´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Elizabeth Perez of Stockport Libraries on behalf of Mary Blood and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Mary’s story, together with the war story of her husband, Harry Blood, was transcribed onto a floppy disc by Fred Kennington, thereby saving Stockport Library Service staff an immense amount of work!

‘You’ll do, you can go’, and I was posted to Martlesham Heath, near Ipswich. I was there for about six weeks, working in the Airmen’s Mess. Martlesham Heath was a pre-war R.A.F. station, and it was here that a famous aviator of the time, Prince Oblensky, had crash-landed fatally. There was a monument to him. Our accommodation was some distance from where we worked, requiring us to traverse two sides of a square. However, there was a short cut straight across the airfield, which we used when possible. After dark, you dare not set foot on the airfield, where a searchlight circled round the whole time.

I had worked in domestic service in a ‘big house’ with servants and with ‘upstairs and downstairs’. The next culture shock was going to work in the Airmen’s Mess. We had to cook for, and serve, about 1000 men. There were big ovens; things like porridge and stews were cooked by steam in double-skinned vats. There were six or seven of these vats. Each vat had a wheel to allow it to be tipped, otherwise, ladling porridge out would have been difficult. Around the group of vats was a drain. When the vats had been used, they were cleaned out with hot water, tipped, with the contents going into a drain. Then the drain had to be cleaned. Floors had to be cleaned. We had to don ‘wellies’; we used big oval tin baths with two handles filled with boiling water in which caustic soda was dissolved. It was a two-handed, and potentially dangerous, job, putting the bath on the floor, tipping it, and scrubbing the red tiles with a long-handled brush, like washing the decks on a ship. It was then followed by clean hot water, and finally squeegeed. In the Mess area, tables and benches were of wood; these having to be scrubbed in the same way. It would be seen as dangerous today; we had to do it and never think about it. Health and safety hadn’t been invented then and we had a place that was spotless. This took a couple of hours every morning. We turned the wellie tops over as otherwise they caught behind your knees. Almost to this day I had a mark across my calves where the wellies caught the muscles.

We didn’t have a lot of entertainment, only the odd dance. It was so far from our billets to the N.A.A.F.I. and therefore a long hike. They used to lay on transport for us W.A.A.Fs. There was no question of ‘Who’s taking you home tonight?’ it was the Sergeant and his truck.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.