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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Meg Harrison and has been added to the website on behalf of Jane Cross Brown, with her permission and she fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was about 24 when the war started and like most women at up until then I had not been expected to go out and work. However, I wanted to work, and I had a school friend who had a large estate called Rycote Park in Thame. She had offered the use of the house to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and I went to work there, at Rycote. So for the first part of the war, up until 1942, I lived and worked on the estate, earning £2-£3 a week. The whole of the children’s ward in the Radcliffe was moved to Rycote and a lot of sick East End children were sent there too. I spent two to three years doing a bit of everything — collecting children from the Radcliffe, making phone calls, and even hoeing kale. I slept in a cottage on the estate and recall at one point sharing it with four huge paintings of nudes painted by the artist Matthew Smith, who had moved his paintings out of London for safety.

By 1942 I was ready for a change and was persuaded that London would be a more exciting place to live in. A friend helped to pinpoint a man in Baker Street who was training people to be draughtsmen for the War Office. While I was doing my training, my call-up papers arrived so I had to find work. I managed to get a job working for MI-14 using my training. I sat next to a colonel whose job was to examine photos taken by air reconnaisance to find gun emplacements and, in particular, launch sites of the V-1 Missiles (doodlebugs) on the French Channel coast. My job was to plot the emplacements onto tracing paper.

The hours we worked were quite long by today’s standards — from 9am to 6.30pm and it seemed as though the German air raids were timed to start exactly as we left the office each evening. The air raid sirens would start up just as we stepped out of the building and this made for a very hazardous journey home. Home was in the King’s Road in Chelsea and I remember once, probably in 1944, I was travelling to work on the number 11 bus when it stopped suddenly as a bomb had just landed on the pavement outside the Treasury building in Whitehall. Everyone just carried on as if nothing had happened!

In June 1944 the first doodlebug landed in London. I had known in advance that they were going to come but had not been allowed to talk about them to anyone outside the office. I was sharing a house with a friend in the King’s Road in Chelsea at the time and hated going to the public air raid shelter at the bottom of the road as it was too claustrophobic. So I took care to sit on a sofa well away from the windows — I was more afraid of flying glass than anything. The first doodlebug landed in the Thames nearby.

London during the war seemed to be awash with drink — everyone drinking to cheer themselves up in pubs and clubs and parties. We didn’t let the bombing stop our social lives. I had a boyfriend who belonged to the Army and Navy Club and I would use my bicycle to get there. I remember the hall porter gravely taking my bicycle from me when I arrived as if it were very valuable, and loading it onto a taxi for me for my journey home.

My job came to an end, of course, in the middle of 1945 when the war ended, but it was about six months before the War Office would release me. During that time I made lots of lampshades ‘under the desk’ for friends!

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