Childhood Memories: In Pontypool

This story has been submitted by Joan Thorndike at the Mayfield UKonline Centre.

My name is Joan Thorndike (Tomlin) and I was born in Pontypool Monmouthshire (now Gwent) I was nine years old when the war began and I can remember the day that war was declared very vividly. My friends and I returned from school that day singing and shouting at the top of our voices “War has been declared” as though it was something wonderful!!!! My mother came out of the house and ‘put a large flea in my ear’ and said “my child you will regret this day as long as you live.” As you can imagine I felt rather annoyed because I was not allowed to go out to play that evening!!!

As the years went by I suffered from the effects that most people had: rationing, no street lights etc., but being in the countryside of South Wales in those days we did not suffer the bombing that other parts of the country did. We had a few bombing raids when the enemy was looking for the ‘ammunition factory’ which was in the area. My only other memory of the bombing raids was when Bristol was bombed and we could see from the Welsh side of the channel the ‘blood red’ sky- it was an awesome sight!

Going on a few years when I was a member of the Girl Guides we took part in many events:- one of the girls in our group was a farmers’ daughter and a group of us would go to his farm at weekends to do our ‘Land Army’ jobs. This was great because the farmer would always give us a bag of goodies to take home for which our mothers were very appreciative, sometimes even a freshly shot rabbit!!! Hay making was one of the jobs I liked best, especially when we were allowed to ride back to the farm on the top of the tractor full of hay!!!!(Can you imagine what ‘ Safe and Sound’ would say today!! We also helped with fruit and vegetable picking and any other odd jobs, which we were capable of doing.

Another event was when the gas masks needed checking and we would help the Air Raid Wardens to collect the gas masks from the houses and while they were being checked we would run off to the next house to collect more and then return the previous ones.

Another event which certainly kept us out of mischief during the school holidays was collecting worn out carbon batteries and then sitting and breaking them apart to release the carbon strip from the middle, this was painstaking because the strips had to be intact! Needless to say we has to dispose of many broken ones!

My uncle who was a railway worker and therefore could not ‘go off to war’ even though he would dearly have loved to do so, was part of ‘Dads Army’ and the place where he trained was just along the road from where I lived, so I would often go to watch them practise, even held one of their guns and had a look through the view finder! (Gosh I really felt that I was going places!)
I would fetch and carry for them, even make a ‘cup of tea’

When the appeal was made for metal we, and I mean many other girl guides as well as myself, would go door to door collecting any metal objects that people wanted to donate and I can well remember that folk were very generous.

All this ‘work’ that we did as Girl Guides won for us the 'War Workers Badge', for which we had to serve so many hours a year (and I can’t remember how many!). We then proudly sewed them on to our uniforms.

Just one more incident which concerned my father. He served in the D-Day landings and also went into Hong Kong after the Japanese left —but when he and many other troops were been sent off to a secret location, they were all put onto a train which had had all the windows painted black so that no-one would know their whereabouts. However, after travelling for many miles they eventually came to a stop, and of course those troops were curious to know what was happening and began to try opening the windows, one eventually succeeded and my father could not believe his eyes, he was at the local railway station where my uncle worked!! He quickly scribbled a little note to my mother and shouted to someone on the station asking for the note to be given to my uncle. This note was just to tell my mother that dad was on his way to 'somewhere' but he 'would contact her as soon as possible’

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