大象传媒

My wartime adventure began in winning a scholarship with 25 others as a trainee automobile engineering student awarded by the Ford Motor Co. Dagenham, Essex.

When finally I stood waving to my Mother and Father on the train which puffed from Penryn Station London bound I could not believe it. I am convinced my Father could not believe it either.

At the end of my journey I stepped down on to Paddington Station into a mass of bustling people all hurrying home with me heading for strange lodgings which was to be my home for the next three years.

After settling in I shared a downstair room with two companions both Yorkshire men. Upstairs were another five senior students and we all got along well.

After induction my programme was a month spent in the factory known as 鈥淭he Plant鈥� working on the assembly lines and three months in the South East Essex Technical College for the theory. The College had an entire section financed and manned by skilled instructors and classroom teachers. In a short time early warning sirens wailed from dark to dawn and the whistle and crump of bombs commonplace. Our evening technical classes were stopped and Sunday mornings took their place.

It wasn鈥檛 all work though. There were girls and dances held at the College on Saturday evenings and I tried to master a few steps from a library book, but when a Dornier bomber crashed in the playing field that was the end of it.

There was also a grim side to life as the flames could be seen reflected in the sky from the bombing in London鈥檚 East end and in the City of London鈥檚 deep underground stations were crowds of bombed out families who slept on anything they could salvage on blankets of every colour. Often one had to carefully step in order to catch a train. They lay side by side in families all in good humour.

The saddest sights were young children marshalled into groups awaiting evacuation all slung with cardboard boxed gas masks and each with a label in the jacket. No tears but most with serious faces.

Alan Dale, Falmouth, Cornwall.

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