大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War Site by Tony Prangnell and has been added to the website on behalf of Peggy Taylor with her permission and she fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Peggy Taylor is an elderly women living on the Isle of Wight, she told me a few stories of her life during World War 2.

Peggy used to work in a factory building planes for use in the war. One day her supervisor told her that the wings on some of the planes that she had been building had failed their flight tests and where unfit to use on an aircraft. She told her supervisor that she had worked on the planes properly and that there where no faults with them when she had finished making them. They investigated the problem and found out that a female worker had been tampering with the wings as she was a German spy and wanted to delay the building of the aircrafts to help the Germans invade Britain.

She married her husband and two days later he left to fight in the war and she didn't see him for 5 yrs.

She also told me that her and a few work colleges in the factory where watching a few planes fly by from the window. They joked about it saying " It would be funny if they where German planes" and they were!
They had to leave the factory and hide in a bomb shelter. When the air raid had finished they left the shelter to find that it was late at night and it was pitch black, and so they had to find their way around in the dark. Peggy told me that she could feel something wet between her feet, she asked her friend near by, "Where are we?" her friend replied "I think we are walking into the river!" she said at one time during a blitz they were trying to find their way into the cafeteria. They were looking for the steps into the building. Peggy shouted out to her friends that she found the entrance to the building only to find out that she was standing on a man not a step as he groaned when she stepped on him.

Although it was a hard time to live though the war she and her friends said that "You had to laugh about it, you could not take it to seriously as there was so many bad things happening you had to try and laugh to cheer yourself up."

She also said while hiding they would count the number of bombs dropping knowing that the last bomb was the eighth one, so when the eighth bomb had dropped and exploding they felt better knowing it was the last and they were safe and so they had a counting game to keep their mind of the horror that they could die.

The last short story she told me was that while she was working a man kept asking her what her husband was doing in the army during the war. She reported him to the Homeguard and he was arrested for being a spy. She was suspicious because he kept asking questions about her husband and he also kept listening to the German radio stations.

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