Teenage Fun in Wartime; then a Pilot's Wife

7 — Jane Pearson tells about her war years and her husband’s time in the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm:

"Stratford was a glorious place for a teenage girl to be, with hotels full of lovely young men in blue — all the hotels were taken over in the centre of the town by the No.9 Initial Training Wing, for pilots and aircrew, air gunners and navigators, they all came here — I suppose it was their second or third posting after joining up, lovely, lovely young men of course (not much older than us, same age probably) and we were naughty girls, we used to go out…well, we used to look through our office window, you could look down into the garden of what was called “The Churchill”, but it was Dr Murray’s house, and then Mr Murray’s dentist place. During the war it was called “The Churchill”, and we used to look out of the window watching the boys doing their parading in the garden, and our superiors, our bosses, were very kind, they used to turn a blind eye. Mr Sam Collins was our manager in our department, and his office was just off at the end of our office, and one day one of the RAF boys threw a potato and it went straight through his window! We were rather scared but he was super, he fetched us out, called us naughty girls for looking out of the window and then forgave us, he was very good, but it was lovely.

And of course then there were the dances that were held every week in what was the Conference Hall, part of the Theatre which is now the Swan Theatre, and we loved that, every Friday night, it cost a shilling to go in; I used to go with Dorothy and other friends. My mother and Dorothy’s mother let us go if each of us, Dorothy and I, went to each other’s homes in turn to stay the night because we had to go home together — at least they thought we went home together! And this is how I met Brian in this dance at the Conference Hall — he asked me to dance, and so we danced together all night! The very first dance we danced it was ‘The Anniversary Waltz’, so it means quite a lot.

That was rather exciting. And then we became very close, and Brian was posted to various places, but that was in December 1942, and then early in 1943 a lot of the boys, well an enormous amount of them, went overseas to learn to become pilots and navigators, and to learn to fly. They had done some hours of flying on little biplanes and things, Tiger Moths and things, but then they went to Canada and America for a whole year to be turned into pilots etc., which Brian was. Came back twelve months later as a Sergeant Pilot.

But….there were so many pilots and navigators, they weren’t getting any action because Battle of Britain and everything was over, and there wasn’t enough action for too many pilots, so quite a number of them, including Brian, transferred to the Fleet Air Arm.
They became commissioned in the Fleet Air Arm and they were quite active round the shores of England and went over to Ceylon and back, and enjoyed that very much more, and felt they were doing something a little more than they would have been doing had they just stayed in the RAF.

When he came home from Canada after he became a pilot, we were married about three or four months after in 1944, and it was a few months after that, that he transferred to the Fleet Air Arm — looked very dashing in his naval uniform — wonderful!

I longed to be called up, because although I adored my parents I longed to get away from home because you know when you are an only daughter you are very cosseted and I just thought it would be lovely to join up and do something, but however I wasn’t allowed to join up by my parents and I thought well I may be called up, but then I wasn’t because being at the NFU was a reserved job, the girls had to stay so that the boys went and the men went you see. So I joined the Girls’ Training Corps, which sounds very funny now doesn’t it, and a body of us went every week, up to the High School, and a number of the teachers from the girls’ part were our officers; Margaret Morgan was one. I was made a corporal, we had drilling and all kinds of things and a lot of discipline, and then we went to what still is — I think it still is — the Masonic Hall in Great William Street where the RAF boys did their morse code and everything, and we were allowed to go there and we did…., we learnt morse code and aircraft recognition and all those kind of things, so it wasn’t a great deal, but you felt you were doing something.

There was firewatching at the NFU, but again my mother didn’t want me to do that, which sounds awful really because my father was in the first aid party at Stratford and they had to sleep out every fourth or fifth night at the first aid post, and mother, being rather nervous, didn’t want me out of the house as well, so I didn’t get to do the firewatching.

(There weren’t any raids on Stratford) that I can remember. We could hear the planes…, you could always tell the German planes when they went up coming back from Coventry, but I know the night of the Coventry raid, which was so devastating, my father was on duty at the first aid post, and he had to go with all of the men there were there, on the train to Coventry, and bring back all the people that they could, back to the hospital here you know, and it was a terrible time that, I remember that very, very well, a most devastating night.
I think there were one or two bombs dropped in fields around, but they say they were just dropping off what they had got left.

Looking back it (food shortage) didn’t seem to be too terrible. Well we only had what everybody did didn’t they, just had very small amounts of everything, but we managed, and as I say we had the occasional rabbit. And I can remember queueing up either with or for my mother at Mr Kinman’s fish shop because they had all sorts of funny fish there, there was whale meat and there was snoek and things like that, and we had any of those sort of things because, well, it gave us a certain amount of protein apart from anything else, but I think we had to be very careful, but I think that it was very good for us, and we were healthy. Of course we had a vegetable garden, by this time we were living in Orchard Way, and my mother was the gardener, she grew the veggies and thing, she was wonderful at that, so we did have those, that’s true, yes.

We didn’t have (an air raid shelter) there, no, but of course at the NFU we did. It was in Marie Corelli’s grounds, you know in the paddock there, and we constantly had drill and had to go down there — horrifying! Fortunately we didn’t ever have to use it properly, but we did have one there. I remember when Brian and I bought our first little house when he was demobbed, and it was in Wellesbourne Grove and it cost us one thousand pounds, and there was a lovely Anderson shelter in the garden. It was very good for putting coal in and bikes and things like that, and then when we moved to Mayfield Avenue there was one there too, a joint one between two houses, but we did take that down eventually. Horrifying places, but I am sure if needed would have been very very useful, yes.

Then, after the war, well Brian was eventually demobbed in 1946, and I left the NFU then, I had been there from ’39 to ’46 and thought I would just be a housewife you see.
So I did and when Brian was demobbed it was rather fortunate that Guyvers were looking for an accountant, and so I said that sounds like a good job for you, and he went along and he got it. He became Company Secretary in a short time and eventually was a director, and stayed there, well, until he died which was in 1981."

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