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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Rebecca, a pupil from Cedars Upper School on behalf of an anonymous doctor & has been added to the site with his permission. He fully understands the site's terms & conditions.

I was 18 at the start of the war. On 1st September ’39, I was preparing to start a course at Medical School & my medical training lasted from then to 1945. By this stage the war had finished in Europe.The training was compressed & there were no summer breaks because there was such a shortage for doctors. As a medical student, I didn’t have to join the armed forces — in fact I wasn’t allowed because they needed more doctors.
I started my first medical post in a local authority hospital. We had a rota for air-raids for fire-bombs — they never evacuated the hospitals. The nights I slept there I had to sleep on a trolley! I rolled of a few times.
There was one particular sister working there who the medical students didn’t like. They found out which her room was, put a hose in & flooded it! Unfortunately, it turned out to be the matron’s room instead! She us all in there in pitch black as punishment. I was called up into the R.A.F. after 9 months.
Training as an R.A.F. officer lasted only 4 days after which I was posted to an R.A.F. centre dealing with TB patients in Swindon. I was there for 2 years. Then I was transferrred to Kirkum in Lancashire as a Stataion Medical Officer. For the next 6 months, when I returned to civlian life, I was completely kitted out in civilian clothes including a ‘pork pie’ hat!
In 1943 there was a very cold winter. A friend of my mothers, a rather stout lady, was walking through the snow when she broke her leg. The ambulance was called & helped her into the ambulance, but dropped her & she broke her other leg too. By the time she got to the hospital, she’d broken both of her arms aswell!
Walking round during blackouts was very hard — more than once I walked into an open car door!
I also remember sitting in a Glasgow tenament watching a cat catching fleas.

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