大象传媒

I was born in 1923 and living in Weston Supermare when war broke out. When I was 18 I was called up to work in the underground factory for the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Corsham a few miles from Bath.

It was an enormous place, 100 feet below ground in a disused stone quarry. I was making parts for aircraft engines in an enormous room with lots of other girls. There were lots of Scots working there who had been brought down from Scotland as there wasn't enough labour locally.

I had lodgings in Bath and whole bus loads of us were taken to the factory and brought home again at night, or morning if it was a night shift.
The buses left an hour before the shift started and we got home about an hour after our shift finished.
We went down to the factory from the surface by way of long narrow escalators that were really frightening. It was very hard tiring work and we used to worry about what would happen if a bomb dropped on top of us on the surface.

I remember coming up to the top, sitting on a wall in the dark and watching the lights from the planes having dog fights in the sky above us.

Shifts were 10 hours long - both night shifts and day shifts and I remember just how tired we were at the end of our shifts.

We were too tired to enjoy much of a social life but I did meet my future husband in a snack bar in Bath.
We were married in St. Michaels Church in Twerton. The churchyard had been bomb damaged and many of the gravestones had been broken and turned upside down. The church wasn't damaged however, but I remember arriving to find the photographer sitting on a broken gravestone.

For our honeymoon we had 3 days in London, we went to the theatre on one of the evenings to see Arsnic and Old Lace. We could hear the doodlebugs coming over as we sat in the audience.
After we were married we came up to Middlesbrough to live and I had to work, as all women did then. I was sent to work on the railway as a porter.

I do not have the romantic image some people have of war time.I was really scared alot of the time at Corsham, and it was very hard tiring work.

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