大象传媒

When WW2 commenced I was 18 years old living at home in London and working in a Government office. The office block was near Waterloo Bridge and we were asked to volunteer for night-time fire watching. When the air-raid warning sounded we had to make our way up a number of floors of stairs to the flat roof where there were buckets of water, stirrup pumps and buckets of sand with which to put out incendiary bombs. We never found out how effective this would be as none fell on the roof, thank goodness.
Later though, at the height of the bombing, I was working in Westminster and a number of the staff were having difficulty travelling back and forth to work following nightly air raids. It was suggested that we worked from 10am to 10pm say on a Monday, sleep there the night and work 9am to 4pm on the Tuesday and took the Wednesday off thus making only two journeys to and from the office instead of the usual six over three days. On the long 10 to 10 day we had an hour for lunch and an hour from 6-7pm for supper. We used to hurry down to J. Lyons Corner House in the Strand where we could purchase a salad complete with a sardine or roll-mop in it which we had with a portion of chips (off ration) and then we returned to the office and ate whatever our mothers had managed to pack up for us. After a while I got used to this new way of working except when the rota worked out to a 10-10 shift on a Saturday and 9-4 Sunday and I missed meeting up with friends and going dancing at the Hammersmith Palais!
During our working hours if there was an air raid in the evening we used to go below ground into the basement of the building where there were desks and typewriters set up in some of the bays (rather like today鈥檚 underground car parks) and bunk beds in other bays where we used to sleep. This way of working ended in May 1944 when the building was bombed at midnight at the same time as the Houses of Parliament. We were lucky to have been in the basement as everything shook and rubble came down but no one was badly hurt. Eventually we made our way up to the ground floor where we were rescued by the bomb disposal squad who were putting out incendiaries, much more expertly that our previous training earlier in the war had been. After this we were moved to the outskirts of London to work in Nisson huts near London Airport (now Heathrow). At the time it was quite a green belt area so we used to visit various small farms and green houses in the lunch hour and purchase fresh tomatoes and vegetables which was certainly better than having to join a queue at our local shops when they had supplies in.
Life still went on and it wasn鈥檛 all bad. My girlfriend and I liked to get away during our summer holidays but as there were restrictions on visiting coastal areas we usually ended up in the countryside. One I remember was spent in Surrey at the time of the Battle of Britain. We were blackberrying in the hills and witnessed a dog-fight and then a parachute coming down and wondering what we would do if it landed near us, especially if it was the enemy, but it landed some distance away.
It happened so long ago but it is things like this one never forgets both good and bad, and companionship with ones workmates at that time was all important.

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Sarah Tack of the CSV Action Desk on behalf of Mrs L Dadswell 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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