大象传媒

When war broke out I was 15 working in a battery factory in Kent. That factory closed down because it was German owned. My brother had been building aerodromes in France when evacuations from Dunkirk started. He was in the Air Force but things were so chaotic that they had to make their own way back - his group commandered a lorry and got out from Boulogne. When he warned my parents about conditions, my parents decided to send me to cousins in Wales. I was only there about 3 months with nothing happening when East Anglia was bombed - just one plane reported but I decided I wanted to be with my parents. My dad met me at Paddington Station and I burst into tears. He thought my cousins hadn't been kind to me but of course they'd been kindness itself - I'd had a wonderful time (they had a general store with a post office and I got to help out).

One day a very large piece of shrapnel fell in our driveway. It was shiny, a strange kind of metal, extremely jagged, about 8" or 9" long, the biggest ever found. One little incident - my mother was slightly hard of hearing and couldn't always hear the sirens. One time she was upstairs and my father went up, tapped on the bathroom door, called out 'are you in the bath?' My mother answered 'is someone coming down the path?' to the sounds outside of gunfire! At this time I did war work making tents.

When I was 19 I was called up. I didn't volunteer, I was too timid. I would have liked to go into the WRNS, because I liked the uniform. However I went into the WAAF. Their uniform was nice too. It had creases down the sides which made it look smarter and we used to post our collars off to a Chinese laundry to have them starched and ironed beautifully. The rest of our uniforms just went to the ordinary laundry on base. The knickers were known as 'passion killers'.

I trained as a wireless operator in Blackpool. We trained in morse at the Winter Garden and the procedure we did in the ballroom. The technical side we did in a wallpaper shop - we sat on the shelves, there was no equipment or seats. We were always posted indivdually, there weren't a great many of us. I had never used a telephone until I went in the Services and at first I couldn't understand a thing. I suppose it was partly fright. We could receive morse code at about 20 words per minute - sending was easier. I was put into Flying Control. That was 'RT', radio-telephone and the station was Edgehill where they trained aircrew in take-off and landing. One night one of the planes was landing and hit a cow. Actually they had left their intercom open and we could hear them saying'are you alright George?' - 'are you alright Charlie?', they didn't know what they'd hit. The cow said nothing!

Also one night a lot of Australians in Lancasters were re-directed to us from Europe because of weather after their bombing raid. The Aussies went off next day, one of them dropped right down out of sight, flying that great 4 engined plane over Edgehill village down into a valley.

Eventually when the war was over in Europe, we were all reassigned to bases near our homes. I was posted to Biggin Hill as it was in Kent. Ron, who was to become my husband, was also posted there from Italy - he was also in the Air Force. We both worked in the telephone exchange - by that time I'd got used to telephones! That was about 58 years ago and we married in 1948.

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