A Teacher's Life in the War

In summer 1939, aged 19, I was half way through a 2 year teacher training course at Darlington Training College. The summer holidays were extended to allow time to build underground air raid shelters in our hockey field, in preparation for war. Because I lived near college I helped to plant vegetables in the flower beds and lawns, and made backout blinds for the tall windows. Everything was done with a great sense of urgency. Normal college lectures went on in my final year and we were allowed a little petrol for bus journeys to go to our school practices. One day in 1940 the 18 year old fiance of my friend Ella came to be shown off to all of us students, handsome and proud in his RAF uniform. Tragically he was shot down only one week later in his Blenheim. I remember the college pricipal's face when she had to break the bad news. I worried for my brother Gordon and his friend Alan, my future husband, who were both very keen to enlist but both being 26 they were sent for training later than the teenagers. We frequently had to sit in air raid shelters at night. We were sitting our final exams, after spending 5 tiring hours during the night in an air raid shelter, and to our surprise our English tutor came round, put a barley sugar sweet on each of our desks saying "Show old Hitler that you don't care a Tuppeny Dam for his air raids". We all laughed out loud hearing her swear! This greatly lifted the spirits of students who were worried about their families in other cities which were being bombed.

I spent some of the summer holiday 1940 picking flax for linen and harvest camping in Gloucester. People grew crops that were not usually grown because of food shortages. We didn't realise how much food had come from America to Britain till the war.
One of the students who came from Newcastle was given a bravery award. An incendiary bomb had landed on the gas storage cylinders where her father worked and she had managed to crawl over to it to put out the fire.
In March 1941 it was my 21st birthday party when we heard the bombers flying over towards Glasgow and return three hours later. An incendiary bomb dropped in the road right outside my house and while people checked their attics to make sure none of the houses had been set on fire, it was put out with a stirrup pump.

On my first day as a teacher my job was to train the 50 seven-year old children in my class to put on ugly rubber gas masks which they loathed because they smelled dreadful, steamed up so the children couldn't see out, were heavy, uncomfortable and frightening to look at so the children kept taking them off. I had to show a good example by wearing mine, but they couldn't hear what I was saying. Then we had to walk outside wearing them into a reinforced-steel ground-level air raid shelter and learn how to put the gas masks into little cardboard boxes on string around their necks. These were to be carried at all times. I remember singing a rhyme with them :-

Got your gasmask
Got your tin hat
Got your torch light
All right
Good night!

All school materials were in very short supply. We had been taught as students to get our pupils to paint on large sheets of paper, so I white-washed sheets of newspaper to provide them with art equipment and pencils were all used down to the smallest stub.

Children were often unsettled at school as fathers were away in the forces and some mothers were working long hours at munitions factories at Newton Aycliffe in dangerous conditions. Grannies brought children to school.

While I was teaching full time every day, I had an extra job every fifth night on duty as a telephonist at C division National Fire Service, sending pumps, turntable ladders and personell to fires. Always two appliances (fire engines) were sent to put out any fire, however small, so great was the need to preserve a complete blackout against enemy bombing. We dealt with messages, had a few hours sleep, then worked till 6 in the morning before going home ready to start another days teaching at 9am.

Alan, who I eventually married in 1948, was a teacher for the first year of the war as it was a reserved occupation. During that year he also had to do an extra job in the Home Guard. They had to watch out for parachutists from Germany each night sometimes in pill boxes disguised as haystacks. On one occassion a bomb dropped very close to him near a railway bridge on Staindrop Road. He thought it was probably a stray one from bombers on the way to Middlesbrough and was lucky, but not too bothered by it.
In 1940 he joined the Royal Artillery and as soon as he finished his training at Catterick Officers Training corps, he was sent to Woodhall Spa to make a film for teaching seven-man teams to man the new super efficient 25-pounder gun so they could all work together and do each job. This put his teaching skills to good use before he went off to North Africa and Italy to fight.

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