Vox Meditantis

The sirens have fallen silent at last, and London breathes again. As I walk through the rubble-strewn streets this evening, three days after the King’s speech echoed across the square at Buckingham Palace, I find myself thinking about your question: “What jobs have you had?” Such a simple inquiry, yet it unlocks six years of my life that feel simultaneously like a lifetime and a fevered dream.

I am twenty-six now, though I feel decades older. When this war began in September 1939, I was barely twenty, fresh from grammar school and working as a clerk for a shipping company near the Strand. How naive I was then, believing that my neat handwriting and ability to file documents alphabetically would be my greatest contributions to the world. The war changed everything, of course. It changed all of us.

My first wartime job came in October 1939, when over seven thousand men from the London Passenger Transport Board enlisted, leaving enormous gaps in the workforce. I remember the recruitment posters appearing on every corner, asking for women between twenty-one and thirty-five to become bus and tram conductors. Though I was technically too young, the recruiting officer looked at my determined face and said, “In war, we bend rules.” How prophetic those words would prove.

The training was brief—eight days in total, three in the classroom and five aboard an actual bus. They taught us to use the ticket punch with precision, to communicate concisely with passengers, and to maintain our composure when faced with the inevitable complaints about delays caused by bomb damage. By July 1940, I was one of the first fifty-three female conductors to start work on London’s buses since the end of the Great War.

The work was harder than I’d anticipated. My feet ached constantly, my voice grew hoarse from calling out stops, and the weight of the ticket machine seemed to increase with each passing hour. But there was something deeply satisfying about keeping London moving, about being part of the vital network that connected people to their lives, their work, their families. When bombs fell and Underground stations closed, we conductors became the arteries of the city.

Yet as 1941 progressed, I felt restless. The Blitz had begun in earnest, and every night brought the familiar wail of air raid sirens. I watched the air raid wardens running towards the danger whilst we civilians hurried towards shelter, and I envied their purpose. When I learned that about one in every six wardens was a woman, I knew I had found my next calling.

Becoming an air raid warden meant confronting the war’s true face. We were responsible for keeping the public safe and acting as first responders during attacks. Each warden covered a specific area and sectors within that area, and we knew every family, every vulnerable person, every potential shelter. During the day, I continued my conductor duties, but by night, I patrolled the darkened streets of South London, ensuring the blackout was properly maintained and helping people reach safety when the bombers came.

The work was terrifying and essential in equal measure. I remember one particularly dreadful night in May 1941, when over three thousand Londoners died or were seriously injured. I spent hours digging through rubble, helping to identify the wounded—so many carried identity bracelets like the ones the authorities encouraged us all to wear. The smell of cordite and dust, the sound of falling masonry, the cries of the trapped—these memories have etched themselves permanently into my consciousness.

By 1942, with conscription extended to women, I was called up for more formal war work. I joined the Women’s Voluntary Service, that remarkable organisation that prided itself on doing “whatever needed doing”. There were no ranks in the WVS—you could find a duchess and a charlady working side by side, as Lady Reading had envisioned. We ran field kitchens for those made homeless by bombing, provided canteens at railway stations for soldiers passing through, escorted evacuated children, and operated clothing centres for those who had lost everything.

The WVS taught me about the profound dignity found in service. We received no payment—only the organisers were compensated—and we even had to purchase our own uniforms. Yet the work sustained me in ways I hadn’t expected. There was something deeply meaningful about ladling soup for families who had lost their homes the night before, or helping a frightened child write a letter to parents they hadn’t seen in months.

In 1943, responding to the call for more munitions workers, I transitioned to factory work. By then, roughly eighty percent of the weaponry and ammunition used by the British Army was being made by women like me—we were called “munitionettes”. The work was dangerous; we handled cordite and TNT, substances that turned our skin yellow and made our hair brittle. The factory ran round the clock, and we worked twelve-hour shifts in conditions that would have seemed impossible before the war.

But the pay was better than anything I’d earned before—certainly better than the pound per week that shop girls received. More importantly, I knew that every shell casing I produced, every component I assembled, might be the one that brought our boys home sooner. The factory floor was filled with women from all walks of life: former domestic servants, shop assistants, clerks like myself, even women who had never worked outside their homes before the war.

My final wartime position came in 1944, when I joined the Women’s Land Army as a “Land Girl”. The government needed to increase food production, and farms across Britain required workers to replace the men who had gone to fight. Though over eighty thousand women eventually joined the Land Army, it was perhaps the most challenging work I’d undertaken.

I was sent to a farm in Kent, where I lived in a hostel with twelve other women. We rose before dawn to milk cows, spent our days harvesting crops and tending livestock, and fell into bed each night exhausted but oddly content. The work was backbreaking—my hands became permanently stained with earth and my muscles ached in ways I hadn’t known possible—but there was something deeply grounding about this labour. After years of destruction and death, I was helping to create life, to feed people, to nurture the land.

The other Land Girls came from diverse backgrounds—many were from London and the industrial cities of the north, thrust into rural life for the first time. We formed bonds forged in shared hardship and purpose. When the war ended, saying goodbye to them felt like losing sisters.

Now, as I walk through London on this May evening in 1945, past the bombed-out buildings and the celebrations that continue to erupt spontaneously in the streets, I reflect on how these jobs shaped me. Each role demanded something different: the conductor’s steady reliability, the warden’s courage, the volunteer’s compassion, the munitionette’s precision, the Land Girl’s endurance.

They were not careers in any traditional sense—they were responses to crisis, adaptations to extraordinary circumstances. Yet they revealed capabilities I never knew I possessed and connected me to a community of women who rose to meet our nation’s darkest hour. We kept London moving, kept Britain fed, kept hope alive.

Tomorrow, the newspapers say, we must begin the work of peace. Many of these jobs will disappear as the men return from war. But I am not the same woman who filed documents in that shipping office six years ago. These jobs have made me someone I could never have imagined becoming—stronger, more capable, more aware of my own worth and the worth of the women who laboured beside me.

What jobs have I had? I have been everything my country needed me to be.

The End

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.