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I was born in 1919 at Whetstone in North London. My father who was a milliner was the second generation manufacturing at a factory in Luton. He had a warehouse which was beside St Paul’s Cathedral in London. I remember my brother and I used to go there on a Saturday morning with my father, and used to slide down the hat chute which the big hats used to slide down, from five floors up. This warehouse was bombed and destroyed during the war. The Luftwaffe missed St Paul’s, but hit my father’s warehouse. I left school in 1935 and worked in a firm having trained in typing and Pitmans shorthand. I worked there until I joined up; there was a publicity campaign to encourage people to join up after Munich. In 1938 there was a great deal of pressure for people to prepare for war. A great friend of mine, Sylvia Gibb (nee Reid), whom I had known since I was 11 years old; she and I joined the Territorials (Territorial Army)about October 1938.
I had service connections dating back to the First World War, my father had been in the old Flying Corp and I had an uncle who was in the Air Force. Because of these connections I rather fancied the Air Force as opposed to the Army. At that time, in 1938, there were no WAAFs so we joined the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) attached to the RAF. We went to Hendon Airport for training several Sunday’s each month. I don’t remember having a uniform at that time in the ATS. I was ‘called up’ on the Tuesday before war started on the Sunday, when my parents and I were on holiday in Scotland and I received my ‘call up papers’ to report. We went once a week, on a Tuesday, to Jack Straw’s Castle, which was a very old pub on the Hampstead Heath where we had our headquarters. We had a very inefficient woman who used to ‘drill us’ there on the flat roof. If we had followed her instructions we would have finished up dead as she used to say right when she meant left and she would have marched us over the edge. Whilst we were carrying out our initial training, we were given a selection of branches to which we could become attached, ranging from cook, which I didn’t fancy, to drivers, a position which was much over subscribed. I along with Sylvia Gibb (nee Reid) decided to choose equipment section, as I had a brother who was an officer attached to the Equipment Branch. We used to go down to Hendon Airport on a number of Sunday’s each month and issued out clothing to other Air Force members. I was attached to 604 Squadron which has since been disbanded. It was pretty boring type of work.

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