I graduated high school shortly before my 15th birthday. Perhaps my misdeeds with chemicals led the Old Man to recommend me to May & Baker, a chemical company. M & B developed the drug that saved Winston Churchill when he had pneumonia, before penicillin was discovered. I cycled to work and to evening classes most nights. M & B’s factory sprawled over two square miles and was a prime target for German bombs. One building was hit in a night raid but there were no daylight raids while I worked there. The lab I worked in was next to the building where highly explosive ether was made and stored. If a bomb had hit it many buildings could have been destroyed.
The next year I worked in the lab at the Cape Asbestos factory. The young factory women were a randy lot I wrote about in a poem.
Asbestos
It was a strategic material, important in war, they said.
It was spun into yarn then woven to cloth and made into clothes
That never caught fire in a fire, or burnt like regular clothes.
Beautiful people span the yarn and wove the cloth to make the clothes
From this strategic material. That beauty has long ago died.
They came to England from Gibraltar when the war began.
Gib was a strategic army base not good for civilians, they said.
Teenaged Spanish beauties with untamed raven-black hair
They were given this menial factory job that English workers spurned
As English workers knew about the deadly dust it made.
I was a teen just out of school in the lab when our paths crossed.
I sampled yarn and cloth to test and was madly in love with them all.
Their overseers told the girls to wear the dust-masks they supplied,
But masks are ugly and they were vain about their feminine charms.
Men were in short supply from war so they practiced charms on me.
Fast forward 10 years I was back as a student and ran into Rosa one day
Her eyes were red, her face chalk white, her beauty long since gone
She had news of the others and we both cried over horrid tales she told
Most stayed on in England after the war. It was cheaper to die there.
I mourned for my lost loves and lovers, the innocent victims of war.
A few months later I changed jobs again to work in the pathology lab of a mental hospital in Brentwood. Some of the hospital buildings had been a priory in the twelfth century - they had six foot thick walls. Many patients had tertiary syphilis that affected their brains. One treatment was to infect them with malaria. The plasmodia of malaria destroyed the spirochetes of syphilis, in preference to their usual target of red blood cells.
We did regular assays of the blood of the syphilis patients and the test required fresh guinea pig blood for standards. We bred our own guinea pigs and allowed the chosen animal some extra petting before it was sacrificed. The senior technician cut its throat and I held a basin underneath to collect its blood.
Late in 1943 part of the hospital was taken over to treat soldiers wounded in the Sicily landings. Ours was the first lab in the area to make and use penicillin. The pathologist returned from a meeting with spores and directions. We took the furniture out of a room next to the lab and put in metal racks, sealed its window and kept the gas fire on so it became a big incubator. The dispensary gave us two hundred medicine bottles that were cleaned, sterilized and capped with cotton plugs. We made and sterilized a batch of nutrient medium, poured some in each bottle and inoculated them with a few spores of penicillium. After three days of fermenting on the racks, the mold was filtered and dressings soaked in the penicillin broth were used on infected wounds with great success.
The last job I had for a few months in 1944 was in a lab at Ilford Ltd., the photographic film makers. Most of the day we worked by a dim safelight and sometimes we worked in total darkness. We made new combinations of film ingredients, usually silver salts in gelatin. After coating them in thin films on glass plates, measured the speed and graininess of the film. They also taught me about photography and film processing.
The work was particularly scary as doodlebugs (flying bombs) were dropping regularly at that time. There was seldom enough warning of an attack to get to a shelter. We would stay in the lab, surrounded by glassware and toxic chemicals or go outside to watch and listen. They flew at very low altitude (50-100 feet) and the engine made a characteristic loud thump thump sound,. When we heard one coming we prayed it would pass us before its engine cut out. When that happened, it might wobble and glide around for a minute or it might dive straight to the ground. They were devastating as the plane was a huge bomb and with its shallow approach almost none of its explosive force was wasted on a crater. It was directed sideways, so a single doodlebug could destroy many houses and kill people in several neighboring streets. Part of the Ilford factory, but not the labs, was hit after I’d left it.
At that time we also had rocket attacks but they weren’t as scary to me because there was nothing you could do about them. The first thing you heard was its explosion. It traveled at several times the speed of sound. If you were near enough, you heard the explosion first, followed by the whistle as it came over. Unlike the doodlebugs, rockets left huge craters in the ground.
