Myrtle Cynthia Tiley 1921-2000: The War Years

I must confess to not knowing the exact chronology of Mum's working life during wartime. As was common at the time, she continued to live at home until her marriage, and when a Luftwaffe plane was discovered buried in a local playing field in the early 1990's, she told me the story of how she stood watching the dogfight in which it had been shot down during the Battle of Britain, from the vantage point of the upstairs landing of the house!

I had no idea about her extraordinary proximity to the heart of the war effort until one Sunday, as a child, we were taking a Sunday afternoon stroll through Horse Guards’ Parade to Green Park, in central London (my parents were fond of these little bus trips-which more often ended up as walks- when we were small). As we walked across a concrete area, Mum pointed to a building covered in ivy, although it looked like a wall to me, and said 'I used to work there.It was called The Citadel. And also, under the ground right here, it's probably all still there; offices, bedrooms, desks, all sorts of office things'. I thought she was joking with my 9 year old self, and asked 'well, how did you get in there?' she pointed out where the entrance had been, and said 'All the war leaders worked from down there, because of the air raids and so on; it was considered safer'. Still baffled by this, I asked if this was an air raid shelter, as I knew exactly what they were, playing on them on a regular basis; she said 'well, almost, but we worked and some people lived there too. I hated it as it was very hot and very smelly; the nicest smell in the world will always be for me the smell of fresh air when you came out after spending hours at a time down there. You never really could shrug off the feeling that each time you went in, you might never come out, because if the enemy knew what it was, they would bomb it, and we would all have been killed. But then, you felt that all the time those days'.

Many years later, the government opened the Cabinet War Rooms as a tourist attraction; and all became clear.

She didn’t seem to have liked Winston Churchill very much, personally, but to be honest I cannot remember many of the comments she made in passing about this time, and she was also of the generation that was afraid to reveal too much, having signed the Official Secrets Act, and taken it very seriously, as indeed that generation did.

During this time she also worked in 10 Downing Street: as the Prime Minister is First Lord of the Admiralty, and she was employed by the Admiralty, her job had unexpected consequences. Mum described Downing Street as 'a maze- it looks so small outside, but is huge inside, and was several houses converted into one'.

On the family front: marriages, possibly hastened by wartime conditions meant that all her sisters and her older brother married between 1939-1944, leaving just Mum and Uncle Ginger at home.

As was common with most adults at the time, those who weren’t called up to fight, but stayed at home to work, also had voluntary responsibilities outside working hours. It is truly a marvel how the entire population, running low on food, living on their nerves as they had no idea from one day to the next whether their homes/workplaces/ friends /relatives would be bombed, sleep deprived, holding down ordinary working jobs, also then had the stamina to undertake voluntary work in the evenings. Auntie Kath used to fire watch on the rooftops of Balham; Mum worked for the Church Army, distributing refreshments and assistance to the victims of bombing, and those fighting the fires and dealing with the aftermath of the Blitz and, later, the V1 and V2 rockets. It did have some effect on her, as she alluded to strain later in her life; it also left her convinced that the only way to face fears was to face up to them, and use common sense. At times this advice seemed harsh; in retrospect, anyone who didn’t live through the war on the home front could possibly understand the stress these courageous civilians faced, nor the tremendous reserves of courage they were called upon to find, with no promise of victory at the end. But, come it did: and on VE Day, Mum and her friends were celebrating amongst the crowds in front of Buckingham Palace, waiting for the appearance of the King and Queen. She never saw them; pinned against the railings, she passed out, and had to be manhandled over the heads of the crowd to a quiet place to recover.