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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Anne Wareing on behalf of Doris Annie Hamilton and added to the site with her permission…

Doris was in church in Newcastle when the vicar stopped the service to announce war had been declared.

Air raid shelters were distributed and everyone built their own garden. There was a lot of heavy bombing on and around Newcastle and she remembers bombs falling around the church, but it never being hit.

She says her mother was very strict about them all going into the shelter when the siren went, father was an air raid warden and would come and tell them when it was all clear and once they had all just got back into bed when they started fire bombing, so they all had to get up again and Dad got into trouble.

Her brother was in the RAF and ended up in South Africa repairing planes. Her sister was in the ATS, part of her duty was to direct the guns aim at the German planes as they flew overhead.

She went into nursing and worked at a hospital across the Tyne and remembers having to be made to go into the hospital shelters when the bombing came. She worked on a children’s ward and they kept a pile of mattresses so that when the air raid warnings came, they could make ‘tents with them over the children’s beds as they couldn’t be moved. She recalls the children loving, it they thought the tents were great fun.

The hospital wasn’t far from the coast and the walls shook during the bombings and they were also firebombed.. She remembers soldiers coming into the hospital grounds and stripping of their uniforms to have them disinfected and the nurses peeping and having fun with them.

She next went to the Huddersfield Royal Infirmary where she was nursing wounded soldiers and recalls that if they were able to walk, they would help the nurses when they could.
People were very friendly and lots of friendships were formed. They would invite the soldiers out (the ones that could walk) and take them back to their homes. She had a friend who had a butchers shop and he would often find a bit ‘extra’ for them. It was all to easy when they did go out at night in the blackout to bump into lamp- posts.

She was in a cinema in Bradford on D Day, when the film was stopped and an announcment made, everyone cheered and she remembers going to the front of the Town Hall and says they were all so very happy.

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