大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Morwenna Nadar of CSV/大象传媒 LONDON on behalf of Peggy D. and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions

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During the war I was living in my home village of Iver in Buckingshire, and I was working in Shepherds Bush in West London, making pipe-work for Shell. I used to get up at 6.30 in the morning and usually returned home after 7 in the evening. For a lot of the time, I rarely saw daylight as I left in the dark and returned in the dark. The sirens used to go off frequently in Shepherds Bush and sometimes we would go to the shelters but sometimes we wouldn鈥檛 bother. Quite often, my friends and I would go to the Hammersmith Palais as it was fairly near work, and dances were held there. We had to take our gas-masks with us but we never used them. We had good fun even although there was a war on. I was also in the ARP and on two or three nights a week, after I got home from work, I was on duty. We were based in the local stables and had pumps in buckets to put out incendiary bombs. Thankfully we never had to use them but I often wonder what good they would have been if we had needed to. The Indian restaurant now in the village used to be another base with bunk beds where we slept, if it was quiet, when we were on duty. My job was to man the phones. I would go on duty, get what sleep I could in one of the bunks, go home for breakfast, and then go straight to work.

The Ford factory at Langley was used for Hawker Aircraft during the war and we had huge smoke-screen cannisters all round the village at night. I remembering hearing the drone of the planes passing overhead when Coventry was bombed. There was a flying bomb which fell on Uxbridge and many people were killed, but we were lucky, both at work and in our village. My parents had friends who kept The Half Moon pub in Cuxham, near Oxford, and I stayed there one Christmas when I was about wenty-one. It was a lovely pub with a thatched roof, and when my son recently took me back there for my first visit since that Christmas sixty years ago, it still looked just as I remembered it. We could hear the sound of the American bombers as the Americans had an airforce base at nearby Chalgrove. The airmen looked very glamorous in their flying jackets as they drove around in their jeeps. They had all sorts of things that we couldn鈥檛 get in Britain and used to give us meat, chocolate, champagne, and nylons. They were very generous.

My late husband, Irek, was in occupied Poland during the war and was in the underground movement there. After the Russians arrived, he decided to make for the West where the Allies were as he felt he would be freer there. He managed to reach West Germany via Czechoslvakia on his motor-bike. As a displaced person, he was able to come to Britain and join up with the Polish Pioneer Corps which was based at a large house in Iver, called Iver Grove, where a cousin of his was a major. In 1946 the local Women鈥檚 Institute asked its members if they would invite the Polish men to their houses for tea as they were all here without their families. I went to Iver Grove with a girlfriend and we picked two fellows, one short and one tall. They seemed nice young men so sometime later we invited them to come to the Savoy cinema in Uxbridge with us. I remember there was a huge queue. We didn鈥檛 really expect to se them again so I was very surprised when there was a knock on the door one day and the tall one stood there. And that鈥檚 when Irek and I started going out together. I also remember there were Nissen huts at Iver Grove for the men and we danced to continental music played on accordions.

Irek had picked up a little knowledge about diesel engines before he came to Iver and he found a job as a fitter at Thorneycroft in Reading, but he wanted to do better than that so he went to Further Education classes at Reading Technical college to do an O.N.C. In 1988, after 25 years as an engine design draughtsman, he retired from British Leyland. He died in 1997after nine years of retirement, and two years later he was awarded the medal for his work in the resistance movement. We had to fight for that but I am very pleased that my son can now have this much deserved memento of his father.

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