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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jacqueline Wilde and has been added to the site with her permission. Jacqueline Wilde fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

From the Auxiliary fire service it became the National fire service and then just before D-Day when they expected the German planes to bomb our ports they sent the different fire brigades down to the coastal areas to stand in because they knew that the bombing would be very, very heavy at the ports. We all had to go, they just kept a skeleton staff and we weren’t told where we were going but we had to all assemble at the Central Fire Station in Birmingham with our kit bag and we were put on trains it was called the ‘Colour scheme’ and until we got to our destination we didn’t know where we were going it was very hush hush. My boss he was put on the train and he went down to Plymouth on the Overseas Column, the Overseas Column was standing ready in case they needed firemen abroad and they would send them abroad with the army. I didn’t see him at all and he went back to being a regular fire officer. When we got down as far as Bristol on the train this was all at night and we didn’t know where we were because in those days if any of the enemy landed over here there weren’t any names on the stations and of course the blackout kept it so that it was very difficult to see anything at all because we only had glimmers of lights. All car lights had narrow slits they had metal pieces over them so you could only get a narrow slit of light coming out and no lights were able to be seen at all everybody had to have blackout curtains, so it was very difficult in the train to see where we were because the blinds were down. When we got to Bristol we were then told where we were going whether we were going down to the south coast or whether we were going to Wales. I wanted to go to the south coast because I was born on the coast and I liked the south very much, but as it happened I was one of them that went to Wales and I’d always thought that in Wales you saw coalminers going along with pickaxes on their shoulders. I was there for a whole year and I never once saw a miner with a pickaxe on his shoulder at all. They were lovely people and they made us very welcome and I was very, very happy while I was there.

We slept on bunk beds in a nissen hut which was not very comfortable at all and this was November time and it was very cold and a nissen hut is very cold unless you’ve got a fire in it and they’d got these coke stoves in it and the first morning we woke up with headaches feeling really awful and we found that you can die if you’ve got a coke stove without any ventilation so we had to sleep with the windows open which wasn’t very pleasant and after a few weeks of this the lady that worked in the canteen, she was a cook she said she had a spare room vacant and her house was opposite the fire station, so one of the girls and I shared a bedroom in her house and she made us most welcome, she used to cook us the most gorgeous things even though we’d got rations and you couldn’t get a lot of things, but she managed to get them and she managed to make lovely food and things. We were very happy there. This was at Caerphilly, we travelled each morning to Llanishen, which was a few miles outside Cardiff and we worked at a lovely old house called Brooklea it was the area headquarters of the fire station and then you had a division with so many fire stations on it and then you had an area with so many divisions and the Birmingham area was a different area to the welsh area so this was their headquarters. It was a lovely house right on top of the hill with a lot of grounds around it so that when we were off duty we could sit in the grounds and different times of the year we’d have sports to keep ourselves occupied when there weren’t any raids because unlike Birmingham we had raids night after night, down there they didn’t have an awful lot, they had them around the dock areas but the cities weren’t bombed like Coventry, Birmingham and London were. So we had quite a lot of spare time and as we were administrative we worked nine to five like an office would do. The only thing with Wales was that once it started to rain it never stopped, and it went on for hours and hours and hours. That’s the only thing I could fault.

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