大象传媒

I'm Tom Jones, and I鈥檓 91. At the beginning of the war, I worked for the Duke of Westminster. Out door life, you know. Then, when the war started, of course, we all got stopped, the younger ones, and I went to work in a factory. I thought I鈥檇 like to be more in the engineering line. So that was a big change for me, because I鈥檇 never been indoors, I鈥檇 always worked outdoors.
They put me with a fellow that worked as a sheet metalworker. He was the only sheet metalworker there. So he taught me the job we were doing. We were making oil cooling fairings, to cover the oil cooler that goes on the Spitfire. We made quite a lot of them, in fact. Towards the end, I was in charge of the job, sort of thing. I had to see that twelve of them were turned out every week. And get ready for inspection, and things like that. The factory was a subsidiary firm in Chester. We worked for a London firm, JF Kenyor. I can鈥檛 be sure of the spelling, as it was a long time ago, but I think that鈥檚 right.

That was my job for more or less the six years, different things for the aircraft, you know. I worked on the Wellington, the Lancaster, the Spitfire.. yes. It was quite an interesting job, because I liked to work with my hands, and when I could make something, it was an achievement, wasn鈥檛 it?

During the war, Chester wasn鈥檛 too affected. We did get one raid, but it was incendiary bombs, chiefly. They used to follow the River Dee. We could hear them come over at night, and things like that. I remember going home one night, looking down the hill towards my house across the fields, and I could see it all on fire, all around it. But that鈥檚 about the biggest scare I ever got.

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