大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Joan Smith for Three Counties Action on behalf of Maurice Alexander and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was thirteen years old when war broke out and I was interested in every aspect of it. I remember the speech which everyone remembers : 'This country is at war with Germany', and immediately aafterwards the sirens started. I left school early and worked in a bank and we did firewatching, though there were no bombs. My father built our air-raid shelter by digging in the chalk and he had it brick-lined. We only spent one night in it, the night of the4 raids on Coventry, and I remember we recognised the German bombers because they sounded different. My father joined the Home Guard as a Land Defence Volunteer. It was 'Dad's Army', but a bit more efficient because many of the men had been in WW1 and so were not nearly as disorganised as depicted. A shipment of rifles came from Canada and each man got one. My father kept his ammunition in the wardrobe.

I joined the Air Training Corps and as soon as I could volunteered for the RAF at Edgeware, where I had tests. The RAF had too many volunteers, because everyone wanted to avoid being a Bevan boy, which meant being sent to work in a coalmine. I waited for call-up by the army and at eighteen and a half was sent to Durham to a massive camp at Brancepeth. Some boys were very homesick. A group of Welsh boys and Cockneys used to sing in the evening. I broke a bone in my foot - and the army took good care of me. Although there was rationing, I don't remember being hungry - except in the Infantry, when you were constantly hungry.

Eventually I joined the London Scottish battalion and was sent to the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders. The training was awful and I got pneumonia and ended up in Carlisle hospital. By that time the war was almost ended, and I was working in an office (because I could read and write). I saw an advertisement for volunteers for the Intelligence Corps and at last found myself with relief in the company of like-minded men. We were sent to Wentworth Woodhouse, aa very large house near Sheffield. I met an ATS girl, and soon afterwards when everyone else was ent to Palestine and I was sent to Austria I wondered if she had had an influence. I was working in field security in Klagenfurt where there were enormous camps of displaced persons. Our job was to look for ex- Nazis, SS officers who often had SS tattooed under an arm.

One of my jobs was to interview women who wanted to marry British soldiers. Any who were ex-Nazi were refused. When we went on leave there were very long trains to take us back, very organised. It was the end of the war and we had a good time skiing and swimming. Once I was in the theatre in central London when a flying bomb struck Lyons Corner House. Nobody moved and the show went on. People were nice to each other during the war - very helpful.

One of the tests I took for entry to the RAF was in Torquay, and only 3 out of 100 passed. They were always looking for air-gunners - whose average life was about six weeks. In retrospect I was lucky to have broken a bone in my foot, and to have had pneumonia - otherwise I would have been sent to Holland when it was flooded, or to Burma.

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