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Mrs Cox.

It was declared in 1939, I was about 16, nearly 17 and I remember when it was declared. I was upstairs and I think when I was at the top of the stairs we weren’t at war but by the time I’d reached the bottom we were.

My brother volunteered for the airforce and we had air raids here because they bombed Coventry a lot. We had one or two bombs in Northampton, we had one drop in a field about half a mile from home, and we saw this thing that looked like a tree appeared up in the air then went down again. Anyway he’d just brought a new dinner-dress suit and during the air raids we had to go down into the cellar and mother was more concerned about saving the suit. She was going down to the cellar holding up his suit.

My husband to be was in London for a time and his father and myself went up for a weekend and that night the air raid was terrific, the bombs were coming down and the whole place was shaking but we didn’t go in a shelter or anything. We could here screaming in the night and in the morning it turned out to be horses, I think they were railway horses, and the whole place was covered in incendiary bombs and was all alight. In the morning we went out and were able to take the underground towards the centre and the whole place was filled with black smoke. Some roads had water bursting out because the mains had burst; other roads had fire coming out because of the gas. It was quite horrific really, we were only there for two nights but some of the poor things were there for years. Coming back in the evening on the underground, hundreds of people were bedding down and sleeping, there was only a narrow gap to walk along to get on the trains. A lot of them had no homes so it was probably the safest place for them to sleep in. That was the night the houses of Parliament were bombed and my parents were already concerned about me going down there and it came across the radio that it was a particularly bad night, but I made it back anyway.

I got typhoid when the war started and was in hospital for several weeks. And when I did go out to work I went into an aircraft factory, then came out of that and went on the land. I didn’t join the Land Army, all the other girls in the village did and all had their uniforms. Course it was strictly coupons and I just went and got a job without going through the land army but had to give up all my coupons. All the other girls were all in the Land Army and I was the only one who didn’t get their uniforms.

So most of the time I worked on the farms. It was very long hours, we worked from 7 in the morning to half 5 at night in the winter, but in the summer we started at 6 in the morning and it was light until 11 o’clock at night and we worked right through. During that time the farmer kept bees and he asked for someone to help him and I was the only one who dared I think. So I used to help him with the bees, getting stung very regularly, when I was 21 he gave me a hive of my own and I kept bees right up until I was 70.

We had to work with horses; tractors were used but not very much because of the fuel problems. You’d have to take the horse up to the field, all on you own, to do hoeing or something and you didn’t see a soul all day. We used to have prisoners come to help us too, first of all there were Italians, they were from a prison camp in Grendon. Then we had Austrians. In the beginning they had guards with them but after a while they just dropped them off and came back at the end of the day to pick them up. It’s amazing really, all these girls alone with these prisoners. The Italians were really cheeky, and we were so innocent then it was a wonder nothing serious happened to us really. Then we had some Germans and they weren’t very nice, they were very arrogant, the Austrians weren’t too bad though. After the war when I worked in Floristry, one of our suppliers was a farmer from Spalding. He told me that one of the land girls on his farm was actually murdered by a prisoner but it was hushed up and not published.

We used to have to walk cattle for miles. We had a farm out at Kislingbury and we walked cattle from there to Whiston, it is easily ten miles, and we walked cattle right through the centre of town [Northampton]. I remember once we brought sheep through and there were a few cars and hundreds of bicycles. We always used to hit St James’ end at lunchtime and there was all this cattle weaving around bicycles. Then one of the beast caught a ladies head light and she was raving and going mad, the police came over and there was only a couple of us girls one at the front and one at the back.

One of the most frightening things that happened to me, well this was the time when we used have the railway down the bottom of the valley, some of our field were on the opposite side on the railway. We had gate keys to get across and we had a big pit of mangles down there. In the winter the mangles were heaped up, covered in straw then earth but on the straw and that was called a Mangle Pit and it kept the frost out. You fed the cows with these and one of my jobs was to go over and fetch some. I had to go across the railway and load the cart and bring it back again. The carts were tipcarts, when the cart was up a pin went through it to hold it in place. Once I filled the cart up and was coming back over the railway with a load of mangle and the pin came out, the cart tipped up and all the mangles went over the line. Trains ran across there and there was trains coming. I put the cart back made sure the pins were all back in, then was throwing mangles in as fast as I could, terrified a train was coming, and I think I had only just finished when a train went by. That was the most frightening thing that happened I think.

Evacuees came to the village [Cogenhoe] too, as my brother went into the forces we had a spare bedroom. We had a little Jewish boy originally, he was from Germany and his parents had been killed. I think he was taken in by some of the Jewish families in London and then got sent out as an evacuee. He stayed with us for quite a long time then he went and we had another boy. My father kept a pig, as if you gave up a ration of bacon you get to keep one pig, and I remember this second boy, he wanted to know if the pig laid sausages. He knew the Hen’s laid eggs and he must have heard that sausages came from pigs. I was out working then so I wasn’t at home much with the children.

The day the pig was killed, I couldn’t bare it, I thought it was awful. The head was taken and all sorts of things were made with it, the hams were kept separately from the two sides and it was all salted and wrapped up. The lining was all melted down to make lard. Plus there was this ceremony were everyone got a bit of pork because the pig had been killed. It was so sad though because this pig was made such a fuss of and then they killed it. But everything of the pig was used, they used everything accept the squeak.
Well the war was going on all through my growing up time, I was 16 when it started and must have been about 22 when it finished. I sometimes wish I joined the forces and went away and experience more of life. Effectively we were working on our doorsteps and it was hell in some places abroad but a lot of women went away into the forces, the ATS and the airforce. I met loads that had the times of their lives and we were stuck with rough Old Irish men and Prisoners.

You always knew when the bombers were coming over, as the German planes always sounded different. There wasn’t many bombs dropped in Northampton but there were a few. One dropped in the Cemetery along Billing Road. I remember that I wasn’t supposed to go with my husband then, as he was 6 years older than I was, he was my brother’s friend. I was only about 16 and father had forbid me to go because he was so much older, but he was lucky enough to have a new car just before the war started so I used to sneak out with him and one night there was a raid. I wasn’t frightened of the bombs I was more frightened that if we were bombed father would know where I was.

We were very fortunate though compared to some towns. We had a few bombs dropped and a bomber came down in Gold Street. They came past a lot on route to Coventry as they were all munitions factories and they didn’t bomb just one night they kept coming night after night. Eventually it did end though, thank heavens.

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