大象传媒

"This story was submitted to the People's War site by CSV/大象传媒 Radio Nottingham on behalf of Jean Mellors with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions"

My World War 2 war began for me as I left school 鈥淣ether St. Senior Gorls鈥� at Christmas 1940. I was just 14 years old and I started work in January 1941 at an office in Chilwell, Nottingham, as a punch card operator. The punch card system was 鈥淗ollerith Data processing鈥�, the earliest of our present computer systems.

Our office at Chilwell was the outcome of the government evacuating all the major food stores at that time, i.e. Meadow Dairy, Lipton, Homes Colonial, Allied Suppliers, etc. to form a nucleus office in order to keep the nation fed in war time. We dealt with thousand and thousands of food points, cut from ration books and paid over the counter by the public in exchange for food, to be paid for in money of course. These food points were the rations allocated to every person in the country for every food commodity, and without which, goods were just not available to be bought in shops and food stores.

We worked long hours, often weekends and Sundays, deadlines had to be met to keep the nation adequately fed.
Our punch cards were punched with coded information about food orders, which were then processed and tabulated on duplicate sheets of orders to be delivered to shops for their deliveries of food rations.

I can remember being surprised at the senior staff and supervisors talking with a London dialect, but I came to understand how these offices had been bombed out of the city of London in the first blitz and the offices at Beeston and Chilwell were to be their wartime base.

Beeston had a good share of enemy activity, and we as a family often spent nights in our 鈥淎NDERSON鈥� shelter in the garden, high explosive bombs fell quite close on Queens Road and we had a 鈥渂asket鈥� of incendiary (fire) bombs one night which caused many fires on the houses where I lived.

I remember often cycling to work the next morning feeling very tired, but it didn鈥檛 occur to anyone to opt out from work, we had a job to do and always stories to relate to our friends.

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