After three months in the Sales Department, I was transferred to the Accounts Department.

It was January 1946. One advantage of the new location was that it was nearer to the bus park and to the Cottage Cafe in the Arcade. Uncle Bob, Mum's younger brother worked in a Colchester Printing Works and also ate there. I saw him sometimes but he seldom spoke, always being deep in his newspaper when not eating. When I wanted a change, I had some fish and chips in one of the small cafes surrounding the bus park. The fish portions were small, always the same kind of indeterminate, bony fish covered in greasy batter. If I had any time to spare after lunch, I dived into the library. As a worker in Colchester, I was entitled to two general tickets plus one non-fiction ticket. I was beginning to prefer non-fiction to novels.

On my first day in Accounts, I realised what "weighing the work" meant. About twenty teen-age girls sat in rows, the oldest being about twenty. We sorted telephone tickets for operator-connected calls made from southern East Anglian Exchanges. This meant Colchester, Ipswich and most villages in Essex and Suffolk. These tickets were hand-written giving length of call, distance and price. Only very local calls were automatic and registered by a metering system. We were required to sort one pound of tickets in one hour. We weighed our batch of tickets when completed and filled the weight and time taken for sorting on to a daily timesheet. Sometimes girls were queuing to weigh their work on the one set of scales. "Ridiculous!" a modern worker would exclaim.

This work was less interesting than filing in the Sales Department. The girls were not encouraged to talk. I did not find any of my peers from Colchester Grammar School on the staff. Instead the girls came from "lower streams" though some had been to the grammar school.

In charge was Miss Frost, a woman of about 50. At first I failed the grades, which meant failing to sort one pound of tickets into numerical order within an hour. This was before I learnt the tricks of the trade, when filling out a time sheet, for a week including seven hours each day and four hours on Saturday. We were allowed 1/4 hour each day for "queries" and 1/4 hour for "sundries". This would no doubt be called "creative accounting" in today's world, for the time was allocated even if I had no genuine queries, but simply could not sort enough tickets in time.

After a month I was given meter books and an adding machine in another room for part of my time. As I was quick with figures and could work out percentages quickly and accurately, I could complete a Meter Book in two and a half hours instead of the three hours allowed. This was another opportunity to "gain time" during the week and atone for my clumsy fingers and slowness on the ticket-sorting job.

Miss Frost was firm but kind. She liked me and congratulated me on my work with meter books. Soon I had more variety in my work.

When another person, an older married woman, was away sick, I was allowed to "fill in" for her. She had a table to herself. Sitting there made me feel important. Her job was called merging. This meant merging seven separate batches of tickets for each exchange. Some exchange names remain in my memory, such as Nacton, Diss and Saxmundham, places I have never visited. In the smaller villages most calls were made from the General Practitioner's house, doctors being resident even in quite small villages.

Once a quarter bills were sent out. Preparing these, folding them and stuffing envelopes was done in a separate room. I was considered for transfer to this section, in particular operating the addressograph. I liked machinery and was glad to spend time with Gloria, a young woman in her twenties, who was in charge of this instrument which had a room to itself. Each metal plate had to be correctly aligned and a button pressed, following which the machine would make a loud clatter and one printed envelope or form would be ejected. The machine then had to be opened and the next plate inserted. It was mechanical but hardly automatic.

Unfortunately, I was clumsy with my fingers and had difficulty aligning the plates accurately. This may have been the reason for being taken off this job. I was disappointed as I thought with a little more practice, I would be satisfactory. I wanted to be in charge of something and have a room to myself. I was 18 years old then and thought I should be doing something better than ticket sorting and told my mother about my disappointment.

"Perhaps they don't think you are old enough for the responsibility," she said.

I thought I was quite old enough and that the job did not carry much responsibility. These machines have long since disappeared on to the scrap-heap of history and even senior managers often don't have their own rooms in modern open-plan offices. In Colchester, which was still old- fashioned in 1994, the buildings of the Telephone Accounts Department possessed a warren of small rooms, as well as one large room where the most routine work like ticket-sorting was done. I have always felt more comfortable in such solid Victorian buildings than in modern offices.

Snow covered the ground from about November and it did not begin to melt until the following March.

Mother had advised me not to put Ipswich on my list but to stick to Colchester only, but I had been afraid that there would not be a vacancy in Colchester for an established Clerical Officer in the Civil Service.

My heart sank a little when I was assigned to the Ministry of National Insurance in Ipswich. I had to be out of the house by 7.30 am each morning, so I was very glad that Dad was waking me up at 6.30 with tea. As he stood and waited for the Colchester bus, I would start walking down Cox's Hill to catch the Ipswich bus near Manningtree Station, outside a Farmer's Co-operative Office. I often wondered what sort of work they did in there. To begin with the walk was pleasant. September air was balmy and I never once missed the 8 am bus. I arrived at the office just before 9 am, so the other staff were pleased. On my first day, I was introduced to our manager, called Mr Freear. He had a separate room and the principal event of my day was being taught to make his tea. He had a silver tray, a tea-pot with a silver cover, two cups, and a separate sugar bowl and milk- jug which was filled freshly each day, from the bottle left on the step of the office.

The four clerks in the office took turns in doing this. The other main job was keeping the coal fire in the outer office well banked-up.

What dismayed me was the lack of work. The post came each morning and was opened by the clerk who had worked there the longest. She was engaged to be married to someone called Geoff and kept talking about him. Then there was a daily squabble about who should do the small amount of work available. This was an absolute contrast from my experience in the Telephone Accounts Department which had always been overflowing with work.

The Clerical Officers were Barbara, Eileen, myself and Mr Frindle. Somehow it was the custom to call junior women by their first names and junior men more formally. But the manager always called me Miss Martin. I never heard him use a first name.

Mr Frindle, recently demobilised from the Forces was about 25. Surprisingly he was an expert typist and could type at about 50 words per minute, an astonishing speed on the manual typewriters of that period. I could type only with two fingers, so I did not get any of that work. Eileen was the official typist. There was only enough work to keep her occupied for half a day, so as she had been there for two years, and Mr Frindle had only just arrived, he did not get much typing to do.

We talked a lot to pass the time.

Mr Freear wanted his old staff to continue to do the routine work, so Mr Frindle and I had very little to do. We were given about thirty different information sheets to study by Mr Freear, who told us he would set an informal examination for the two of us in about three months' time. Soon we knew those forms almost by heart. The office was boring as we were not allowed to open a book or read a newspaper, even when we could find absolutely nothing else to do.

We had to sit and look "busy" in case there were any visitors to the office.

Tea-break at 11 am was an interesting diversion. Sometimes one of the two Executive Officers came in for tea. There were two of these, Miss Tanton a recent University Graduate and Miss Knowles, a woman in her fifties who had just returned from service in the Indian Civil Service. I met quite a few senior staff who had returned from India.

India sounded dangerous. Miss Knowles liked to talk about her experiences there.

"One day," she said, "a rabid dog got into the compound and bit my dog. Then my dog turned round and bit me. As a precaution, I had to go into hospital for a full set of injections. These were very painful, being injections into the stomach.

Then we had to wait six months, to see if we were all right. I was very lucky, as I was all right. There was someone else there who died. She stayed in the hospital six months and thought that she was all right as no symptoms had appeared. Then one day someone brought her a cup of tea and she could not swallow it. That was the first symptom. It was very sad, as we all thought she would be all right."

Luckily Miss Knowles stopped talking about that subject, as it was beginning to upset me. I wondered why the injections did not always prevent the rabies but did not enquire, as we clerks rarely initiated conversations with the Executive Officers, but just listened to what they had to say.

But I did say, " It was lucky that it was your own dog that bit you and not the strange dog."

When November began and the snows came, I started to wear Wellington boots to walk through the snow. Dad thought they were the right things to wear but I did not like them. Inside I wore nothing but thin lisle stockings and these did nothing to protect my feet against the cold. A pair of man's socks would have solved the problem, but I did not think of this, and in any case, they were unobtainable either through convention, or through lack of even small items of extra clothing. My top coat was warm enough, and I could walk quickly but my feet started to give me pain, which did not ease up until I was seated on the bus. In the evenings, fortunately, I did not have to repeat the walk back up the hill, because a bus travelling uphill in the direction of Colchester passed by a few minutes after the Ipswich bus arrived. I was usually home by twenty minutes to seven. It was a long day. I spent eleven hours out of the house. The odd thing was that during that time I had not done much actual work, merely fulfilled bureaucratic requirements.

The new Clerical Officers in the Ministry of National Insurance were assured that there would be fulfilling work for them once the new National Insurance Act became law. The trouble was that we had a year to wait. We had been taken on twelve months in advance in preparation for this new Act.

I became more and more disillusioned with the Civil Service as the year progressed. Mr Frindle also expressed his disappointment. One day he said, "When I went home I chopped some wood and that was the only real work I had done all day. It made me feel better."

Nevertheless, we were getting paid. I don't think I was paid more than three pounds per week. Fifteen shillings went on bus fares and lunches. I gave my mother one pound. Ten shillings were deducted for National Insurance and tax. I had fifteen shillings to spend.