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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Dominic Penny of Link into Learning on behalf of Joe Mendoza and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s Terms and Conditions.

I had a first-rate cutting room assistant, ‘Puck’ Bishop, a Wren in the Royal Netherlands Navy. She was wonderfully efficient and kept me and my cutting-room in first-class order, reminding me each day when it was twenty minutes to ‘pack-up time’; so as to help me not to get too ‘carried away’ at the end of each working day.

One day I got to my cutting-room but she wasn’t there. “Where’s Puck?” I asked my ‘boss’ 3rd Officer WRNS Hazel Wilkinson, our excellent supervising editor and a good friend. “She’s not working to-day; you’ve got to cope on your own”. “Anything wrong?” I asked. All I got from Hazel was a ‘look’. Oh Lord, I thought. I hope her boyfriend Lieutenant ‘Jochy’ hasn’t got her pregnant!

Anyway, I settled down to break down the days ‘rushes’ and enter each slate-number and negative number in puck’s neat ‘Rushes-book’ as clearly as she did.

And then, suddenly, two chaps — civilians — came into the cutting-room: one in a blue rain-coat and trilby hat and another in a brown raincoat and similar head gear — each carrying a small pile of obviously full film cans.

“We need your help, Mr Mendoza, to sort out and assemble this material,” said ‘Blue raincoat’. “Excuse me, gentlemen” I said “but are you officers?” “No — civilians”, he said. “May I know your names, please?” I asked. “It will not be necessary” said Brown raincoat. “I’m leading Seaman Mendoza”, I said “but everyone calls me Joe.”

I had to mount their first roll of film on the ‘horse’ feed it through the moviola and fix the end into the empty take-up spool there.

“It will not be necessary for you to view the material. Just operate the moviola for us and help to break the material down into correct-length separate shots and join them up.

So off we went. Mr Blue sat at the moviola and I pressed the stop and start pedal at his instructions. Mr Brown sat on the stool beside my cutting bench with typed pages of obvious commentary before him. Mr Blue told me to start the moviola and after a length of run-in spacing and a few seconds of visual material he said a loud “Now!” to Mr Brown across the room.

Mr Brown silently read the commentary to himself and after a bit called “Stop!” So I stopped the moviola, Mr Blue lifted the viewing magnifier and marked the frame below with blue wax pencil. “Run it for a couple more feet”, he told me. So I ran the moviola for a few more seconds until Mr Blue told me to stop and cut the film — beyond his mark.

“Carry on”, he said, so I let it run forward until he looked through the magnifier. Presumably he reached the start of the next shot “Stop!” he said “Cut the film” which I did.

He handed the cut trim to Mr Brown, who rolled it up, put an elastic band round it and put it aside. “Now join it up, please” said Mr Blue. I used the foot-operated joiner to join the cut end of the film in the moviola to the cut end of the film on the spool above it. And that was the procedure for quite a long time from then on.

We were steadily producing an assembly of numbered rushes in script order, and each shot of which was approximate commentary length. That was our basic function, it took a long time — all this stopping, cutting, joining and starting.

Mr Brown stood guard in the cutting room while Mr Blue had lunch in the Ward Room and vice versa. It lasted the whole working day, but we finished up with three reels ready for trimming, commentary — recording and laying after the final picture editing.

Did I ever find out just what film I had been editing by proxy? The answer is “yes”. It happened like this:-

Mr Brown, Mr Blue and I scrupulously collected all the two-sprocket snips left over from each shot as it was joined. I recognised from these exactly what they were from and the subject of the whole exercise, but I said nothing.

You see, the previous summer we had spent weekends off-duty swimming and sun-bathing on Hayling Island — a holiday spot then empty of visitors just outside Portsmouth Harbour. We noticed huge concrete structures in the sea ‘around the corner’ from our swimming beach. We assumed they were to be part of some future extension to the Harbour. One of our party described them as ‘Concrete ships’ and we all laughed like drains at such a silly idea. It was not until the whole story of the D-Day invasion of France was revealed that I realised I had been editing an instructional film on how to put Mulberry Harbour together.

‘Mulberry’ was a gigantic man-made concrete floating harbour, big enough and strong enough to carry and service all the shipping, all the men, all the machinery, all the tanks, all the ammunition, all the guns, to ensure successful invasion of three continuous miles of the coast of Normandy.

The day after Mr Blue and Mr Brown left my cutting-room Puck came back to it. She saw the tin of broken-down logged rushes from the previous day. “You haven’t done much”, she said “What on earth have you been doing?!” “Missing you!” I said.

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