Open Writing

It was 1943 and the war was now spreading into North Africa, where we heard of the battle of El Alamein where Americans fought alongside British troops, and on to news of Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Tripoli. We had no relatives or friends taking part in this theatre of war, so it did not ‘come home to us’ of what exactly was going on out there in the desert with the opposing German forces under Rommel.

This was the time when we were at war with the Japanese, who had overrun parts of China and Burma. The Burma railway was being built through the jungles by British prisoners of war. They were being guarded by Koreans, kept near starving and in rags, and were in the most sorry plight.

Later we learned that the railway had cost 20,000 lives. Some years after the war a film was made about it – ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai’, with Alec Guinness.

I had now been working in the Dock and Traffic department at the P.L.A. Head Office for several years, and used to travel up to Aldgate by tube and walk round to our building in Trinity Square by way of the Minories (which housed the Royal Mint).

This fine Port of London Authority building was just round the corner from Fenchurch street, Mincing Lane tube station, the Tower of London, Billingsgate and Leadenhall market, and I wandered around them all in the lunch hours.

The Tower of London was closed to the public during the war, and Billingsgate fish market was non-existent, as was Leadenhall market, which at Christmas times had been the place where most of the best poultry and game would be on sale. Butchers would have shop-high screens of rows on rows of steel bars on which were hung turkeys, geese, ducks, rabbits, hares and all manner of wild game birds.

One September day we office girls helped with a street collection for the very first Merchant Navy Day. I recall shaking my tin very briskly at the lunch-time office workers who tried to pass by. We had lost many merchant ships and crews on convoys bringing supplies from the Commonwealth and across the Atlantic.
Today the collection still continues and on September 3rd the ‘red duster’ the merchant Navy flag, flies over City buildings.

Looking back on my life, I must have liked ‘collecting’ as when at school I joined the Busy Bees children’s section of the P.D.S.A.- Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor which was begun in the East End of London, and progressed until it owned a site at Ilford where we visited the new sanatorium.

Years later collecting, conversely, for the N.S.P.C.C. – National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and going from door to door when some refused, saying they would sooner give their money to the R.S.P.C.A.- Royal Society for the Care of Animals.

Following the outbreak of war in 1939 the third floor of the Port of London Authority building had been taken over by the Admiralty, under a Flag Officer in Charge.

A stout Able Seaman called Tubby Knight attached to their Defence Stores, used to come down to chat with the Docks policeman Jim Harding who always stood at the street entrance to our building. They had both served in the 1st world war.
My office was on the ground floor, so I often saw them and had a chat, and it was Tubby who arranged to introduce me to John Petrie an R.N. Writer who worked upstairs in the Admiralty department. John came from Edinburgh and his accent was fascinating. He had been a solicitor’s clerk before being called up.

We began going out together.

He told me he had a sister Christine who did not exactly approve of him having an English girl friend. He lived ‘up a stair’ in Edinburgh, and he always sent his washing home to his mother - not a good sign, was it?

All this made me think, but anyway, I took him home and introduced him to my parents, and eventually some time in 1943 we became engaged. There was no talk of me going up to Scotland to meet his family who remained a mystery to me.

One memorable evening in November, when we attended the Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Sunday, members of all the services marched into the central arena to the music of a Guards band. At the end came a few Chelsea Pensioners slow-marching to the strain of the ‘Boys of the Old Brigade’.

At the end, after everyone had joined in singing ‘Abide with me’ there was complete silence as showers of red poppy petals floated down from the high dome.

Ever thoughtful, and hopefully to take their minds off the war, I decided to start keeping a ‘Best Memories’ book, in which I asked my friends and relatives to write of their loveliest memory. I still have it today, and can read it and remember the people who contributed their thoughts.
Many memories were of places visited before the war, but there were quite a few alarming incidents of R.N.and M.N. men being torpedoed and rescued from the sea. One was of the experiences of an ex-W.L.A. (Womens’ Land Army) girl.
Les Perrin, who was on loan to the R.A.F. told me of the night before D-Day, on the 6th June 1944, when he watched lines of parachutists boarding Stirlings. Although the men had blackened faces, girls in the W.A.A.F. from the airfield’s offices ran out to kiss them Goodbye and Good luck.

Horsa gliders carrying equipment were to be towed behind the planes. Many planes did not return from across the Channel, and in one that Les had to service, he found part of a dead pilot’s head.

My father gave me a memory of the 1st World War. It was the sight of the spick and span Scottish pipers come to collect them. He had been taken prisoner-of-war in the 1917 battle for Passchendaele, and held in a Belgian village for eighteen months.

He remembered the men lining the roadside, dirty and lousy as coots, listening to the Scottish regimental march as they swung past.

Mum and I still went to the cinema regularly. Two memorable films were Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, and the British film ‘The Bells Go Down’ based on the National Fire Service and including actual shots of the fires in London’s blitz.
Then my friend Les Perrin came home on leave and asked to see me. Apparently he had been startled to hear I was engaged. So we met one evening and talked as we walked a long way along the Thames Victoria Embankment, catching-up.

Afterwards, going home on the train, musing over what we had said, I missed my interchange stop at Wembley Park, and found myself out at Eastcote on the Met line.

And so, subsequently I came to realise I did not fancy going miles away to live in Scotland, away from my parents, and having John’s mother teach me how to cook mealie pudding,( a steamed mixture of fried onions, oatmeal, and suet), and how to starch John’s collars. The engagement was over.