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My Wartime Experiences

Amalgamated Press — London
WAAF — Radar Operator — Chain Home Low
Gloucester — Morecombe — Yatesbury - Dunwich
Whitstable — Dunkirk Nr. Canterbury
Walton-on- the-Naze

I was seventeen and a half years old when the Second World War broke out on the third of September 1939. As soon as it was announced on the radio, the siren went off for an air attack. My mother, father and myself promptly went into our garden Anderson air raid shelter, my mother taking an apple pie, which had been in the oven, into the shelter as well. We weren’t to know that this was a false alarm, and that the Germans would not be attacking immediately.
I had started work at the Amalgamated Press in Farringdon Road, working as a humble junior on a magazine called ‘Home Chat’. After a lull, when nothing seemed to happen for a long time, the Blitz Proper started. We then spent six months in the air-raid shelter, sleeping, at night, three in a row. That is when I learned to sleep well; because I thought that if I was going to be killed, I would rather it would happen whilst I was asleep.
During this time, we had an unexploded bomb in a neighbour’s garden at the end of our garden. We had to get out of our house for a week, but as nothing happened, we were allowed back. After a few weeks, the neighbour’s garden disappeared into a large hole. The bomb had after all exploded under ground!
During this time I was travelling to the City each day. Sometimes by train, but if they weren’t running, by bus or tram, which was the cheapest way to travel. My abiding memory is of broken glass being swept up by the shop-keepers, and to this day, I cannot stand the sound of breaking glass. At work, when the sirens went, we all trooped down to the basement, and to our amusement, one of the men always took out his knitting!
At one time I was in a train, in a carriage all by myself when the train was bombed -or rather the railway line at both ends; and so we couldn’t go forward or backward. We were let out of the train and had to walk along the railway line and find our way back to work as best we could, having scrambled up near a bridge.

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In late 1942 I was called up to go into the WAAF, where after various aptitude tests, it was decided that I was suitable to be a radar operator. I then went to Gloucester for a weeks initial training, then on to Morecombe for further initiation into the mysteries of being a WAAF, and finally to Yatesbury for radar training.
I was then posted to Dunwich, just a week before my twenty-first birthday. Dunwich was the town that disappeared into the sea over hundreds of years, leaving only a handful of houses- a shop, an inn and a beach café. We spent many happy hours in this café, together with the Army, drinking cups of tea, eating cakes and chatting.
Dunwich was a radar station called CHL, or ‘Chain Home Low’, where we plotted low-flying aircraft and shipping. Our plots were then passed to Stanmore for identification, and caused great excitement if we had a hostile identification.
From Dunwich I was posted to Whitstable. At the same time I got married to another airman in April 1944, just before D-Day. In an effort to be posted together, we volunteered to become radar-mechanics at Dunkirk, near Canterbury. There was a shortage of radar-mechanics at the time and they tried to cram a year’s course into three months. Needless to say, we both failed. We managed to live out in a cottage nearby, and were made very welcome. Needless to say, it was a bit primitive, with a toilet at the end of the garden, and as far as I can remember, no bathroom. It had electricity down-stairs, but only candles in the bedrooms.
Having failed our mechanics course, I got posted to Walton-on-the-Naze, and my husband soon followed. We were lucky to be billeted with the local butcher- so we were never short of meat. There were two or three Army Sergeants and their wives as well as a school teacher, so we were quite a little family.
Eventually the War came to an end. My husband was demobbed before I was -as he had an early release to help with the General Election, that came very quickly after the War. When I was eventually released. The hunt started for somewhere to live…
But that is another story.

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