Railway Village | Author, Jane Lark's stories

Last week I wrote about the men who returned from Dunkirk and what happened after they disembarked at Dover, but obviously one of the important things for my story, which is about women working in the Great Western Railway factory in Swindon, is to find out about what they knew and heard and the emotional situation for those at home. What were the things that impacted the women in their homes and workplaces after France was invaded, and after the men returned?

When I read the GWR staff magazine articles, personal accounts of the time, and the local paper articles for that period, firstly what came across was the anxiety people felt when Germany invaded France. Throughout the weeks the German army raced across France, emotions and fear ran particularly high in the UK. Before that, many people had thought the war would not progress, many had been calling it phoney and a load of old nonsense, for months. Then suddenly the Allied forces were losing, people’s husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends and boyfriends were dying and there was nothing the army could do to stop the Germans.

The hope of saving France was so slight, The King announced a day of prayer and people who never normally prayed queued in their thousands outside churches to pray for peace. Then Churchill declared the retreat and evacuation of the Allied forces…

View the 1940 Pathe film about the British Commonwealth’s National Day of Prayer

What could have been a concerning situation became joyful. The people at home were as jubilant as though the men had won the war when they saw them returning safely, even though it meant they had lost France to Hitler.

The excitement and jubilation, after days of fear, meant people broke rules to express their joy. Do you remember how bare the shop shelves were at one point at the beginning of the COVID lock down. Well people described shelves like that, with nothing left, as everything was being handed to the men on the trains. It’s nice to think that in 1940 shelves were emptied by selflessness, remembering the food was rationed so the selves were not restocked for weeks and people went without the things they gave to soldiers.

In the end, I found out about so many intense situations and events in May, June and July in 1940, the second novel in The Great Western Railway Girls, when they Do Their Bit, ended up only covering these three months because I didn’t want to leave out a single event or aspect of the experiences of the women through this period of World War Two in Swindon.

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Learn more about The Great Western Railway Girls novels here -> The Great Western Railway Girls

So, as happens sometimes, life events and health took over and the posts I had planned had to be pushed onto the back burner, but hopefully now I will have some time to write again.

As I said in my previous post, three of the things that lead me to ideas for books are people, places and pictures. Previously, I have told you about some of the people and one of the places, so let me carry on from where I left off and tell you about another place behind the GWR Girls series.

Number two on my list of places I have already mentioned, that is the STEAM – Museum of the Great Western Railway in Swindon, which was opened in the millennium year, 2000. It is positioned in the former GWR workshops. As I said in my last post, I visited the museum quite a few times. I took my daughter when she was small, and, when I worked for Swindon Borough Council who own the museum, I used to run training sessions and hold and attend meetings in the rooms in the museum. What I love about the set up there, is that there are lots of spaces where scenes of working life are recreated, in life size models, a captured moment in time, and not only that there are sounds. The museum plays the sounds appropriate to the scenes. Which means as a writer I have the opportunity to think, how would I describe that. Then there are the personal descriptions from the people who worked there, describing what they experienced. Also items that hint at the life of the people who worked there—the checking in pegs, the glass framed foremen’s offices on their stilts in the corners of the spaces. I love the life-size platform that is set up for the 1940s era, and I like sitting in the carriages.

Of course, for anyone with an engineering and technical brain there are plenty of actual trains to look around. But for me, with my overactive imagination, I just love the storytelling style of the museum. It has really brought things to life for me and many of the things I describe in my book I can only describe because I saw them in the museum.

There are more things I could say about inspirations I have gained from this museum but that would give away parts of the plot!

I would definitely recommend a visit, though.