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This story was submitted to the People's War website by Julia Shuvalova for GMR Actiondesk on behalf of Derek Roger Hilton and has been added with his permission. The author is fully aware of the terms and conditions of the site.

On my seventeenth birthday, I volunteered for the R.A.F. and was sent to Padgate where I sat very hard maths exams for Air Crew. I passed the exams and the medical, although the M.O. remarked on my back which had severe acne. My own doctor had been treating it with Penicillin injections every day for a week but had told me that Penicillin, the only antibiotic available then, didn’t work on me. I was sent to the skin hospital where they gave me ointment to rub in and advice about plenty of baths and hard rubbing with a rough towel, not very pleasant.

However, I started training at Padgate and after three weeks of training, marching, being fitted out with uniform, etc, the M.O. had another look at my back and decided I had to leave, as I wasn’t responding to treatment. I clearly remember leaving and feeling very upset not to be able to continue and do my bit. I think my parents were relieved — being a parent myself, I know how I would have felt. I dare say it probably saved my life. Air gunners had a very short life span, but I never gave it a thought, like so many young men, I just wanted to take part in the action

We had a neighbour in our avenue who hated me from that day. His son Bobby Lee was the pilot of a Lancaster bomber and was killed in the Dam Busters raids. Bobby had been an only child and Mr Lee resented me not being in the forces — he must have been mad with grief. Bobby had been a good friend of mine and I felt very sad for the family.

I was directed then to go for training in munitions work and was sent to the government training school in Cheetham Hill. We could choose a skill, and a neighbour of ours advised me to be a fitter, especially as fitters were short at that time. I did learn a lot, but with my art training and aptitude for maths and drawing, training as a draughtsman would have been more appropriate and would have equipped me better for civilian life. Career advice wasn’t offered in those days and my parents didn’t have the knowledge to guide me.

My training school was a long way from home and meant getting up very early to catch a bus to Manchester and another to the school. I was there about six months. We had a canteen with a stage and had live entertainment in the lunch hour. I got on well with everyone; there were many young men and girls training for munitions work. Unless you were in a reserve occupation you had to go either in the forces or munitions. Some who were conscientious objectors were sent to work on the land as an alternative to munitions. A neighbour of ours was sent to the Isle of Man.

Eventually we completed our training and were assigned to various factories. I went to work at Ward and Goldstone’s on Frederick Road, Pendleton. I was able to use my bike to get to work and it was much more convenient working there. I built presses for making aircraft parts. Women worked the machines to press out the bakalite parts used in the electrics in an aircraft. I found some of the women very coarse, swearing like some men.

I had to supply all my own tools, apart from those I had made at the training school. An unpleasant event occurred whilst I was there. An older man, about 35, thought that painting my tools was a huge joke, and when I found them the next day, under my bench where they were left, I challenged him. He admitted it and I grabbed him, put him against the wall, and painted him with red paint from head to toe. Of course he fought to get away but my anger plus my youth and the cheers from the other workers gave me the adrenalin to teach him a lesson. He never messed with my things again.

At Ward and Goldstone’s I met a soul mate, Peter. We shared a great love of classical music. Peter’s father was the vicar of the local church; the whole family were music lovers and I spent happy hours there. Peter was a classical pianist. The family were friends of William Walton, the composer, and they used to visit him in Cheshire at his home.

We went to many classical concerts, following the Halle Orchestra around various venues in the Manchester area, after the Free Trade Hall was bombed. Peter gave a recital for the YHA members at our club and was enthusiastically received.

The vicar asked me to paint a new church notice board. I was given the wood, cut, shaped and painted black, and I spent hours in our dining room painting in gold the details of the services, etc from the vicar’s instructions.

It was now about 1944 and it was obvious that we were winning the war. I made enquiries about my job at the Guardian and was assured that it was safe. I remained an active member of the YHA, spending most weekends in the Derbyshire Dales and sometimes Delamere in Cheshire. We went in all weathers, walking and cycling. We all had racing bikes with lightweight frames which I believe were called 531. I became a keen rock climber and bought a cotton rope from a shop in Manchester, going on my bike in my dinner hour.

One club night at the YHA an older man offered to teach those of us interested to rock climb. We climbed on rocks near Buxton, it was a long walk from the hostel and I had been sick after having a drink the previous night. Ron, our ‘teacher’, went first and secured the rope. I was next and I slipped and fell about ten feet - the rope tightened round my ribs, bruising them.

I used to practice out of our bedroom window at the back of our house in Venesta Avenue, known then as a running rapel, now called abseiling. We wore boots with metal tri-kunies and sharp spikes all round the edges.

We were at Rudyard Lake YHA one weekend when it was heard on the radio that a V bomb had fallen in Worsley and had demolished a house, killing a young boy. I remember cycling to see the damage.

We had great trips at the weekends, the roads were very quiet and we cycled to the Lake District, staying at hostels and cycling all over, even to the Honister Pass, where one of the girls came unstuck and didn’t negotiate a bend over a bridge and landed in the beck! Once we saw hundreds of students from the Royal College of Art in London, walking round Ambleside in their blazers. Lakeland villages were untouched by war in the physical sense, food was plentiful — but of course, their husbands and sons served their country too and gave their lives.

Peace came in 1945; we celebrated in various ways, I joined the thousands in Picadilly. Life returned to normal and my job at the Manchester Guardian.

I feel some nostalgia for those war years, though I would have preferred it to have never happened, people were quite definitely at their finest — adversity brought out the best in them. We had a common cause in the long struggle for peace. I had made good friends and met some interesting people.

Dad’s brother Robert was a regular soldier, an officer stationed in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese. He was taken prisoner and was in Changi Camp and forced to work on the infamous Burma railway. His war didn’t end till later, but thankfully he survived the terrible ordeal and in his 91st year wrote his memories too.

Pre-war we had lovely holidays, going by train as Dad was an engine driver, and sometimes on free passes; our usual destination Bournemouth or Barmouth. Once Dad drove our train, the Pines Express, to Bournemouth - a great thrill for a youngster, and I was proudly telling the other passengers that my Dad was driving the train. During the war few people could take holidays, although Fred Seal and I had stayed in Morecambe and fished off the stone jetty. It was a lovely resort, homely, with flower beds all along and a band playing on the pier. Ladies in floral pinafores sold home made nettle beer outside their cottages at Heysham.

In 1947, several of us from Manton YHA had a youth hostelling holiday in Norway, the first holiday abroad for all of us — Fred and Mavis, Ivor and Joyce and Ron, Mavis’s brother. Norway was a revelation to us — the grandeur of the mountains, the fjords, the warm hospitality of the Norwegian people, who greeted us with gratitude because we were English and our soldiers had ended the German occupation.

German tanks were strewn everywhere and at Myolfyell hostel, Oscar the warden had been a member of the Norwegian resistance and had been in prison. We listened intently about his experiences. He had a friend who had also been in the resistance. He had a log cabin some distance away that had fallen into disrepair. A crowd of us volunteered to repair it and we spent three days working on it — the girls painting, the boys laying a concrete floor, repairing the roof and the sauna next door. We slept each night back at the hostel, distance meant nothing to us. It was all a great adventure and a great memory.

Derek Roger Hilton
April 9th 2000

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