大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by 大象传媒 Essex Action Desk, on behalf of Maud Thomason, and has been added to the site with her permission and she fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

We were talking about the war days and as we know girls, so many of us were evacuated to places we had never heard of, which frightened us to death. My mother kept me with the family more or less living down the Anderson shelter in the garden ! Time went on with buzz bombs dropping and different events happening. Some we wish not to remember. The time came for me to go to work, not to the best of jobs, working in the ammunition factory and then in the railway yards as a rivet girl, not very glamorous, although I was one of 20 girls amongst 200 men ! Work was hard and it gave me wonderfully powerful arms like Popeye.

The air raids got so bad mother finally moved us to Shipley, Yorkshire, to Wind Hill, true to name I can assure you. It wasn鈥檛 long before I had to go off to work again as the war authorities made sure you were doing your bit. So I landed up in the AVRO aircraft factory, which meant I had to rise every morning at 5.30 to catch the coach at the bottom of the hill, freezing cold. When I arrived at the underground factory it was so vast it is hard to imagine today. My job was in the dope room, a stinking substance we painted on to the planes, the smell was atrocious. But we didn鈥檛 have the bombs so we had to be thankful.

The war finally ended and we were waiting for our loved ones to come home. I had a dear brother who had been a prisoner of war for more than 3 years and had been badly treated in Stalag 4b in Germany. When he knew he was coming home we planned the party. I went shopping for anything we could get to make it special. As I got to the bottom of Wind Hill I saw a very thin handsome man, I realised it was my brother and that he had come home. I dropped the bags and ran up the hill to greet him. I had my best shoes on and broke the heels on the way up! It was one of the most wonderful moments of my life. No-one had known if he was alive or dead, as he had escaped 3 times trying to meet up with the French resistance.

Getting back to a normal life was very difficult for everyone, but we finally realised we could go dancing and begin to live again without the fear of the sirens going off and having to run to shelters. Many people suffered, their loses greater than mine, but I will always miss my dear brother who died at the age of 52 from a rare blood disease, a sequel to his imprisonment.

Maud Thomason

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