My wartime life

My name is Cynthia Maud Still, nee Turner. I was born on 1/5/1918. I was 21 in 1939. For my birthday the government sent me a gas mask. That was a wonderful present!

Outbreak of hostilities

In September 1939 I was living with my father in Fulham, in south-west London, my mother having decided to wait out the war in Brighton where she ran a Palmist`s shop. Dad was employed at Napier`s, an aircraft engine manufacturer, in Acton. He had worked for them during the First World War. He was an engineer’s fitter. He had been in the army during the Boer war but had been invalided out. I was working at F.W.Woolworth and Co. in Putney High Street, where I assisted in the tea bar and on the counters. I worked 54 hours a-week for about two pounds.

My war work

When Dad moved to a flat in Acton to be nearer the factory, I moved too, and found work at Woolworth`s Acton store for a short while, until I took up work at Napier`s as a machine operator. I had no prior training and had little education after the age of 12 but it was wartime and my country needed me. The hours at Napier`s were longer as we worked 12 hour shifts for 7 days a week. I don`t recall any official days off but you could get away with the occasional absence especially on a Sunday as they had to pay you double time.

My job was drilling holes in the metal parts of aeroplane engines. I always thought they were for Spitfires but we weren’t told. Later in the war I think we made engines for Mustangs but again I not certain. I had to drill holes of various sizes from pinhole to an inch. You drilled whatever was put in front of you. I suppose I got quite good at it but it was boring work! I never saw the finished engine as they were assembled elsewhere and we never found out where that was. But I saw plenty of Spitfires, and heard many of the engines that I must have helped to make.

It was hard work and especially so for me as I was working on the night shift. I met Fred, future husband at Napier`s. He was working a milling machine, a machine tool that shaped metal by means of revolving cutters. He was handicapped by a malformation of the right hand but he could work the machine and he did his part to win the war just as much as any frontline soldier. He had been called up, and had been passed fit despite his handicap. When he asked the medical officer who had passed him about his right hand he was told that he should have notified the board of the problem and not expected them to notice it.
I was called up eventually but the board decided that as I was in the aircraft factory I was in a reserved occupation and also I was married so they sent me back to the works.

We worked from 7pm to 7 am with only a short lunch break. There was a canteen but I didn`t use it, preferring to take my own food in. In our workshop we had a small group of friends who clubbed together to brew up tea. We never went short as some one could always find a source of tea.

It was very noisy in the factory; there was no music while you work for us on the night shift.
We were probably paid more than the armed forces for the work we did but we probably worked harder as we were working all the time. My war was one of drudgery day in day out with little opportunity for breaks and not much in the way of thanks. I earned 1/9d an hour when I started and when I gave up work in 1944 to have my baby the wage had risen to 2/6d. [Nine pounds seven shillings and three pence rising to thirteen pounds seven and sixpence before deductions]
The government took half of it in income tax, which was supposed to be refunded in part after the war, but I never saw it, maybe my husband did. {Post war credits]
We were paid the hourly rate for weekday working, but at the weekend the rate was doubled. The weekend started at 1am on Saturday and ended at 12 midnight on Sunday.

Air raids

Napier`s didn`t get bombed, though other Acton factories were damaged. C.A.V. was hit but we were lucky. It was good that we weren`t because I don`t think the air raid shelters were much use. The raids were at worst an inconvenience, disrupting the flow of work with power cuts, false alarms and of course the inevitable loss of momentum that a retreat to the shelter brought. At first we went to the shelters when we heard the alarm but the management didn`t really like that. They put in a kind of last minute alarm buzzer. We had to down tools and run when we heard it.

Married life

I was married in 1941 on the day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour, some wedding present! It was a register office ceremony. This did not please the Roman Catholic priest who was my husband’s parish priest. He told us we were living in sin and later on said that my son was illegitimate. How things have changed today.
My dad and Fred`s parents came to the ceremony and my dad and Fred`s were the witnesses. Mum didn`t attend. My husband’s best man was a friend roped in from work. He was a wartime acquaintance and I am afraid that I have quite forgotten his name His wife was the only other guest. . My husband’s prewar friends were all in the services.

I obtained my wedding outfit through a mix of coupons and the black-market. We had a wedding cake. It had two tiers but no icing. Instead we had a white cardboard cover to simulate the icing. We had no wedding photos taken, but we did receive telegrams, which I still have. We went on honeymoon in Somerset. We travelled by train to Taunton leaving Paddington at one p.m. and arriving at eight p.m. there we took another train to Wiveliscombe where arrived after another hour and a half. We stayed with the parents of a friend of Fred`s whom he had known before the war. The mistress of the house insisted that we showed her our marriage certificate.

My husband had been moved to the progress chasing section. He had to follow up the individual tasks to make sure that they were being done and on time. It was better paid than my job. We used to go home from work and walk down to Shepherd`s Bush where there was a café that we could always get a bacon, egg and fried bread breakfast. I don`t know how the proprietor managed to get the food and we didn`t ask. We would go home to bed to get some sleep before getting up in the afternoon to go back to Shepherd`s Bush for a meal at Bertorelli`s restaurant. The beauty of this arrangement was that you didn`t need to use any food coupons. We could get a good meal for 5/- for the two of us. It might seem extravagant but we were earning the money, didn`t have to waste sleeping time shopping and saved our coupons.

After we were married we found a bungalow to rent in North Acton. We could have it for the duration of the war as the owner was in the forces. It was there that we watched the buzz bombs roaring overhead with the Spitfires chasing them trying to shoot them down or to tip them off course with a wing tip under their stubby wings. One day Fred was up a cherry tree in our garden when one of these doodlebugs came over with a Spitfire on its tail. The pilot was shooting at it with very intense bursts of bullets. The shell casings were landing in our garden. I never saw Fred move so fast as when he came down from that tree.

The Blackout was a nuisance when you went out as there weren`t any lights to show you the way, other than a hand torch which had to be pointed downwards all the time. Once in the fog we followed a torch up ahead of us only to find that we were walking round and round a static water tank.

The bombing:

We didn`t have anything like the bombing that they had in other parts of London. We could see the fires at night and hear the explosions but we got away lightly. The government didn`t tell us much about the bombing until after the war. I suppose it wouldn’t have helped morale much and would have given the German military too much information.

I recall standing watching the East End burning and I saw with my own eyes the effect of the bombs so we knew what was happening. We used to watch the searchlights picking up the enemy bombers and passing them from one to another while the anti-aircraft guns tried to shoot them down. What a noise they made!

Once we went to see my husband’s aunt who lived in East Acton. An air raid warden stopped us going into her street. He said that there was an unexploded bomb in the alley way and no one was to be allowed into the houses until the bomb disposal team had been.
We found Aunt Glad in a church hall nearby. She was most upset as there was a pound of tea in the house and she was “blowed “if Jerry was going to blow that up. Fred and I went back to the street and managed to talk our way in to retrieve the tea and my best coat.
The bomb was an incendiary and it was in the drain next to the house. I suppose we were very foolish but it was a good coat!

I left Napier`s in late June 1944 as I was expecting a baby in the September. I was due to be confined at Park Royal Hospital but it was hit by a bomb and maternity cases were transferred to Honeypot Lane Hospital in Kingsbury. I was taken in by ambulance. I could hear the ack ack guns booming. My son, Anthony, was born in the air raid shelter during an alert. Fred was at work and came home to find me missing and no one in the ambulance station could tell him where I had been taken. He had to wait till the next day to find out he had a son. My husband had been raised a Roman Catholic but I was C. Of E. We had married at a register office.

Flying Bombs, the V1s

Soon after this was the nearest time that we came to being killed. The alarm had sounded and we crouched under the table in the sitting room. The baby was on the floor. I was crouched over him and Fred was crouched over me. It was a squash but I`m glad we did it because the blast from a buzzbomb blew out our windows and showered the room with glass splinters. The table under which we sheltered was studded with them but we were untouched. The buzz bombs were a new form of weapon like a plane with short wings and a rocket engine at the back. They looked like they were on fire
. When the engine ran out of fuel it dived to the ground and blew up. I watched them glide but only when they were a good way off as the blast of the bomb travelled a long way.

The black market

Things were in short supply but if you had the money you could get things on the black market. I didn`t know much about it but did get butter, tea and stockings. It always seemed to me that the government encouraged the black market as there weren`t many coupons available and you used a lot of them just to get a few things. A new winter coat took about six months coupons and shoes were very difficult to get. My mum never seemed to have any problems acquiring things she needed so I suppose some of her customers must have paid her in kind. I think she had a lot of U.S. service men as customers and they never seemed short of rations.

When I became pregnant I was issued with an extra ration book for the baby and milk for me. Nappies were hard to obtain, cost a lot and used lots of coupons. I cadged clothing coupons from my mum-in-law, as she never bought any clothes for herself. She helped a lot. One day she came home with two pairs of old fashioned flannel knickers, and a blazer. I have no idea where she got them but I was able to use them. I turned the knickers into three pairs of pajamas and the blazer into a dressing gown. I had no training in sewing, but I borrowed a sewing machine and used a pair of pajamas that I had bought as a pattern. They weren`t wonderful but they did the job. I embroidered with a cat motif to make them look better. Looking after a baby was hard work in wartime and I often didn`t know which way to turn, but I just got on with it. Nappies were a problem as I only had 12 and they took ages to dry. As soon as one was soiled I had it in the wash so that I never ran out.

The end of the war in Europe

When the war was over I just felt relief. We didn`t go up the West End to join in the celebrations. We stayed home. We wondered what would happen next as the need for aeroplanes was over and the owners of the house we lived in would want it back pretty quickly. The future was uncertain but with Clem Attlee in charge we weren`t going back to the horrible days of the thirties.

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