Millions Like Us (73 page)

15. and 16. Two mothers, two wartime diarists: Clara Milburn and her son Alan; Nella Last and her son Cliff.

17. Women’s Institute members bottling jams and jellies. The making of preserves exemplified the frugal ethos of the older generation.

18. In the Y-service WAAF Aileen (‘Mike’) Morris became expert at eavesdropping on enemy transmissions. Her intercepts were despatched to Bletchley Park for decoding.

19. ‘Nobody ever blabbed’; like everybody else at Bletchley, code-breaker Mavis Lever was sworn to secrecy about her work.

20. The Decoding Room at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of wartime decryption.

21. Dressed for the job, women shipyard workers manoeuvre a steel girder into position. Between 1939 and 1942 the numbers of women in the workplace tripled.

22. ‘I felt that no one could possibly win the war without me!’ In 1940 QA Lorna Bradey believed the world was at her feet. This later picture shows her in battledress, which replaced the impractical, but feminine, scarlet capes and white veils.

23. For Pip Beck, her job as an R/T operator at Bomber Command seemed the fulfilment of all her romantic dreams.

24. ATS kit inspection in a typical services dormitory. Note the ‘biscuits’, in three sections, laid out to form a mattress.

25. and 26. Jean McFadyen was one of 6,000 members of the Timber Corps who worked in the forests year-round cutting timber for everything from pit props to coffins.