大象传媒

This story has been added to the People's War Site by Margaret Walsh of The Royal Star and Garter Home on behalf of Doris Wigmore and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was stationed at Mill Hill in North London, in the ATS [Auxilliary Territorial Service]. I was in the part of the organisation that had to collect up the laundry from all the girls in my company. We had to take the laundry to London Moons Garage in Kensington.

I did not drive in those days and I would like to say how wonderful the female drivers were. They were much better than the men - in fact on one occasion I had to get out of the vehicle and walk because the male driver was so bad. It was very icy and he braked so hard - something you never do on ice - that the vehicle spun right round and ended up facing the opposite direction. You can see why I wanted to get out!

Well, we were taking the laundry to London, when all of a sudden the vehicle stopped. My female driver, who was very experienced, kept trying to start the engine. I tried as well, but it didn't work at all. We were there for 3/4 of an hour. All of a sudden we tried again and it started.

We continued for about 20 minutes or more when we were directed to go round a different way, because at the time we had stopped originally a flying bomb had landed in the place we would have been if we had kept going. That was really weird as you can imagine.

I had been aware of the time because we had been away so long that I was worried that we might have got into trouble on our return. As it happened they were lucky to have us back at all!

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