大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Liz Andrew of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Mary Gray and has been added to the site with her permission.

I was 13 in 1939 and we lived in Coatbridge near Glasgow - it was an iron town then and there was lots of industry. My mother died in the November following the outbreak of war and my father drove me to Galloway to stay with an aunt who was a housekeeper at a shoreside pub called the Cock Inn. She already had Anne and Jessie, two evacuees from Glasgow, living with her - they were lovely girls - I always remember one of them saying, " We're twins, I'm six and she's seven!" They had a good time there - good food, out in the fresh air all the time and in and out of the water. While I was there an RAF plane crashed into a nearby field - but the crew managed to get out.

I went back to Coatbridge and for a year I worked in the office of Stewart and Lloyds - they made 500lb and 1000lb bombs - and they had a whole lot of girls making moulds in the sand for bomb casings.We girls were well looked after - for instance we were given sanitary towels for nothing.

My father looked after me - They were very happy years - he was very good to me. He was a traveller for Provident cheques, which was a bit like a Credit Union. He had been a bugler in the First World War when he was just seventeen and he had been quartered in a French couple's house over a shop. We lived with his sister. People came out to Coatbridge to dodge the bombing at Govan where the shipyards were. A couple landed at our house - they were very genteel and well educated and had good jobs. They took over the iving room - We hardly ever saw them but they were spotlessly clean and they did their cooking over the coalfire .

After that I worked for three years in a lawyer's office. My dad remarried in 1944 - my stepmother was a nurse and I got on very well with her. Briefly we had just a room and a kitchen but within a couple of months we had a three bedroom house owned by the Cooperative.

I decided to join the Wrens. I was sent to Mill Hill barracks near London but while I was there I suffered a Haemtosis - a serious bleed from the mouth. I knew it was serious and I was sent to the sick bay and then to London for a month for convalescence, then to Basingstoke and Kingston on Thames - I was very disappointed - so joining the Wrens
was all a bit of a wash out.

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