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This story was submitted to the People's War site by the Dunstable At War Team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I moved into the area in 1937, got married and rented a (what was then very rare), new house in Houghton Regis for 15 shillings per week. As our house was surrounded by fields, I was able to take a small plot of ground to grow vegetables. It was very hard work to dig the soil as it had never been dug before and I decided to grow Swedes — they all came up! But how many can you eat? I gave most of them away. We moved into ’The Retreat’ in Dunstable, in 1939.

We had an evacuee; a young woman with a baby but she was so unhappy she returned to London after a short time. Other evacuees included a mother and a daughter whose father worked as a tanker driver in London. He would visit them at weekends and it was through this family that we were able to discover what was happening in London during that time.

I worked for a firm called Bagshaws in Dunstable; quite a medium sized engineering firm which made conveyors and fabrications amongst other things. After the war started we became a reserved manufacturer and I worked in a reserved occupation making tank tracks for armoured vehicles, chiefly for the Bren Gun carrier. We made well over 2 million of those. We had a good size machine shop and were fully employed with a lot of skilled men in the factory working 12-hour days from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm. We also made very large containers — the landing stages for the Mulberry Harbour, used in the D-Day landings.

I was a member of the St John Ambulance Brigade and after the war started we formed a rescue department for the Dunstable area. We kept vehicles in the yard that is now occupied by Barclays Bank. I was on duty for 2 nights a week, during which time we would play cards to keep us occupied and awake. We were very fortunate however, as although there were many bombs dropped around the area, none actually landed in Dunstable.

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