大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War site by Joan Smith for Three Counties Action on behalf of Betty Williams and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
I was nineteen years old when war broke out and I had just left school in July 1939. Plans that had been made for me to go to a secretarial college in London were changed
because of the outbreak of war. My specialist subjects at school were science so pharmacy was suggested at London University, which was evacuated to Cardiff in Wales. Before I went to Cardiff the university was bombed and one or two lecturers were killed. Everyone enrolling had left home, which meant we had a good social nucleus of people. I had digs in a terrace house where we had sitting rooms upstairs and bedrooms downstairs because that was safer durung air-raids. We had four meals a day and paid 25 shilllings (拢1.25) a week. There was no electricity, only gas, including gas lighting. Because we were so far from home that made for a good social life. On Sundays we had a rambling club, which was very enjoyable, and on Saturday nights we went to the dance in the city hall. One of my friends had worked before her degree and found she was eligible for dole money, and I went with her to collect it.
The college returned to London in 1943 and I became an assistant lecturer in pharmaceutical chemistry. There were only two women in my year at university, and all of the men as soon as they qualified were called up. When we returned the college was in Bloomsbury Square. We had to firewatch, and would take sleeping bags to sleep in the rooms which had beautiful ceilings. The college had been founded in 1840. The firewatching was organised by the college, and raids with flying bombs had begun. You could hear them coming - a low hum like an aircraft. If the sound stopped you knew you'd had it because the bomb was going to fall. Being chemistry the labs were on the top floor of the building where we wouldn't stand much chance if anything happened. Apart from firewatching at the college I also firewatched at Chancery Lane underground station. The platforms were lined with bunks where people could sleep. I was on duty on the very last night of firewatching near the end of the war. A group of drunken men were bundled onto the last train so that we could have peace.
Because we were in Bloomsbury we could go to the Myra Hess lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery which were lovely annd always crowded. We could also get tickets for the theatre which kept going all through the war, and we saw Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. I was a sergeant in the Red Cross because of my qualifications.
On the 8th May 1945 I was outside Buckingham Palace when the king and queen appeared on the balcony, and the then princesses Elizabeth and Margaret mingled in the crowd.

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