CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

of Britain: I was involved in the Battle of Britain. It was wartime when it was the atmosphere that
one did something towards the war, and I had no education, no training of any sort; I had my
school certificate, but nothing higher. So it meant, if I had wanted to go to university, and I always
wanted to be a doctor but I had no possible chance of getting on a medical course, and I’d have had
to start from the beginning again, and I was in far too much of a hurry. In any case, it was a means
of getting away from home and having a bit of, you know, life.
I acquired a political outlook during the war, when in the air force I met up with people who were
mildly political. I remember on one occasion there was a bank clerk, one of the older people who
were called up; and we used to go for walks round the countryside, and I remember saying to him,
“How do you think I’d vote?” He gave some thought to it and he said, ‘Hmmm, I think you’d have
to be a Conservative with your background.” I didn’t really consider that. My conversion, as it were,
came during the 1945 election, when I was married. At Sandwich I had married Denis Haines, and
in order to annoy our landlady we started reading the Daily Worker, and we had also done quite a
lot of canvassing with a bunch of miners from Betteshanger pit. So after the election we said to
these ex-Welshmen, “We’d better join the Labour Party, we’ve been canvassing for it.” (Welsh
accent.) “Oh, you don’t want to join the Labour Party. Join the Communist Party.” We got in touch
with the secretary of the Deal branch who was the miner at Betteshanger, he was the secretary of
the union I think at Betteshanger; and we were invited to a meeting in Deal where Tommy Jackson
was the speaker. Because we were new recruits and so on and so forth we were invited to tea with
the miner’s wife and family. We arrived, and it was a magnificent pure white tablecloth and
everything laid out for a tea, and a marvellous spread of typical working-class tea things. Tommy
Jackson was brought in and sat down and took his teeth out and put on the white tablecloth.
Anyway, we joined the party during that meeting. It must have been during the campaign, I think,
because on election day I voted in Sandwich for the Labour candidate, got on the train, rushed up
to Mill Hill where I had a residential vote and voted for the communist; so I voted twice in the ’45
election. Then I became pregnant (stillborn baby) and left the air force and we returned to London,
living for a time with my mother-in-law – Dennis’s mother – and then I started working at firm
called Adam Hilgers, electrical something-or-others, whop were producing what at the time was
high-tech electrical equipment for use in hospitals. I was in the production planning department as
a progress chaser, co-ordinating production. Then I applied for emergency teachers’ training, so I
did a year at Adam Hilgers, which I think became in that period Hilger-Watts, and is still so far as I
know part of a big combine. Then I did teacher training at Hampton emergency training college.
This was ’47. I did pre-college teaching for six months before my course, and my course was
actually ’48 to ’49 – it was only thirteen months. I started teaching in the East End of London in, it
must have been, ’49.
D
ennis had a great friend, Freddy, who in his remote youth had been a marxist of some sort,
and he lent us various books. In at the stage at which we knew him he’d wandered slightly
from marxism; later he became very much removed. But Dennis and I began to look at the
basis of marxism. The book which finally convinced me was What is Marxism? by Emile Burns.
That came like a flash of light to me, particularly on the religious question. I’d been slightly
troubled, partly I think because of my mixed background: I didn’t seem to fit anywhere. But that
gave me the reason why I didn’t fit anywhere. I didn’t believe in any of them, and that suited me
very well. […] I was an awfully ignorant type. I never have been very intellectual: I’m an organising
female. The issues of the time – the end of the war; the possibilities of unemployment; housing of
course was a big issue because we were in digs and that played on our minds; getting a job. Dennis
had a job to go back to because he’d been employed before the war by Hammersmith council on
street lighting, and he’d become during the war an electronic engineer more or less. The job was
not suitable for him with his intellectual development; he was a highly intelligent bloke. He actually
continued his education, getting first his higher national, and later he went onto get his degree, but
he became a BBC recording engineer. Those sort of issues of people coming back from the war and
needing education were very much to the fore of our minds. But I can’t remember (any specific
factor…?) Incidentally, during my first year of teaching I got polio, which I’m certain affected my
mind. It was ‘bulbar polio’ which is the kind that kills you, but nobody told me so I didn’t know,
and lived. It’s paralysis of the throat: I’ve still got partial paralysis of the throat which is why I talk
like a croaking frog. That affected my memory I’m certain, and now old age is acting on it and you
ask me a question which I could probably make up the answer to, but I’m not sure…
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