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This contribution to People’s War was received by the Action Desk at ��ѿ��ý Radio Norfolk and submitted to the website with the permission and on behalf of mrs. Eileen Davis
I was born on 20th December 1924, so aged 14 I was coming to the end of my second year at Birmingham’s Junior Commercial School when, with was threatening, the main body of our school was uprooted, each pupil labelled, supplied with a gas mask, entrained and deposited at Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire.

We shared the local grammar school and my friend and I were billeted with a welcoming couple in their twenties. The Rural District Council requisitioned some of us to take the place of members of staff called up for war service, and the two of us were detailed off to make out identity cards for every person occupying Badminton House, the home of the Duke of Beaufort. In the small space provided I had to write ‘Henry Arthur Hugh Fitzroy Somerset, Duke of’. I also had the ‘honour’ of writing another card for the Duke’s royal evacuee, “Mary, Her Majesty, Queen”.

Having a second attempt at ‘best writing’ and having no experience of war-time security, it did not occur to me that destroying an officially printed British identity card and depositing it in a waste-basket was serious. When we finished with one card short, the horrified antics of the Chief Clerk should have set the seal on my future ambitions. However, the next day I was transferred to the Sanitary Inspector’s office where I became familiar with the location and maintenance of all the public conveniences in the Bristol area!

My first job after leaving school at the age of fifteen, with proficiency certificates in shorthand and typing, was with a large company producing sewerage pipes! The boredom of operating an addressograph had me looking for another job and I was offered a position as assistant to the private secretary of the elderly wife of a retired member of a chocolate manufacturing family renowned as much for philanthropic generosity as for their products.

Accompanying my employer and Birmingham City’s Maternity Hospital Matron to a property in the country, I measured up the rooms in order to work out what furniture she would need to buy to accommodate nurses when, as soon as it was ready, mothers and babies could be moved out of the now heavily bombed city centre. She accomplished the task shortly before she died, but my job was further extended for three years on the retirement of her husband’s secretary. Reaching the age of eighteen, my employer’s pleas for exemption from wartime service were rejected by the Ministry of Labour ad National Service, and I was “directed” to work at the Midland Region of the ��ѿ��ý where I was employed as a general secretary moving from one department to another as necessary.

Security was tight and I spent much time listening to live broadcasts recording every deviation, however small, from the typed script. Working in the music department to summon members of the Midland Light Orchestra to rehearsals involved telephoning a local hospital where the musicians were employed in the ‘reserved occupation’ of porters, and worked a shift-bartering system which allowed them to comply.

The Features Department sent me early one cold, Sunday morning, clambering over the rubble of Coventry, brining to mind the night we went out in a furniture van to the countryside to sleep as a respite to bombing raids. Instead, we heard German bombers flying low over us to drop their load on Coventry and watched the flames rising. The Community Centre had escaped damage and was to broadcast the Midlands contribution to a nationwide ‘hook-up’ to launch the first GFP (General Forces Programme).
Working for the Variety Department provided a diversion when I rang a hotel to fix up overnight accommodation for a Workers' Playtime entertainer, to find it had been relinguished by the non ferrous metals control.
During the previous year I had attended Sunday classes in our old bomb damaged school, and had obtained a shorthand teacher's diploma. The only way I could make use of it was in evening school where some of my students were blue-clad patients from a forces rehabilitation centre, so I said goodbye to the ��ѿ��ý and spent the rest of the war working for a firm making funeral furniture and a YMCA mobile canteen unit. I was then free to teach in the evnings and to pursue my other interests: the International Centre where I was a member, and an off-shoot of this when, supporting India's bid for independence, I became a founder/secretary of Birmimingham's India Club.
On holiday in Margate on VJ Day, I celebrated with Kiwi ex-Pow's, who were at last looking forward to returning to New Zealand.

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