Open Writing

In October 1940 we were having continual raids and I rarely slept upstairs either at Hazelwood or at home. Bombs were dropped on the London suburbs of Burnt Oak, Kenton, Neasden, Willesden and Kilburn, which were all near us.

When a bomb fell at West Drayton my cousin Arthur was hit by shrapnel which penetrated his liver. We went to see him in Hillingdon hospital. In November Uncle Albert came over from Camberwell to see Mum and Dad, and to tell them that Aunt Cely was ill with cancer. He was a policeman and his hand had been burnt by a flash from an incendiary bomb.

We still managed to go to the cinema nearly every Saturday afternoon. Sometimes the air raid siren sounded while in there, but we just stayed put. Checking with my old diary I noted seeing ‘Each Dawn I Die’ with George Raft and James Cagney, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, ‘Waterloo Bridge’ with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. During the week at Hazelwood, we sometimes went into Watford to the cinema, and I was reminded that I went on occasion with the new office boy Paul Thompson, who had been pursuing me, from the day he arrived.

Orders for Odhams’ books were increasing over the pre-Christmas period and we were working after supper, until 8 or sometimes 9 o’clock at night.

Because of the raids which had continued, and being too dangerous to go up to London visiting relations, we spent a quiet Christmas at home, listening to the radio, reading and myself with my everlasting knitting. More and more we listened to the radio for some relief from war, and enjoyed the regular High Gang shows with the American stars Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon. We never missed ‘ITMA’ (It’s That Man Again), the renowned comedy show, which started in 1939 and went on to the end of the war, and Band Wagon with Arthur Askey. Every Saturday night at 7.30pm we still turned on ‘In Town Tonight’ which had been going since 1933.

Fortunately there were no raids during the three days of Christmas, but on Sunday December 29th there was a very bad night of bombing over London. On New Year’s Eve all the staff gathered in the entrance hall of Hazelwood for singing and dancing until midnight when we all joined hands and sang Auld Lang Sine.

In January 1941 Portsmouth Docks was set on fire with hundreds of incendiaries and in March the German bombers returned with high explosives. This began a period of intense bombing which lasted until May 1941. The worst night for London was on May 10th when 500 planes dropped 700 tons of bombs killing 1500 and seriously injuring another 1800. From August through September there were raids day and night. It had never been so bad.

My grandmother from London came to stay with us for a few days respite in September, and after that my Aunt Cely came as she had been warned to get out of her house due to an unexploded time-bomb. We had three bombs at Edgware, and incendiaries were dropped all along the back of our nearby shops. At the end of September we had no gas and Mum cooked the dinner on an electric fire. We heard that my great aunt Annie had gone to stay with her niece Alice at Crouch Hill, as a land mine had been dropped in her Islington street.

The government instigated a drive for scrap metal and we were asked to hand in aluminium pots and pans, and in every street the iron railings were taken away by the lorry load. There were often Bring and Buy Sales in school and church halls, raising money for the Red Cross, W.V.S, the St.John’s Ambulance and the P.D.S.A. Following the war the usual church Jumble Sales of secondhand clothes, books, toys and household items gradually ended as the Charity shops like Oxfam took their place.

I was writing dozens of letters to cousins Arthur Black and Arthur Coan, and friends like Percy Cotton, Charlie Rae, Ben Pike, Louie Gibbons and Elsie Knight who were away from home in the Forces, and pen pals Jim Fenn and Bill, both on minesweepers.

I left Odhams at Kings Langley because Mum had been on her own at night while Dad worked nights on the Daily Herald in London, so it was decided to ask me to change my job, to be at home at night to keep Mum company.

I found a clerical job with the Dock and Traffic department of the Port of London Authority’s Head Offices in Trinity Square on Tower Hill. Apart from the typing pool staffed by young women, they had never before employed women. Then, as so many of their young men were called up, they had to look for female staff.
In my lunch break I sometimes walked to London and St. Katherine’s dock for a ten-penny dock dinner, usually ending up with rice, or a bread and butter pudding with just a little dried fruit in it. (Our warehouses had at one time been stacked with dried fruit.)

Most days I took the shorter walk across to the Toc H canteen, near French Ordinary Court, where the menu could be onion and potato pie with a sprinkling of cheese, or Irish stew - mostly potatoes and mutton chop bones, or fish pie of mashed potato with a small amount of fish. Posters decorated the walls showing Potato Pete and Dr.Carrot. Over there we sometimes saw the Reverend Tubby Clayton, chaplain to the Merchant Navy, who lodged in Trinity Square at Talbot House, and where spare beds were kept for merchant seamen who were temporarily without a home.

The rest of the dinner hour was spent wandering round the Tower of London’s Gardens, seeing the Home Guard drilling in the grassy moat. Out on the steep cobbled Tower Hill Donald Soper, the Methodist preacher would address office workers from Mincing Lane and Fenchurch Street. Next to them another man vied for the crowd’s attention as his mate, shackled, hand-cuffed and with chains wrapped round his body lay on the ground. Onlookers were promised they would see him miraculously free himself in five minutes if only they would put more coppers into the cap he took round. It never happened.

So it was in the late spring of 1941 a reception was held in the huge board room at the Port of London Authority building in Trinity Square to celebrate the Lease Lend Agreement which had been signed on March 11th 1941 with the United States.

I was acting as a stewardess, and as guests arrived I pointed them in the right direction, and so was able to take the opportunity of greeting Eleanor Roosevelt.

Later that night I travelled home to Edgware with a young news reporter Tariq Wahbi from Baghdad who had been covering the reception. He invited me to write a piece about the fires in the London Docks for his newspaper. For this I was paid £10.

Mum and I still went to the pictures in the early evening. We saw Anton Walbrook in ‘Dangerous Moonlight’ and Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in the second of their ‘road’ films – ‘The Road to Zanzibar’.

One by one P.L.A. messenger boys were called up for National service. Len went in the Royal Engineers and lost his life in Africa. Jack Roberts joined the Merchant Navy: his ship was torpedoed and sunk on Russian convoy off Norway, and he was rescued from the freezing sea. Tommy Sign with the R.A.F. took part in the Normandy landings.

On December 7th 1941 the Japanese bombed the dockyards at Pearl Harbour and sunk many ships of the American Fleet. The U.S.A. declared war and joined the Allies.