大象传媒

I was nursing in a London hospital during the war. Though of course we didn鈥檛 have many porters, as they were all called up, but we all had to act as men and women as well, by bringing the beds down underneath the hospital, in order to take as many patients as we could out of the line of fire, as I was in the east end of London and we got a lot of bombing.

So we spent many times, more times under our beds than in them 鈥� but we laughed and enjoyed it. We got on alright, managed alright. We had air raids because I was in London, and you can鈥檛 believe what you can stand up to and face and laugh about. I made some very good friends, and we all helped each other and some of them went out shopping and never came back.

It was very sad at times because the bombs were dropping quite unexpectedly and sometimes we got a warning and sometimes we didn鈥檛. But my hospital was fairly lucky as we had some bombs, but the casualty department got all the bombs 鈥� it was amazing really. This meant that it was closed at night, so there were very few casualties, and I wasn鈥檛 hurt at all. We did lose some of our nursing friends, but the hospital was patched up and we carried on really. I have to laugh now when I hear people say 鈥淥h, I鈥檝e had to be up all night鈥�. We were up at night. We didn鈥檛 even notice we were tired and we didn鈥檛 even take our uniforms off, just put a clean apron on and got going again in the Blitz which we had nearly every night in the east end of London. But we had some good friends, and luckily I didn鈥檛 lose many of them. So we were fortunate really.

It was a big, tall hospital but the bombers seemed to go over it. But the funny thing was that the out 鈥� patient department was the new part and it was lower, and that got bombed. Well, of course they usually bombed at night, and so the casualties were fewer because it was a big hospital.

I used to go home when I could, when we had time off, and because it was in London and I had to get to Surrey. But the trains were running pretty well, and it was nice to see my mother and sister and chat about how we鈥檇 both been under the tables at night and so forth. It鈥檚 amazing really what you can get used to. We just got used to it and gathered our things, if we鈥檇 got any studying to do or anything we wanted, we took them all down under the hospital because we had lots of places which they鈥檇 made comfortable for us. We used to sleep there and do our bits and pieces and really we were very happy. It was very worrying at times, but it was a very friendly time, we made some good friends. In fact, my friends who we were together in the war with come down here and stay with us. We鈥檙e all getting older now, but we talk of our old times. I think it made us all closer together. It all worked out very well indeed.

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