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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Radio Northampton Action Desk on behalf of Joy Fielder and has been added to the site with her permission. Joy Fielder fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

When war was declared - I’m going to give my age away now - I was 21, so I was called up and I went on Munitions. I went to British Timken and we were doing roller bearings there, for the tanks and the aircraft, so it was a 24-hour shift. So for a fortnight you were on days and for a fortnight you were on nights. When you were on the day shift, you had an hour’s break in the middle of the day and you had two ten minute intervals - one in the morning and the other one later on in the afternoon, and you used to work from 7 in the morning until 6 at night.

I would be sitting on a very high stool, looking through a magnifying glass at the roller bearings to see what faults had been caused by the making of them in the machine; you had things that were called ‘flats’ and ‘rig grinds’ and you had to look out for these, and there were several other faults. If you found any faults, you put them in a waste tin and then they were taken away. The good ones, you put in a tin which was situated in front of you - it was like a big desk - and the magnifying glass was very big, and on a stem, so all you had to do was just sit and look through it, pick your material up, look at it, see what it was, and either throw it away or put it in the good tin.

The atmosphere in the factory was wonderful. Not very often, but on occasions, we used to have groups come into the canteen when we were eating lunch and they would call ‘Worker’s Playtime’. We used to sit and be entertained by these various people, who of course, had been round entertaining the troops as well so they were all used to stage work, it’s what they were. We had some wonderful ‘Worker’s Playtimes’; lovely concerts.

Before I was called up to Munitions, I was doing accountancy in an insurance office, so this was a big change for me. Having to work in a factory was looked upon as the sort of thing you didn’t do, but come the war you had no option. Actually I applied for the Forces; I wanted to go into the RAF, but I couldn’t get in because it was full, so the only place they could put me was on Munitions.

My pay on nights, was three pounds and ten pence in old money, and on days I got two pounds, nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I don’t think this was a brilliant wage at the time in Northampton, but I hadn’t left the Notre Dame High School until I was 18, because I sat for my exams and consequently I was late going into the working world. So I imagine my wages were very poor.

I was different to other girls working in the factory; for one thing, I was very musical and I have been all my life, and also when I was working in the Munitions factory and I was on days, I used to entertain the troops with singing; I belonged to a group and I sang at the Old Savoy Theater in Abington Square before that was taken over, and we had 2,000 troops in there and I had a wonderful reception. I used to go round singing, and I also worked in the evenings, when I wasn’t on nights, as a Red Cross volunteer. I also worked at the Victor Club on the right hand side of the Market Square, I was a Dance Hostess. All the American troops used to come in and have a dance and what-have-you.

Also at the Plough Hotel, they used to come in and I used to help with all the preparation of the food and the serving of the troops as they came in. We used to serve a hot meal - they used to walk round, collect the plate and go and sit at another table. On the day that we were all getting keyed up for D-Day, we had just over 300 troops who came through the Plough Hotel for their meal on the way to the invasion, and they were going through straight from us. The atmosphere was very tense that day, but at other times when they were coming to Northampton on leave, it was all very happy and jolly and it was lovely.

I was very conscious of being involved in the war effort because not only was I working full time on Munitions and doing voluntary work, I was also going out on voluntary A.R.P. night duty when I wasn’t working at the factory. I was out on night duty when the bomb plane crashed in Gold Street. I remember vibrations and a terrific noise. I was in Wellingborough Road, just about at the corner of Bostock Avenue, so that was a good distance away, but it was absolutely frightening.

When they bombed Coventry, again I was out on nights and the Germans were going over in one succession after another and the sky was absolutely alight with searchlights. In spite of the fact of the terrible disaster that it was for the people in Coventry, it was a wonderful sight to see all these searchlights in the sky. It’s perfectly true that we could see flames and that we knew it was Coventry without being told; it lit the sky like a huge bonfire.

I would say the best things about these times was everybody caring for everybody else; you looked after people, it wasn’t ‘oh, that’s my friend’ or anything like that, if I’d have been walking down the street and seen someone in any trouble, I would have gone up to them and said ‘can I help?’; it was that type of atmosphere, you helped each other.

The worst thing was the rationing of food - it was very, very hard. For example there were five in my family and we were allowed, on ration, when available, one pound of sausages. So it came to the point that some of us would have a sausage, and some of us would have half a sausage. So in that case, the next time we had a pound of sausages, you might have a whole sausage to yourself and your sister had a half; so it was the luck of the draw whether you had a whole sausage! I’ve laughed about it since, but really it was dreadful. And of course, no eggs, you couldn’t see an egg.

We had a canteen at British Timken and for what they could get, it was quite good, I suppose. We used to have an awful lot of soup, which quite frankly we were never quite sure what was in it! But it tasted alright! We also had a lot of milk puddings; things like rice and that sort of thing.

On V.E. Day, I was here in Northampton and I remember walking up Wellingborough Road to Abington Park and all the cars were tooting and carrying on, and when I managed to get into the Park, they were having drinks! Now, whether there was a license or not, I don’t know, I wouldn’t like to say, but there was quite a lot of drinks around and everybody was dancing and it was wonderful.

On V.J. Day, I was down in Bournemouth, where my sister had got married and lived. There used to be a bandstand in the Square and we were celebrating round the bandstand, some of the troops were there, we were all dancing and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. And the same thing, they had free drinks: they came out from the hotels with trays of free drinks, and saying ‘you must have a drink, the war is finished at last.. at last’.

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