Memories from Gwen Hayton (Bayley)

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Carolyn Bull, a volunteer from Millennium Volunteers, on behalf of Gwendoline Phyllis Hayton and has been added to the site with her permission. Gwendoline Phyllis Hayton fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

My family had a small hotel where we used to live, called the Old Eagles and of course, they were very, very busy during the war. And I was teaching at the time, you see. Every night I went to the hotel to help out. You couldn’t get the help there because the helpers were in the forcers themselves. The girls went into the… they were Land Girls.

The Old Eagles was the local pub, as it were. I lived in a small town, the population was only five or six thousand. It was called Whitchurch in Shropshire. All sorts of people came because we had everything there, you see, for different races, the Americans came as well. I can remember them very well indeed. It was a place of solace, where people could be merry and it was very community based. I used to play the piano, I used to help my parents as well in the bar, and then someone would say “How about a song tonight?” And I’d say “alright then” and I’d go and sit down at the piano and start and someone else would say “Oh, Gwen, come on! Play (so and so).” And it would all burst into a great sing-song. It used to really cheer them up. They loved them. They were among my happiest days. I knew quite a lot of songs from heart and with the war being on, I cultivated the tunes I knew that the boys would like to sing. Lots of requests. “Right, just let me get this beer pulled...” “Come on, Gwen! Can we have a sing-song!” Even when I was serving someone. And we’d sing for a good couple of hours, they never seemed to get tired of it. They all used to crowd around the piano.
But there was sadness. When a son or daughter had died in the war, we wouldn’t usually see their parents come into the Old Eagles. They treated it with great sorrow in those day, well, it was a sad time. And they wouldn’t be there but all the people that knew them that were there, they would raise their glasses for a toast to the lost ones. If someone stopped coming to the pub, there was a pretty good chance they had gone.

We had an air raid shelter in the Old Eagles. This’ll make you laugh, it was in the old .. .we had two rooms in the back yard which were actually used for… lighting and things like that. During the war, we used to go in there when we were expecting a raid. Wash houses we called them. We had a cellar as well. Sometime we went down there if we thought it was very near or overhead.
Whitchurch was a town where the German planes used to fly over regularly to get to London to drop the bombs. I saw one or two. We went out if we heard news-wise from anywhere that the Germans would be on their way later, we used to watch out for them, you see. And make sure, as far as possible, outside of the range of where they were going to drop. Yes, we had a few bombs in Whitchurch. But not overwhelming, you know. Nothing like London. Mainly we heard about what was happening through the radio. We heard about all the machine-gunners. It didn’t really happen near us…

After the planes had gone over and dropped their bombs, sometimes we could see the docks burning, ablaze. And it would cast an orangey-red, fiery glow on the sky.

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