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DISCLAIMER:
This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Phil Sealey of the Somerset County Museum Team on behalf of Alison Richards and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions

“When the war started we heard of it on the radio, and the siren went to say there was an air raid warning. We were near Manchester aerodrome and my aunt, with whom I was staying, took me and my cousin down to this old quarry where they were some very old houses, shacks really, and we told the people there, with childish glee, that war had started, they wouldn’t believe us. We stayed down there; complete with our gas masks; my aunt insisted we took them with us, for about three hours. Then she decided she had heard the all-clear siren. I think we had heard it, so we went back to her house.
My aunt had moved back to a property she owned at Llansteffan, Carmarthenshire, in Wales. So I went down there with the idea of living with her and going to school, but when I found out I had to learn in Welsh, I said, ‘No, thank you.’ I couldn’t stand that; also her husband began to throw china all over the kitchen floor, which terrified me. A cousin also lived there, a boy, and he used to fight me too, so I wrote home and said please may I come back; I don’t mind if I am bombed, so back I went.
We lived twenty miles from London, not right in London. The Germans used to jettison their bombs on the way back from raids, including firebombs and incendiaries, which landed on our house. Several times we were hit so we always slept under the stairs. We had an air-raid shelter in the garden, and we used to watch the Battle of Britain dogfights overhead, most interesting and very exciting. Of course, after the bombing we used to go and look for bits of shrapnel and keep them as trophies, we then took them to school to show them off.
When I was fourteen our next door neighbour’s brother, who live in Newfoundland, asked to take in two schoolgirls for the war period and educate them. My friend and I were booked up to go, but when my brother came home on leave he said no, we were not to go as all the ships were being sunk while crossing the Atlantic. The ship I was due to go on went down.
My friend and I cycled to school one day and when we arrived the headmistress met us and said, ‘We’re closing the school.’ It was after Dunkirk and she was quite sure we were going to be invaded. She just closed the school just like that; we went home triumphant, no school. We had quite a gap before we went on to another school.
I got a music scholarship to a school called Eothen, at Caterham near Kenley Aerodrome, where I boarded. The area around the school was bombed quite a lot, so we had our lessons in the shelters, which were a bit cramped. We had two classes; and it seemed that there was always a much more interesting subject being taught in the class I wasn’t in. We all got through our School Certificate, I got a couple of distinctions; we all did quite well surprisingly. We had sandbags all round the windows because the church just by us had been bombed, so bombs fell quite near us.
My mother had to move out of her lovely home unfortunately, and go into another smaller place because we had lost our income. My father had properties in London, which were bombed out, so we had no money coming in as rent, and that’s what we lived on. The bombing of London cut off our income completely.
My father had died when I was two. So we had to move to a funny little cottage named Little Bindells, which my brother used to call Little Swindells because it was wooden, you could see through the cracks, and see the snow coming down. Then sadly we had to move again, to just a room, sharing a bathroom and kitchen; it was pretty awful, and we had to wear second-hand and jumble clothes. I only had one friend who came home with me, I never took anyone else; you soon knew whom your friends were. When we had our rather grand house we had a lot of friends, but only two or three kept in touch with us. We became very poor. However, it was very good for one.
I was in the Girls’ Training Corps where we all learnt semaphore and Morse. Then a friend said ‘Come in the Wrens [Women’s Royal Naval Service], it’s marvellous.’ ‘Come and be a visual signaller.’ So because I’d done reasonably well in the School Certificate, done semaphore and Morse code, they took me. It was quite difficult to get in the Wrens, not everybody did.
Visual signalling was more difficult than taking down Morse code by listening to the tapping sounds; we had to block our ears. We had to know all the [signal] pennants. When the boats came in with all their pennants flying you could read the message, which told you what was happening. We didn’t do much semaphore but we had to know all the flags, and then we used to signal to all the ships. After our training we were sent off to various places awaiting our posting; we were first of all posted down to Dover, arriving at Shellfire Corner, known as ‘Hellfire’ Corner. I remember when we arrived at the railway station it was in the middle of a shell attack and we were told to lie down on the platform, in the pouring rain; Ann and I saw a lady killed, it was awful. I also remember seeing some other poor old lady actually shelled.
We were stationed in a boys’ school in Dover and taken each day by jeep to go on duty, we did 48 hours on, 48 hours off. We did decoding in Dover Castle, and when we had time off we used to take milk, or whatever, to the people living in the caves. There were people living in caves in Dover, half of them lived down there most of the time; the shelling was so bad. It was only eighteen miles across to Calais and the shells came without any warning, they just arrived.
At one-time we were working in a lighthouse at the end of Folkestone pier. I’ve been back since to see it, but it is not the same lighthouse now I’m sad to say, it’s changed. We used to go outside, actually stood outside in the wind and the rain, and everything else. We signalled with a great big ten-inch lamp.
Then we moved to Southend. We used to go down on a little train to the end of the pier; the longest pier in England I think. We worked in a little box on stilts. The passing destroyers knew we were Wrens and used to go as fast as they could just for the fun of it. When we were on duty we climbed up on a great box and signalled from there.
I was acting duty officer and I was only nineteen. I used to go out in boats, to take all the reports and things to the officers in the ships, and I climb up the rope ladders. They always used to give us a gin and something; that was quite a time, and then we got moved again.
We did what was called degaussing [degauss — to demagnetise a ship’s hull]. You had to take a film to see if the hull of the ship was all right to go over magnetic mines. We had to go to a special place to take the photograph. As the bows came in you pressed something, then as the stern went pass you again pressed something, then took the photograph and looked to see if the coils were correct. Then you rushed up the steps and said, ‘Yes, ok’, and hoisted the flag, and that was fine. On one memorable morning I was due on duty at half past six and my great friend in the top bunk said ‘I think you’re on duty, Alison.’ I leapt to put my bell-bottom trousers over my pyjamas, jumped on my bicycle, tore down, and there the ships were all queuing, waiting for me. I had to rush and hoist the flags, the ensign, to say I was there. Immediately they were all hooting and signalling, ‘Where have you been?’ ‘What are you doing’ and everything else. I was lucky I wasn’t court-martialled; I could have been, but it was getting near to the end of the war.
I had a brother in the Royal Engineers; he was lovely. I knew the Captain of Signals quite well and he had noted my brother’s name. Whenever a ship approached he would ask, ‘Is Captain Robins on board?’ and if so, ‘Will you please report to the bridge?’ My brother thought, oh help, what has happened. When he did come home on leave and had reported to the bridge he was told his young sister was waiting, and was signalling to him; it was so wonderful and exciting to see him arriving. I then went home on compassionate leave and had a nice time with him. And then we both went back, and that was the last time I saw him; two weeks later he was killed. The war ended ten days after that.
After the war I met my cousin in Canada and he told me that actually Americans killed my brother, friendly fire, it wasn’t the Germans blowing up the bridge as we thought it was. It was the wretched Americans; they came down and peppered them all on the bridge. I wish I hadn’t heard really. My mother never knew, thank goodness. She just thought the Germans had killed him; we all did. Now we are friendly with the Germans, but in those days it mattered that we thought it was the Germans. My brother always used to say the Americans were trigger-happy.
The sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the end of the war held in Trull reminded me of where I was on VE Day. My mother and I were in Colchester watching my sister on stage; she was a good actress, when they gave out that the war had ended, everyone clapped, cheered and jumped around. But we were not feeling like it; we felt very sad.
I was in the Wrens for a very short time. I was offered a commission when I was twenty. If I had taken it up I would have been counting sheets, and goodness knows what, so I said no thank you; I didn’t want to do that, I would do something better in life, so I left. I went to college to become a speech therapist, which was what I really wanted to do. But my mother was ill, and I thought this was no good, I couldn’t go on for three years, so I gave up and went and did shorthand typing, which I said I’d never ever do. In the end it has paid me well and I have travelled the world working as a typist using the skill I acquired, and I’ve met and worked for my husband. So it was the right thing to do, I think.�

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