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8a — Vera Hawkins (born in 1920) gives an account of her contribution to the War Effort, and of her husband Tony’s military service:

“In 1941 when there was a war on, we married in March which we shouldn’t have been, and in Lent which we shouldn’t have been but he’d got leave, and so Canon Noel Prentice married us. We couldn’t have any hymns because we hadn’t got an organist, there was no organist, we couldn’t have the church bells because that meant Invasion, so it was dead quiet!

I was still at Freeman, Hardy and Willis, but I got called up in the August because I was 21, and at 21 all girls were called up to do National Service of some kind. (Tony) worked for Frank Burchall, who had the big electrical shop, but he got called up you see at 21. We started married life… he was between coming out of Dunkirk and going to India, which he did do in the end, and we only had, I think he had got 48 hours' leave, something silly like that, to get married in, and I was still living at home in Broad Street with my parents, and we got married… there were 13 of us sat down, don’t tell me 13’s an unlucky number, ‘cos I don’t believe it! And it rained all day, you know, it was one of those days, and I didn’t have a white dress, there wasn’t one, you don’t need it, you don’t need it! When the girls say it costs thousands of pounds for a wedding dress I think you don’t need it, you don’t, we never had anything at all, we hadn’t got any money between us. I had got a bit of bottom drawer, which girls used to do in those days, they don’t know them long enough to get…, wade straight in. We had walked out together before he went in the army for four years, about four and a half years before we got married. He used to walk me home. He did get on with my father because he was an electrician and my father was an electrician, so, you know, I was lucky in that way.

He got called up, he had his papers on his 21st birthday, and he went to Aldershot, and I can honestly tell you he would not have been a soldier if he hadn’t been called up, no. He was not a military, aggressive man in the slightest. He wouldn’t have refused to do his duty, but he wouldn’t have been a soldier because he wasn’t that sort of man.

He went into the Royal Engineers and he became a bridging engineer, and had a wagon that was a thrower over bridges, I don’t understand but when the army came to a river and there wasn’t a bridge, he was an engineer who could make the bridge go across, or build a bridge or whatever it was, and when it came to coming out of France, at the time of Dunkirk, [and I have been there this year only, and I was very emotionally depressed with it all].

He said they were ordered to drive back to somewhere called Dunkirk which he hadn’t heard of, drive as fast as they could, well the roads were full of refugees but he was on his bridging wagon, not supposed to pick anybody up, but he said if anybody climbed on our wagon I didn’t say get off. But we couldn’t travel very fast, because the roads were clogged, the only time we could travel was when the Stukas came over and machine-gunned and the people all went into the ditches, [and I’ve seen the ditches, I got out of the car and saw the ditches where they all go into these ditches], he said if there weren’t too many carts and horses and things abandoned in the middle of the road, we could drive a bit. But they drove on and they came to outside of Dunkirk and then they were ordered to destroy their wagons as best as they could, that was what upset him most, because it was his wagon, and it was electrically operated, you can…, I don’t understand it but whatever, but to have to slash its tyres and puncture its tanks, that was what upset him more than anything else. And he said and then we walked with the rest of them and got into Dunkirk, well I don’t know if you’ve been to Dunkirk, but I’ve been there, Clive and Liz took me this year, and there’s three miles, like you’ve got six miles in Blackpool, you’ve got three miles.

Both (my sisters) wanted to get away from my father who was more than bossy, he was a bully, and so they both went in the forces which again blotted my character, because my father said I wasn’t in uniform, because I wasn’t in uniform, I worked on the land and that wasn’t a job. I worked for Newton and Newey up the Clopton Road — there’s a nursery at the end. While I was there I learned the hard way, I learnt how to trench dig and do all sorts of things which I wouldn’t have known. That was my national service.
The foreman went to fetch the clinker in a lorry which they brought up to the end of the Avenue and tipped, and we girls had wheelbarrows; that was where I learned the difference between a spade and a shovel, and get a shovel full of clinker, and we made the roadway from there which runs up to where Benson Road joins on, there’s an outlet there. We girls made that road, so I am a roadbuilder as well. All these girls we worked with (Daphne Phipps and the Goode sisters), we were not Land Army girls, there was Land Army, but I had promised Tony when we got married, he said I know you’ll get called up in August, please don’t go in the services because I don’t want you not to be here, if I get leave. Well he promptly went to the Far East for four years, so it wouldn’t have made any difference would it?

So I didn’t go into uniform, well of course that was another nail in my coffin as far as my father was concerned ‘cos the other two were in uniform, but when we come to the shovel, my sisters didn’t lift anything heavier than a pen! I could lift…, we worked the hardest! But we worked up there with the Land Girls, and we met a lot of very nice Land Girls, a lot of them had escaped from offices in Birmingham and away from their parents’ eyes and were glad to be free, you know, and so of course they lived it up, and I was married and so somewhat staid compared with them, but my husband was away so… Everybody was all right to me, and I got on well with them, but I wasn’t actually in uniform as such, that was my job.

I had previously been called up at 21, and had to face some daunting ladies in the place at the corner of Shakespeare Street and Birmingham Road; in those days this was the place to go and be told where you were going to work, and this lady, sitting there in her sixties I think trying to do her war effort, said what are you going to do, are you going in the services? And I said well no, I don’t want to go in the services, and I explained to her, and she said well you had better go in a factory then. Well I had never been inside a factory, (but) I thought well I was like Tony, I would go where I was sent.

So I was sent up to Josephs, where I met Barney Joseph, who was a very kind man, and he knew that we were as green as grass as far as factory work was concerned; well of course it became dark, so it was dark to go to work in the morning, it was dark to come home at night, it was all blacked out, and the noise was something to be believed, I had never heard such a noise in my life, but he thought I was one of the ones who was intelligent enough to learn how to do oxyacetylene welding — but I tell you now, I never light that gas fire, I am terrified of gas, so sitting there with a canister of whatever and a canister of oxygen to mix with a long thing and a flame about that long, and having goggles on to look at the little bit there to weld, was terrifying to me, but I did it.

And then they said well I think you are doing so well we’d like you to go on to arc welding — that’s another terrifying thing with sparks coming out you know, but before I could do that, it was so upsetting me that I said I wished to go and see the doctor, and the first thing that the woman overseer asked everybody was are you expecting a baby?
That was the only reason. No I’m not, my husband’s abroad - that doesn’t make any difference, she said, which of course, I was green. I didn’t know anything about it. So anyway I went to the doctor’s, I saw Dr Murray and he said you shouldn’t have been there anyway, you’re not equipped for that, he said, if you’d come to me I wouldn’t have let you go there, there’s surely another job you can do for the war effort, so he wouldn’t let me go back, so that was it, I was invalided from that. I had earned a colossal amount of money in those few weeks that I worked there, which didn’t do me a scrap of good did it?

But that brought me to being home at the time when Tony was from Dunkirk. Out at Sherbourne they had Lord Sherbourne’s estate in Gloucestershire, and he was there, and so I went and spent a bit of time with him, and came back and saw the doctor and went back, until he finally went up to Dumfries in Scotland where they set sail for…it turned out to be Bombay.

And then I came home you see, and I said well I must do something, he’d gone, and so I went on the land. I worked for Newton and Newey for a long time, I was up there and it was hard work but I didn’t mind, I liked it. It was OK, I was in the air, I was with the girls, it was good, but I wasn’t allowed to work full hours, I was termed as part time, so in the lunchtime, I had from twelve till half past one, when I used to come into town and stand in the queues to get the cigarettes for the girls who smoked, ‘cos I didn’t smoke. But all the landgirls smoked, and they couldn’t escape because they were there anyway, so that endeared me to them because they would wait for me to go back and see how many cigarettes, whether they had got to break one in half to share or whatever.

Tomatoes was a food that the Food Office would let them grow, they were allowed to grow a certain amount of cucumbers but only a few, and the greenhouse that the cucumbers were in was misted with whatever, white paint or something, and the man who came to inspect, to see that we were doing the right thing, had a cucumber to go home with, it was all very sort of under the counter you know.

But we worked hard, and those fields up there, I don’t know whether you have ever dug in that ground, I don’t suppose you have, but it’s clay, it’s real clay. And we used to go on the fields and dig by hand, and we had a wooden mallet to knock a cane in, plant a little tomato plant, which we used to say ‘you’ll never be able to grow in this,’ but they grew, it was absolutely marvellous, the way things grew. I learnt how to shoot and tie tomato plants, I’d never have known any of that.

There were about 30 or 40 girls and there was the foreman and then there was a young fellow who, he wasn’t really sort of very brainy, but he was a worker, and he was put upon and I didn’t like that, but he was…I favoured him because I didn’t like to see anybody put upon. But he used to have to do the stoking thing, you know, filled…, to get the greenhouses warm.

It was he who used to go with Mr Green to Haydon and Ball to get this clinker, but we were detailed to get it out, barrow it, and do it. And then we would have to do the green house, and the greenhouses were long, I don’t know how many feet but a long way, that had to be dug ready for the new tomato plants to go in, trench digging properly, and you did watch out for the left-handed girl, because you didn’t want to be…! I knew which girl was left-handed, and I knew which side to stand on because…foot chopped off! But it was hard work, it was knowledgeable work; it made it that when I was 80 I bought myself a little greenhouse and grew some tomatoes — I can't eat tomatoes they upset me, but I have still got a greenhouse.

.You know, you say war doesn’t bring anything good, and war, actual war, doesn’t, but the outcomes of war sometimes give people an insight in life or a chance in life that they’d never ever would have had. Some of the technical developments would never have come. We had a French refugee, a great man with a portly stomach, and he…, we called him Pierre (goodness knows whether that was his name), but he came with a giant hypodermic type thing to sterilize the greenhouses, he used to sort of inject this stuff to sterilize the soil, because if you keep turning the same soil over and over, you know apart from the manure which we carried in great steaming baskets full of little red worms, I have done that too you know. I have lived life! I have carried manure like it was a pudding! A shilling an hour, that’s what I got, a shilling an hour. Never was a shilling an hour more hard! But I never regretted anything.

It was very hard in the winter because it was cold and it was foggy, and at Christmas when we weren’t actually growing tomatoes, to get some revenue we were doing things for Christmas like little baskety things, planting them with bulbs and things like that. It’s very, very cold sitting in an unheated shed on a stool with no back (no wonder I got backache), to do these things for Christmas, because that was the only thing…
You couldn’t just grow anything you wanted, it had either got to be food for the nation or whatever. Fun was on Fridays, when we used to sell the tomatoes, and people would come and queue in Vincent Avenue, for a pound of tomatoes, and a lucky couple of girls would be there serving tomatoes. But that also takes a lot of doing, because you can have a twelve pound chip of tomatoes, but it doesn’t give you twelve separate pounds of tomatoes, so you’ve got to put and take, you know, it’s like playing shop when you’re children with sweets you know, it was really quite an eyeopener and the people would be there, grateful.

No rationing, no, but a pound of tomatoes would help the cheese go down. I said when I was on the land, never, when the war was over, would I eat another piece of cheese or another tomato because as land workers, we had twelve ounces of cheese a week instead of the normal two or three that people got, because we were laborious workers, hopefully. We had cheese with everything, you know — you can get sick of cheese after years, and tomatoes would help, to normal people, help their bit of cheese down I suppose and that’s something. You can blow out dried egg with a bit of cornflour if you’ve got some too, dried egg in a can — yuk! Really is. But you’re glad to eat it.

I have been hungry, we were hungry. During the time that I was at Josephs, in the mid-morning, somebody would come from the catering bit, would come round with a trolley with mugs, about, oh just like a barrel full of steaming hot, well they called it tea, I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was it was wet, and thick doorsteps of bread and dripping. I don’t know where the dripping came from, whether they had shot some elephants or what, but you were glad to eat that."

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