大象传媒

Story told by Joan Peare (n茅e New).

This story rectifies the errors that occurred in Article ID A1142001

I was still at school when war broke out and stayed on until I was 14. On leaving I worked locally until I was 16 then volunteered to work at the Integral factory in Witney (Oxfordshire) making hydraulic pumps for aeroplanes.

There were 6 of us from Lechlade who all worked in the same place. We used to leave home before 7 o'clock in the morning to take the train to Witney. Sometimes we would wait for hours for a train in the evenings because the London train had to go first and this was very often delayed due to air raids on London. On Sundays there weren't any trains at all and we used to get picked up in a van and dropped home again in the evening. The winter was the worst because we wouldn't even see Lechade in daylight. We would leave in the dark and arrive home in the dark and with the blackout there were also no streetlights to light our way home.

My sister, Lucy, had volunteered to be an ambulance driver, unfortunately that didn't work out and she ended up driving the baker's van and driving for the Local Volunteer Force in the evening. Sadly she was killed in a motoring accident just after the end of the war.

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