They kept us at school for the day while a programme of homework etc. was sorted out for us, meanwhile one teacher was allocated the task of teaching us things that may be of use to us in the crisis. That was when I learned how to change a fuse in an electric plug. We were asked to report into school on certain days and times for homework.

When we were reminiscing my husband Roy told me of his adventures as a messenger at an ARP post in the city he put out many incendiary bombs as he dashed about. He lived with his mother in a house just off Spon End which was badly bombed, and one of the worst thing for them they suffered a plague of rats as the animals left the centre of the city during the bombing. So the Council had to cope with that as well as everything else.

Sadly my father became ill and was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour on his chest. This meant that mother had to go out to work. The Gauge and Tool Coy.kindly offered her work and I had to leave school to stay at home and look after father.

After father died, Miss Barlow the headmistress of Barrs Hill was very good and got me work at the Standard Motor Co. ( Aero Division, Banner Lane ) and I trained as a comptometer operator and worked in the wages department. My wage was the princely sum of 拢1. 2s. 6p. but again I had to go on my faithful bicycle a distance of four miles each way.

We were a section of young girls and for me the world opened up, with make-up, dancing and dating. The local hostel in Tile Hill village ran dances on Saturday nights and as Honiley Aerodrome was not far away, we enjoyed the company of young RAF boys at the dances with the current phase of jiving and jitterbugging, we forgot all our worries on a Saturday night. Transport was our bikes of course.

Then an American Army base was established at Stoneliegh ( now the agricultural centre ) so we girls were spoilt for choice. They also held dances at their camp and sent lorries to pick the girls up at certain spots. It sounds dangerous now, but it was very well organised and we were chaperoned by older women personnel. At the hostel we had to dance to records but at Stoneliegh there was a live band, and luscious ice cream. The soldiers were very nice to us young girls, we were very naive and they respected that.

There were no buses running after 9.00 p.m. so if we dated in town to go to the cinema etc. we often had to walk home, again perfectly safely across Hearsall Common, or having lifts on the crossbars of the lads bicycles ( very uncomfortable )

Food... with the three of us working full time, mother, Margaret and I, the only time we could queue for extras was on a Saturday and that became quite a chore going around the shops. Mother did all the cooking and washing at home, with Margaret and I sharing the ironing and housework between us. I must admit when it was my turn to scrub the tiled floor through the house from the front door to the back, I could do it in about ten minutes whereas Margaret would take an hour going into all the corners, I was very haphazard. We also decorated inside the house with distemper and stippling the plain walls with another colour put on with a crumpled up piece of cloth, often an old nylon stocking. It looked good too. Every six weeks or so the Lyons fruit pie people would deliver hundreds of their individual fruit pies to the factory, as a perk!!, these were about 4鈥漵quare in boxes. I always bought the one my friend Joyce
had because her mother worked at the Co-op and she did not want this little luxury. So I would take the two pies home and mum would cut them in two and we would have them for a sweet with top of the milk.

By this time we were inviting some of the airmen etc. home for a spell of home life and mum would make her famous sausage meat pie which she livened up with a dash of HP sauce. I have always had a very sweet tooth and around Christmas time I would make decorations for Christmas trees ( you could not buy them ) and sell them not for money but for sweet coupons.

Clothes. My sister Margaret was a wizard on the sewing machine and made most of our clothes and I was the helper, tacking materials together, unpicking and doing odd bits. She made some lovely clothes, always with an unusual touch. We both liked decorating them and adding different touches, bundles of lace, beads, flowers and sequins could be bought on Coventry market. I had one black dress that was retrimmed so many times with flowers, then beads, then lace it was amazing. As for parachute silk, Margaret must have made dozens of sets of undies and blouses of this wonderful commodity. Girls would get hold of some of the silk and Margaret would make the clothes in exchange for part of the material. Margaret made me a two-piece in grey flannel, ( unpicked man鈥檚 suit ) it would not be out of place today, with its straight skirt, and the top was fitted to the waist then hung half way down the skirt. She made collar and cuffs from parachute silk, and one of the young drawing-office boys painted the set with flowers for me, gorgeous. I still have the cuffs in my souvenir box!!! We managed to aquire the lining of a fur coat, good fur coats in those days had linings of a most wonderful thick shiny satin material. This was black and Margaret made me a beautiful skirt on a deep band with pleats all around for dancing, I was the bees knees. But the pleats all had to be ironed in every time I wore it not like todays fabrics. I remember cycling to a dance at Tile Hill and standing on the pedals all the way so as not to crease my lovely skirt.

We even made sandals. In those days clothes lines were made of a thick string/twine covered in a material. We painstakingly stitched the clothes line to form two soles, stitched on straps of webbing, and stuck an in sole on top. They were very successful, and yes, we painted and decorated them. This saved us a number of coupons but they were hard to make and we refused to make them for anyone else.

I also cornered the market in ear-rings.... I would gather a piece of lace edging into a small circle, add sequins, beads etc to the centre, sew a piece of bent wire on the back. The wire then had to be bent firmly to fix to the ear lobe. These were very popular.

My sister did not go dancing with us, she is older than me and she and her friends sometimes visited a pub called 鈥楾he Newlands鈥� near our home. A bunch of American Army lads 鈥榝ound鈥� this out of the way pub, and loved it as everyone made such a fuss of them. At that time the Americans admired our British forces with their battle dress tops, and when they knew my sister did sewing, she was inundated with American tunics which she adapted into battle dress tops. I don鈥檛 know what the officers thought of that!!!

Holidays were spent on the bike and with my friends we went youth-hostelling when we could. We cycled hundreds of miles and loved it. Lots of army lorries would pass us, and there would be the wolf whistles, and the lads would throw us things, sweets, cigarettes, even oranges one day, AND with no come back, What I mean to say is these things were not given to us with an ulterior motive, anyway we were all mobile on the road.!!

Of course it was not all happy go lucky. We were caught up in many air raids.. which I am not going to try to describe. There were day light raids when we were at work and we would have to rush to the shelters, each girl with her designated box of important papers to look after. After a raid we still had to get our work done and would have to work overtime, as the unions insisted that the men were paid on time every Friday morning, come hell or high water. They did not care for the fact that we girls often had to work quite late to make up the wage packets.

Pauline, one of the girls on our section and I decided to volunteer for the local First Aid Post. This entailed a course of lectures and practice and tests, and we had to do spells of night duty as we worked during the day. This was quite tiring and not very rewarding as unfortunately, or should I say luckily, although they called the men out to go into Coventry when the air raids got fierce, we young girls were left to mann the post, and we did not see any action.

Another girl on the section Pat got me interested in joining the Royal Observer Corps. and I thought that I could do more for the war effort there than as a first-aider. So we joined the R.O.C. and were stationed at a large house in Earlsdon, yes, another case of taking to the bike. We were issued with the standard RAF uniform, sent for training and started on work that was very exacting, worrying, and very important. At least I thought so. I aged a lot during my time in the ROC. We girls sat around this huge table which was a map of the county and surrounding districts done in grid reference. We were each connected by ear phones to an observer post out in the country
where two men taking it in shifts would be scanning the skies for enemy aircraft. When sighted they would phone us the grid reference, the number of aircraft, the type if possible and height and direction. ( I often wonder why a medal has not been struck for those brave volunteers who spent many, many uncomfortable and worrying hours spotting, then would go home to start probably an exacting, stressful day job )
We girls would then plot these references on the table, with arrows, numbers, little aeroplanes. I was terrified either that I would get the grid reference wrong, or even miss it altogether. In the ops. room there was another huge map on one wall which covered the whole of the south of the country and where other girls would be doing the long range plotting, as the enemy aircraft flew over. I would watch the big board checking what aircraft seemed to be coming my way, and often warned 鈥榤y post鈥� of possible sightings. I remember getting very tired and feeling really washed out going to work the next day after a night shift. We were all so young for the responsibility but then so were the aircrews who did such wonderful flying tasks to keep us safe, many of them only 20,21,22 years of age. So many of them sacrificing themselves for our safety.

Yet there was still the dancing and the dating... but one day we had some terrible news, we had all been down at the hostel dancing on the Saturday night with the RAF lads, and on the Wednesday we had the news that two of the Lancaster bombers had been destroyed. This was not an unusual happening as you will realise but these crews we had been with on the Saturday and we had actually dated some of them. We were all upset and our boss could not make head or tale of it all. When it was explained to him he sent us all off to the works surgery, instructed the nurse to give us tea and aspirins and send us back in a fit state for work after half an hour. I wrote a poem about this incident, not marvellous stuff but..... ( copy attached )

It was a full life, work, house work, dancing, ROC duties, dating...often very, very tired. We all gave blood on a regular basis and at one of the sessions three of us were turned away as we were anaemic, we felt this very much.
VE Day came and there was a big parade through Coventry. We marched proudly with the ROC section and we had a special cheer from a group of our American friends as we marched along. Some girls of course became GI brides.
When it was time for the Stoneliegh camp to be dismantled they gave a farewell dance for which we had to have a ticket... I kept mine for years but cannot find it now. I can remember hundreds of photographs were taken by the Americans to take home with them, I wonder what their wives and sweethearts thought.

What is the saying.... the best of times - the worst of times.....................................

And the 64 dollar question....was it worth all that sacrifice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

鈥� We were so young 鈥� by Mary Matthews

We were so young we had no cares,
Though oft the sky was filled with flares.
We danced all night, enjoyed the noise.
The music played, the girls met boys,
Blue uniforms - we knew that they
Tomorrow would fly far away.
But life was great, it was a lark,
Ignore the bombs, ignore the dark.
Then came the day we heard the news,
Two planes gone down with all their crews.
It hit us hard, we felt the pain
Never to see those boys again.
They were so keen, they were so brave,
Too young to lie in foreign grave.
The news came through when we were working,
And our boss - forever lurking
Behind us - wondered why
All his staff began to cry.
Not very old, just flighty girls,
With paint and powder, bouncy curls.
But on that day we felt such pain,
Never to see those boys again.

Added at a much later date......

So long ago - yet have we learned
The lesson that those lost lives earned.
Dear Father God we hope and pray,
That common sense will rule one day
And peace will come o鈥檈r all Your land
At last! At last! They鈥檒l understand!!!!!

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