The train was running two hours late, and the December day was turning to dusk as I left Euston station and called a taxi. I was anxious to report at Bush House that afternoon if possible, as I hoped to catch the first train from London homewards on the following day. As the taxi threaded its way along the wet streets towards the Strand, my thoughts went back to a similar occasion some two and a half years earlier. I had come to London in 1940 for an interview with the Crown Agents for the Colonies, and had accepted a post in Malaya. Little had I known what adventures were in store for me as a result of that earlier interview. The Japanese had put an end to my Malayan appointment with drastic and disastrous thoroughness in February, 1942, and after six months of varied experience and travel I had found myself back at home, with the problem of my future career looming darkly, like a shrouded question mark, ever present in my thoughts.

Three months after my arrival home in the autumn of 1942, the Colonial Office had offered me a position on the Gold Coast. I had married in the meantime, and did not relish the thought of another two years or more of separation. There had been no compensation for my losses in Malaya, and I should need to be very careful in future if I was to get back on to a sound financial footing. With some regret I decided not to go to the Gold Coast, and resigned from the Colonial Service. The National Service Act required me to re-register and take my instructions with the others, and for a time I was uncertain who would claim me first. My experience in Malaya had given me an insight into active service with the Royal Engineers, and I hoped that I should have an opportunity to join the Corps if the Army claimed me. However, the first call was from the Air Ministry, who desired my services in a civilian capacity. I had been asked to report to Bush House for an interview in that connection.

The door to the East Wing of the building was barricaded and as I passed into the entrance hall I was met by an R.A.F. policeman who asked for my identity card. This was produced, together with the letter summoning me to the interview, and I was instructed to wait whilst an Air Ministry civil policeman disappeared upstairs to report my arrival. A few minutes later he returned to say that I should come in on the following morning, and I left the building to find my hotel for the night.

On the next day I reported as instructed, and went through the same procedure of checking before I was admitted to the body of the building. The policeman guided me along the corridors and up the floors to a small room set in the heart of the honeycomb. As I entered the room an elderly man greeted me and invited me to occupy the chair in front of his desk.

"You're very young, Mr. Bailey," was his first remark.

My old handicap had presented itself again. There are times in one's youth when the lack of years appears to be a source of regret, a sad state of affairs when one realises how all too soon the years speed by and time has been lost almost before it has been spent. It occurred to me that even the War had failed to teach the lesson that as a man grows older he does not necessarily become wiser, and that wealth of experience is not dependent on how long, but how fully, a man has lived. As the interview proceeded, I found myself instinctively defending my youth by demonstrating the concentrated nature of my experience, a hard training which had fitted me for work of far greater responsibility than even I thought, at that time, would come my way.

When I left Bush House, I had been appointed as an Assistant Civil Engineer but no indication had been given as to where my first posting would be.

The following pages are the story of the adventure which started with the interview at Air Ministry; not my adventure alone but the experiences, the thrills, the hardships, the tragedies and the comedies of a very large body of people with whom I had to work or whom I had to serve during three years of activity in a part of the world I had never visited before - East Anglia - the springboard of the Bombing Offensive.

Heavy rain lashed at my face as I got out of the Service car on a chill February morning in 1943 with an Assistant Engineer from Newmarket, the Headquarters to which I had reported earlier in the day. We had driven sixty miles through strange countryside, passing through quaint villages and along narrow highways across the heart of Suffolk. Our destination was a dilapidated farm house ten miles west of Norwich, in the centre of Norfolk. We walked into the farm house and upstairs into what had once been a bedroom. At a plain deal table an elderly man sat scribbling on vouchers, and in another corner a girl was typing a letter. We passed through into a second bedroom, the furniture of which comprised a plan chest and a chair. A sulphurous coke stove was burning and rain dripped down the smokepipe to sizzle away on the top of the stove. A young man with rather long hair and a red face stood by the plan chest surrounded by carrier's notes. We were introduced and I learned that he was Brierley, my Clerk of Works.

Brierley, who was a carpenter by trade, had been posted to the Station in the previous autumn and had been left alone to organise the work pending the arrival of a Resident Engineer. He told me how hopeless the effort had been and before many days had passed I realised what an immense task had been thrown upon him and what an impossible thing it would have been for him to have carried out the job alone.

I discovered that the old farmhouse was one of a number which had been requisitioned by the Air Ministry together with their surrounding acres. The land had been cleared and runways laid down. The farm buildings had been allowed to remain temporarily for the housing of office staff and stores, but they too would be dismantled eventually. The airfield, called Attlebridge after the nearby village of that name, had originally been constructed in a great hurry in the first year of the War as a small Fighter Station and had seen service both as a Fighter base and a home for light bombers. My assignment was the extension of the field to take four squadrons of American Liberators. This involved the extension of runways and perimeter tracks, the construction of aircraft dispersals and the building of completely new living sites, messes and operational and technical buildings. I was to spend a quarter of a million pounds, and my only technical staff was Brierley, the Clerk of Works.

My immediate concern, however, was to deposit my baggage at the lodgings which had been secured for me. I was driven round to the other side of the airfield, and left there to meet my landlady. I walked up a muddy path to the side gate and the door of the small cottage had opened before I was half way along the path. A dog barked shrilly within, and a small redfaced woman in a sacking apron stood in the doorway. She was apparently ill-at-ease, but she showed me my room before she explained that she hadn't expected me until the afternoon, and had no lunch for me. I assured her that I should have to get back to the office, and she was in a happier frame of mind when I left her and returned to the airfield. I was taken to the small Mess which was used by the handful of R.A.F. police and a single officer, introduced, and sat down to the meal.

Two other guests monopolised the conversation. They were the pilot and navigator of an American twin-engined bomber which had been forced to land on the field. In loud voices they told bawdy tales and aired their views on England and the war situation. I was astonished to see one of them help himself to a liberal spoonful of jam, which he placed with his meat and ate with obvious relish. The R.A.F. officer, an elderly Flight Lieutenant, was uncomfortable and had no idea as to how to take part in the conversation. The Americans were young men. One, it appeared, was a baseball professional before joining the U.S.A.A.F. and the other had left college for a temporary job before being drafted. There was little to choose between them, but I thought I preferred the college boy, who was a Southerner, to the Brooklyn type personified by the baseball player. The two flyers were the first Americans I had spoken to in England.

It was with some feeling of relief that I returned to the office to go over the fundamentals of the contract. Work was stopped for the day owing to the bad weather, and the afternoon was spent in going over the layout plan and getting a general outline of the work in hand prior to inspection of the site. Later in the day the Agent came to the office, and he too was a young man, with a suave manner, a neat new donkey jacket, and an irritating habit of pursing his lips before speaking. It appeared that he was controlling another contract besides the one at Attlebridge, an arrangement which seemed to me to be most unsatisfactory.

The position on the job was very uneasy, as there was an acute shortage of labour, and the firm were unable to complete the first site of Nissen huts. Until these were completed for habitation the Ministry of Labour could not supply more men as all labour was to be housed on site. The position was one of deadlock. In addition to this, the hutting parts had been brought in in good time, but the contractor had been unable to cope with the deliveries, with the result that a state approaching chaos existed as regards stores. I was not at all easy in my mind as I trudged back in the evening across the field to the small cottage which was to be my temporary home.

The meal was simple; jam and bread, followed by a type of scone made from pastry, which the landlady's husband had nicknamed "blitz buns", washed down with strong tea, constituted the menu. I was hungry, and ate hugely of the thick doorstep slices and the heavy home-made cakes.

We sat in the kitchen, with a reeking oil-lamp in the centre of the table, on hard wooden chairs, and the landlady watched me narrowly through her small gold-rimmed glasses. Ernie, her husband, sat in shirt sleeves by the fire and reached across for his food. I soon discovered that Ernie had a keen sense of humour. He had a habit of speaking quickly, and his voice rose in pitch to a shrill giggle at the end of an anecdote. He, of course, soon tacked the name Bill to my surname, and this provided him with a surfeit of amusement for the first evening. He was a smallholder who had lost a good deal of land owing to the Air Ministry requisition, and in his few serious moments he had a number of well-chosen words to say about the Government. So small had the holding become as a result of requisition that he was unable to afford a man to help him. He possessed one cow, one sow, one horse, four young heifers which he was rearing for sale, and about seven acres of good land; for these few acres he was obliged to fill in all the wartime Government forms and grow his quota of sugar beet and wheat and other crops. He spent his spare time cultivating a small vegetable garden. His wife devoted most of her day to poultry and the breeding of rabbits. They had a brown and white smooth-haired terrier appropriately named Judy, who was in season when I first went to the house in February and who therefore was constrained to stay indoors. I was warned to be careful with Judy, but for some reason which astonished and pleased Ernie and his wife, the terrier and I struck up a friendship immediately, and my welcome was assured.

The bedroom was reached by the aid of a candle and so I did not get an opportunity on the first night of inspecting my accommodation. There was obviously no wardrobe, although a few old clothes hung behind a curtain in one corner of the room. The small mantelpiece was covered with a varied assortment of artsy-craftsy bric-a-brac, consisting chiefly of souvenirs which doubtless roused my landlady's memory to hectic weeks of holidaying in her heyday. To me they served no purpose, however, save to render the mantelpiece completely useless as a shelf for my studs and shaving tackle. The absence of a wardrobe meant that I was obliged to leave my clothes in a suitcase with the exception of my suits which were placed on hangers and hung precariously on the single hook behind the door. The most comfortable part of the room was the bed, a vast area of spotless white sheets on a feather mattress. I was glad of that bed on the first night and many nights afterwards, for it was the only luxury I enjoyed during my stay at Attlebridge.

As my knowledge of the place improved, I was astounded at the drudgery attending the running of the house. Water was obtained from a well which was shared with the people next door. The axle of the drum was worn, and as the bucket descended there was a knock, knock, knock and then a splash as the bucket hit the water. The old handle squeaked and knocked in protest as the landlady laboriously wound the forty feet of rope back on to the drum. There was a sink inside the kitchen, blessed with a drain which ran out into the garden, presumably to discharge its contents into the soil and be filtered back into the well. A small outhouse concealed the crude sanitary device which served the premises, and an incautious exit from the outbuilding might have caused the user to pitch head first down the well but for the slanting roof which covered its wide mouth. My ablutions were performed in the bedroom, a pitcher and a bowl being provided for the purpose. At seven o'clock or earlier each morning a cautious knock on the door served to rouse me and to indicate that a jug of hot water was outside the door.

On washday, the landlady placed a tin bath on an upturned box, lit a fire copper in the kitchen, and filled the house with steam. The bath and box were usually placed outside the door, as the atmosphere in the kitchen was unbearable. I hated washdays, as I had to lunch in the kitchen and the steam of the copper, the heat of the fire, and the heat and fumes of the oil stove on which all cooking was carried out, combined to make me perspire and feel sick. Lunch was the heaviest meal of the day, and I was expected to eat as much as Ernie, who had been plodding all morning behind a.plough or working at the thresher. On the evening of washday, if it had been a good drying day, the ironing was done, the landlady using two flat irons alternately, occupying the whole table and one of the two fireside chairs whilst Ernie used the other and Judy took up the rest of the hearthrug. There was a front room, of course, but this was not for use, as it contained a very good three-piece suite and the best ornaments. I have often wondered how the room looked with a fire in the grate, but I never knew.

Before going to bed each night a hot, milky drink was supplied in huge cups. Sometimes it was cocoa, sometimes coffee or other beverage, but always the drink was made with milk. And always the milk boiled over. If milk boils over on an electric range or gas stove, it is a matter of no great inconvenience, but the milk which boils over on to a paraffin oil stove runs down the chimneys and burns on with an indelible brown stain and a burning smell which fills the air. The mica windows of the stove at my lodgings were almost opaque, with a dark brown coating over them which showed the flame through as a weak yellow light. As the milk boiled over on most mornings also, the dismantling and cleaning of the oil stove was a constant liability.

So began my stay of fifteen months at Attlebridge, fifteen months in which I was to learn of Norfolk and its people, a townsman living in unaccustomed rural surroundings, at the same time trying to lay down a base for American bombers with poor class labour, insufficient supervision, sudden and unexpected bottlenecks in supplies, and the threat of raids to disorganise and destroy the work in progress. At eight o'clock each morning - sometimes earlier - I left the cottage and walked or cycled past the deserted Rectory on to the old perimeter track in the sweet, cold morning air. It was on such a morning that I experienced the Norfolk "scud", a mist of frozen particles, which settled in thick, hoary layers on my eyebrows and moustache and soaked my trousers. The journey to the stuffy little office in the requisitioned farm building served to wear off the immediate effects of the heavy breakfast which was pressed upon me. I once tried to refuse the porridge course which, according to a tradition of the household, was served at the end of the meal. My landlady was most upset and was convinced that I was ill as I had obviously lost my appetite, and I never refused again.

On arrival at the office I found each day a great volume of post containing plans and carriers' notes, letters concerning the construction, endless forms, and multitudes of vouchers. There are over two thousand forms in circulation for the Air Ministry and in my fifteen months at Attlebridge I think I must have used many copies of each of the forms. In addition to the volume of work resulting from this endless paperchase there was the matter of the work outside, and each day material was arriving at the small railway station nearby. The heaviest traffic which the station had ever had to deal with before the War had been the shipment of sugar beet and other farm produce, and the arrival of material for the construction of an airfield led to congestion and confusion. Brierley and I spent many hours with Mr. Bird, the station master, trying to sort out the mess and to trace lost consignments or to help him settle the many problems arising in his office through the constant stream of railway advice notes. The material was flooding in, sometimes before the plans had arrived for the buildings concerned, so that in the absence of a central stores compound it was almost necessary to have the insight of a clairvoyant to decide where the stuff should be dumped on the site in order to avoid picking it up again or losing it before it was needed.

The farmhouse office was obviously too small for my requirements, but there was no time to make myself a suitable headquarters. The best that I could do was to erect half a Nissen hut alongside the existing buildings and whilst I was waiting for this building to be completed I cycled or walked round the dispersed living sites to see what order could be achieved out of the chaos.

A good deal of perseverance was going to be needed to plod through the mess. After a fortnight on the station I got out a rough scheme which I tried to present to the contractors. At first I was not well received as the suggestions I put were taken as a reflection on their way of running the job. The trouble was that work had been started at the wrong place, no proper roads had been laid for transport and no compound erected to receive stores. The consequent waste of effort in resorting hutting, barrowing where vehicles could not reach, and moving concrete mixers up and down the site, could not be afforded, as we had so little labour that it was difficult to build up even a good concreting gang.

I had left England for Malaya before the nip had been felt in the manpower resources of the building and civil engineering industry. The nature of my work in Australia in the extension of the Kingsford Smith Civil Airport demanded more heavy plant than labour, and no great pinch was therefore felt consequent on the calling up of men to the forces. The situation in England was therefore something new to me, and I could not grow accustomed to it for a month or more. The general public and our Allies have never been told just how bad the labour position was in 1943 when the most construction was in progress. The Norwich Labour Exchange was responsible for the supply of labour to Attlebridge, and I met the National Service Officer early in my experience. He was a small man of middle age and his problem was to scrape the bottom of the barrel to provide men for the many airfields being built in the area. The labour was of the poorest type imaginable. Agricultural labourers who had deserted their poorer calling for the temporary attraction of higher wages formed the bulk of the unskilled force. There were few tradesmen, and trainees were introduced to swell the numbers of bricklayers, carpenters and other trades. Ex-servicemen with partial disability pensions, old-age pensioners and boys were working side by side.

In spite of the efforts of the Ministry of Labour there was a wide difference between man-power requirements and available resources and it must have been a hard decision to make when the Ministry called in the help of unskilled labour from Eire. The Irishmen who came to England to fill the labour gangs were not the traditional good old Irish "navvy" types, but scum, indescribably dirty and uncontrollable, a special problem in discipline and security. The contractors found it necessary to allocate special huts for their use and more than usual precautions were necessary when washing their bedding and cleaning out their accommodation to avoid the spreading of flies and fleas. The small detachment of R.A.F. police at Attlebridge were constantly investigating suspicious cases, frequent attempts were made to check identity cards and the local policeman was never away from the site for very long. Each time the police opened up on a check of identities, a number of the Irishmen disappeared. It may be that some readers will consider this review of the Irish labour as over-imaginative and exaggerated but should any of my former colleagues at Attlebridge read this book, they will remember the series of events following a particular air-raid in the Spring of 1943.

I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening reading by the light of the oil-lamp. The landlady and her husband were at their usual positions by the fire and no-one was speaking. Suddenly we heard the distant sound of a wailing siren coming from the direction of Norwich. We sat in silence for a few moments and then heard excited voices outside. There was a rumble of gunfire in the distance.

"They're over Norwich" said Ernie, as he made for the door.

"Don't go out, you fool, you" called his nervous wife, but Ernie had already gone. A few seconds later he re-appeared.

"Coo, just come and look, just come and look!" he spluttered, "the sky's lit up like a firework display." We went outside and locked eastward towards Norwich. Parachute flares were floating in their thousands from a great height to light up the whole of the surrounding countryside. What had been a dark, moonless night was now a blue-white area of light flecked with spurts of red and orange from the ground batteries. We heard the distant drone of aircraft and the crunching of bombs over Norwich.

The raid lasted about half an hour and we heard no more that night. On the following day I expected to hear a good deal about the event from workmen who came in daily from Norwich, but the news which had excited the labour force most of all was that a number of new Irish labourers who lived on the site had left their huts in the early morning with the excuse that they were going to the city to buy boots. This was not considered a convincing excuse for the middle of the week, and the return of the men late that night did not clear up the mystery. At the end of the week the men were asked for their unemployment insurance cards as a matter of routine. None of the men who had been to Norwich the day after the raid could produce their cards, and on the following day they left the site and were not seen again.

Not all the Irishmen were suspicious characters, of course, and some of them proved to be good workers; but generally speaking they were not worth the trouble they caused. I do not know whether or not they were supposed to undergo a medical examination before coming to England, but quite a number of them were unfit to work.

One day I was inspecting a site where trench excavation was in progress and the foreman pointed out a young man whom I had not seen before.

"He is one of the new Irishmen" the foreman explained. "Heaven knows why they sent him here. I feel sorry for the poor devil. I put him in the trench to dig and found that he could not use the spade. He's got a withered hip."

Bombing was going on with a certain regularity although the attacks were principally directed at Norwich. One night in particular was very heavy. We had all been in bed for some time and did not hear the siren in the distance. We were shaken into wakefulness by the rattle of anti-aircraft artillery. I was inclined to stay in bed but the landlady implored me to go downstairs. The fire in the kitchen had died out and we sat shivering in the darkness for an hour whilst the windows rattled and Judy, the dog, whined on the doormat. Ernie was fully taken up in attempting to control his terrified wife and it really did seem as if bombs would fall very near to us that night.

Eventually the anti-aircraft fire ceased, we turned up the lamp and had a hot drink and then returned to bed for a few hours of sleep before the dawn. I decided that I would not get up for another raid, as in my opinion the kitchen was little safer than the bedroom, its only protection being a brick blast wall built in front of the kitchen window. The Morrison table shelter which had been provided by the local authority lay rusting outside, as it was far too big to go in either of the downstairs rooms.

Although bombing in itself did not delay construction on the airfield, the possibility of it meant that a constant vigil had to be kept on the task of concealing the work in progress. We were obliged to camouflage all stocks of building materials and to tone down new construction as it was completed. Every stack of bricks or pipes was covered with camouflage netting and valuable labour was allocated to continuous duties in the concealment of buildings and materials.

Slowly, very slowly, the contractor began to produce a little order out of the chaos. Steelwork began to arrive for the first hangar, a light-weight affair covering three-quarters of an acre and big enough to accommodate two four-engined bombers with comfort. The site was prepared and the foundations were ready just in time for the specialist steelwork erectors when they arrived on the site. A spell of fine sunny weather enabled them to get the derricks in position and erect a few of the lattice columns which formed the meccano-like frame of the hangar. It really seemed as though March was going out like a lamb, until on the last Friday of the month a gale sprang up from nowhere. It so happened that on that day a Captain of the U.S. Army came from the American U.K. base headquarters in London, to inspect progress and tour the field. Going along one of the lanes circling the area, we were twice impeded by blown down straw stacks which had been demolished over the road. Corrugated iron sheets of the hangar were lifted in the air and blown across the field for several hundred yards. Half completed Nissen huts were blown flat, and the workman found great difficulty in keeping their feet. To my great surprise I saw the steel erectors perched precariously thirty feet up in the air carrying on with their work whilst the columns supporting them were visibly swaying in the wind. We lost a few weeks in repairing the damage caused by the one day's gale. After two months, an American Major of the U.S. Corps of Engineers appeared on the site and introduced himself. He was the area engineer for the American Army covering the construction of airfields in Norfolk and Suffolk and he was required to make a report on progress to the U.K. base in London. From that day onwards I gradually came to learn that American officialdom is just as involved as our own. The Major produced a sheaf of typed sheets which he called "Form 90". Form 90 was a progress report to end all progress reports. The Air Ministry progress sheet is a single page of printed foolscap, but the American Form 90 ran into several pages. Every building on the site was dealt with separately and at the end of an hour, with all the assistance which the Major could give, my mind was in a whirl after trying to supply percentage figures on odd Nissen huts and small areas of concrete.

Spring lengthened into Summer. Work went on for seven days a week with the exception of a break of one Sunday in four. As the days lengthened, we increased the working hours and as the weather improved, we emerged from the mud and began to see a little of what was to be, taking shape.