Memories

The early part of the 1939/45 war I was, as an engineer, in a reserved occupation with a firm in Lewisham, SE London, making electrical measuring instruments vitally needed by the Forces. One day a colleague and I were taken aside and told we were to work on a top secret project and we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. We were told to return to the factory late that night when everyone else had gone. Out of the darkness came a lorry. A team of soldiers emerged and they unloaded a large metal box and they moved it into a room which had been lined with two layers of wire netting covering the walls, floor and ceiling. Having been told how to switch the ‘box’ on, the men left and we locked the room and went home. Next morning we learned that a beam of radio energy was emitted from a tube at the top of the box and that our job was to find a way of measuring the strength of the radio field. (Some time later we realised we had been working with a very early centimetric radar transmitter) We developed a bipole in a sealed glass envelope, like a light bulb, and an instrument on which the field strength was indicated. When I think now of our days in that room I am horrified by the amount of time we spent in the emitted beam, something which, had we then known the dangers, we certainly would not do these days. Ignorance was bliss!

In the same factory the people who painted the calibration lines on the instrument scales, were adjacent to my office. I used to see them moistening their delicate brushes with their lips, to bring them to a point, prior to dipping them into the paint pot. One man used luminous paint on the instruments for night fighters. Later on in the war it was learned, something we all now know, that dangerous radiation was given off by luminous paint and the scale painter was made to work with a 1 inch thick piece of lead glass between him and the work he was doing and the paint was locked away in a lead lined safe when not in use. This all proved to be too late for the man who died soon after the war with cancer.

As an extra duty I was an ambulance driver at night. The ambulance service tried to get to a bomb incident as soon as possible but the fire brigade always seemed to get there first. One light evening we happened to see a Flying Bomb (V1), with its engine shut down, gliding towards us a few hundred feet up. We rushed into the station to get to our vehicles intending to follow it, at a safe distance, so that we would be as near as possible to the incident to help casualties. As we drove out on to the road the fire brigade past in front of us on the same mission. We were second once more.

One night, stretchering a casualty to our ambulance, a bomb whistled down ahead of us. We crouched down as fast as we could to avoid the bomb blast. The blast knocked us off our feet. Later that night I started to experience internal pains. By the time I got home after my duty I was in severe pain. As it happened, one of my brothers, passing from one AA gun site to another, decided to call in at home and he found me in agony. He took me to a doctor but I collapsed before he got me there. The next I remember was lying in hospital with doctors telling me that I was going to be operated on straight away. They brought my brother to see me and I remember seeing that he looked ghastly white. The next I remember is lying in bed in a ward with tubes out of my abdomen and bandages around my middle. I had burst my appendix and I had peritonitis. That night a bomb fell on the end of the ward. I remember that a nurse threw a pillow over my face and herself across the bed to protect me from flying glass. Brave girl! At first light I was placed on a wire stretcher with one blanket under me and one on top. I was carried to a converted Green Line coach and, with the other survivors, we drove off. We were off loaded on to the platform at Olympia to await a train. No one new what was happening. Later a train of goods wagons pulled in and we were loaded aboard and the doors were closed. We travelled for hours, in fits and starts, without food and little water. There were no windows so we had no idea where we might be. Eventually we stopped and the doors were opened. It was now dark and the Red Cross told us we were in Leicester. We were given water and transported to the Leicester City and General Hospital. Having spent the whole day vibrated on a metal stretcher my back was sore and bleeding. It was shear heaven to be transferred to an hospital bed with clean sheets. Later I was to learn why my brother had been white faced. He had just been told by the doctors that they were going to operate on my but they could not see me surviving the operation. But I did, thank God.

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