Serving the Fire Service

My parents, Ron and May Perolz, were both in the Auxilliary Fire Service during World War 2.
My mother was a Leading Firewoman based at Edmonton, and was in charge of the part-time firewomen at a number of stations in the area. She was also taught to drive, and chauffered a divisional officer (whose exact title I'm afraid I don't know) on his visits to local fire stations. My mother's sister, Caroline Hall, was a cook at Hornsey fire station.
My father volunteered to join the AFS in 1938, and as far as I know he became full-time at the outbreak of war. At that time the fire stations in Middlesex were run by the individual boroughs and urban districts, and he was attached to Wood Green, although later he also served at Palmers Green and Gordon Hill, Enfield.
During the "phoney war" period the auxilliaries attended house and other fires alongside the regulars, and on one occasion he went to a chimney fire. Having been recently trained, he remembered that the last thing the firemen were supposed to do before leaving a house where there had been a chimney fire was to go up on the roof and look down the chimney to make sure it hadn't reignited. As nobody else seemed to be doing so he took the task upon himself, and then realised that the ladder had gone and the fire engine and the rest of the crew were driving off down the road. He had no alternative but to shout "help" down the chimney, and the people in the house, nerves already shaken by the fire, were shocked to hear a voice echoing from their fireplaces. They eventually helped him in through an upstairs window.
My father then started to learn to drive a fire engine, and at the end of his first outing he was instructed to turn into the fire station yard. He did so, unfortunately failing to open the gates first.It took him and his friend some time to repair the damage.
When the bombing started my father and the other firemen from his station were often called upon to go to the City of London and the Docks, where the firemen from the surburban stations and further afield were frustrated by the fact that their hose couplings and other equipment were not compatible with that of the London Fire Brigade. During these air raids, bombs would continue falling while the firemen were fighting fires that had been started by previous waves of bombers. At the Docks they also had to contend with various ignited substances, such as sugar, pouring from the warehouses. On a number of occasions my father didn't come home for two or three days and had no way of letting my mother know where he was. She remembered one particular occasion, probable 29th December 1940, when she came off duty at Edmonton at 2am and the sky was so bright from the fires in the City, where she guessed my father was, that she could see the time on her watch.
In, I believe, 1943, my father rode his bike into a tree during the blackout one night, the white rings painted round tree trunks which lasted well into the 1950s being in reality very little help in the faint light from a bicycle lamp. He injured his right knee, which he had already damaged playing football before the war, and as a result he had to leave the Fire Service. He went into the Air Force in Bedfordshire, and after basic training at Cardington and Henlow, he went to Chicksands Priory, home of the "Y" service, which was the RAF equivalent of the "Ultra" Naval intelligence service at Bletchley Park. He never revealed what he did there, even to my mother, and it wasn't until information about Ultra became public in the 1970s that he spoke about it at all. The reason for this was that, when he was discharged at the end of the war, he had to go into a room where a numbers of officers were present, and a pistol was lying on the table which he was told would be used if ever he breached the Official Secrets Act which he had signed when he went to Chicksands.
After the war my parents always retained an great affection for the Fire Service, and if they heard the fire engine's bell in a neighbouring street they would often go and see if any of their wartime colleagues were there. Strangely enough, in the 1970s, I worked for a while in the former fire station at Palmers Green where my father had sometimes served, which by then had been taken over by the London Borough of Enfield public libraries for their "back room" operations such as ordering and cataloguing new books for all the libraries in the borough. Ironically it was badly damaged by a fire caused by the age of the electric wiring.
Although people often mentioned the war during my childhood in the 1950s, they rarely talked about what they themselves had done. There are so many questions I wish I had asked my parents, and if anyone reads this who knew them I would be delighted if they would contact me on my email address, embostle@yahoo.co.uk.

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