大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War web site by Karen Elmes at the Building Exploratory on behalf of Nellie Ahmed and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Nellie was in the Land Army doing pest destruction during the Second World War. She moved all over the UK from Devon up to Cumbria and even to Scotland. At one point, she was bitten by a rat and had to be taken to hospital to have an injection.

Nellie did all sorts of agricultural work. She helped with the lambing season in Cumbria and worked on Lord George鈥檚 estate where he had a herd of pedigree horses.

She did a lot of dairy work too and had to know all about milk for the Milk Marketing Board. Initially she milked by hand and when milking machines were introduced, she had to train other girls to use them. They preferred hairdressers for this sort of work because their hands were much stronger than office girls鈥� hands.

Land Army girls used to entertain troops at night because there was nothing else to do. Towards the end of war she met her husband, a Turkish man who had been brought over from Italy with war wounds. At this time she was actually engaged to an Irish man and she told her mother that she had met a lovely Irishman. When she took her fianc脠 back home her mother asked where he came from and he told her he was Turkish:

鈥淚n those days getting married to a foreigner was a dreadful thing. It鈥檚 alright now, but in those days it was terrible, especially as I was a little village girl!鈥�

At the end of the war Nellie and her husband came to London after they married and lived in two rooms in New Oxford Street 鈥� just behind the Dominion Theatre. However they had to leave when their flat was taken over for the building of a new tower block 鈥� Centre Point, which was built opposite their home. From there they moved to Shoreditch where they lived in a brand new flat in Marshall House, Mintern Street. Marshall House was built on the site of bomb damaged streets. At the time there were a lot of bomb sites in the area and Nellie saw it was a 鈥渂rand new block surrounded by chaos.鈥� During the 20 years Nellie and her family lived in Marshall House. They witnessed a lot of construction work aimed at repairing WW2 bomb damage, looking down from their flat as the estate was built up around them.

Nellie remembers there being prefabs near Britannia Park at that time and she clearly remembers them being demolished to make way for new flats. People were attached to the prefabs, they didn鈥檛 want to leave them. Pauline Quirk and Linda Robson lived in the prefabs and were friends from an early age.

This story was recorded by the Building Exploratory as part of a World War Two reminiscence project called Memory Blitz. To find out more please go to ^{About links}

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