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When war broke out I was a 17 year old youth employed as a teleprinter operator at the G.P.O. in High Street, Exeter. On the night Exeter was bombed I was night off. The G.P.O. was hit - badly damaged. The next morning I went to the building and with others, helped - each carrying a teleprinter to now what is known as the Barnfield Theatre. Within a day or two we had the office running well. I hated the job thereafter as we spent most of the time taking telex's from the War Office - informing people in the City that their son/husband was missing or killed in action. I then joijned the R.A.F. I was put in an hotel in St Johns Wood in London (where we were told that the 'Ripper' had killed one of his victims). I remember we were marched 500 yards down the road, still in civies, to the London Zoo for our meals. Shortly after I was sent to Yatesbury, Wiltshire to a Radio course to learn the morse code. On completion I had my flight. It was in a very small plane called a Procter - a two seater. The Polish pilot had one seat behind him and I sat in that seat with a small radio and a morse key. I was told to train by sending and receiving messages by Q code to base whilst the pilot did short trips around base. The pilot who had done 30 operations
was doing "rest period". Unknown to me (he could speak very little English) he flew under the Clifton Suspension Bridge - as had several others before him, until one was seen by the Military Police and Court Martialled. I later went to an Airfiring Range and later to Moreton in the Marsh (now a Firemans Training Centre) where I met up with the rest of my crew. It was here that on my very first night flight without an instructor, that we very nearly landed in the Atlantic 28 miles from Lands End when the Port wing of our Wellington Bomber caught fire. My pilot, then an Australian, managed to land safely at St. Mawgan in Cornwall. Unfortunately in the panic, I had no time to wind in the 300 feet of trailing areial and on landing it wound around the door of the aircraft and it had to be cut away before we got out. Incidentally the Australian Skipper came over to England and the four other crew members and myself managed a reunion at Moreton in the Marsh after 50 years!.

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