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The Ritz Dance Hall was in Weymouth but the name changed a lot of times but it’s known as the Ritz again now. It has a balcony inside.

The Regent Dance Hall was where I met my husband and he asked me to do ‘The Lambeth Walk’ with him.

During the War I was stationed with my husband all over the place, Scotland, Ireland, Singapore, Germany, Macclesfield, Aldershot, Folkestone when he was in the Royal Artillery.

The Salvation Army Band would march down the streets on Sundays playing; they liked to march down the prom.

Weymouth and Malcolm Regis used to be two separate parts before the war and they used to fight across the bridge, and when the new bridge was opened George V came to open it, but I didn’t get an invite!

There’s still a man who makes sand sculptures on the beach, the son of a wartime sculptor. One recent example was a sand sculpture of horses coming out of the sea, but vandals eventually damaged it. Another year he made Snow White’s castle.

Military conscription finished after the war, but our eldest boy had to go and he did three years. He went with the Merchant Navy because we were at Gravesend at the time, a big Merchant Navy town. He did three years and then it finished.

My brother volunteered towards the end of the war, though he didn’t need to. He trained and set out on ship for the Middle East but the engine had broken down and they had to land. They had no new parts to repair it, and had to send back to England for a new engine. It took over two months to arrive and there were over a thousand men on this ship. So they couldn’t move for over two months and he said it was absolutely disgusting over there. He happened to strike it lucky because in the meantime the Americans had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and otherwise he’d have been there.

I was involved at the time with an engineering firm that was partly responsible for the demonstration of atomic weaponry. I was asked to teach general engineering since I knew a little about atomic weapons. I didn’t take part but I had friends who did, and some of them died because of it. Having said that, when Hiroshima came off, the next time it was Nagasaki. I don’t why they dropped that one, as I would have thought the first one would have been enough. It killed off millions of people.

For months at a time I didn’t get a word from my husband when he was posted in Burma. When I did, they were blacked out. They were only little cards. He told me once that he’d gone on leave, and he put the name of the place by saying ‘the first three letters are Aunt Edie’s surname, and the last three letters are the place where Aunt Edie lives, Ranchi. So I knew where he was then. But that was the only way you could do it.

I married a soldier and I went with him wherever he went. We went to the northwest frontier of India, all the way by boat, no flying in those days. It was a long journey on the Lancashire, through the Med and across the Indian Ocean. I loved it, loved the sea. When we got to Karachi we went by train all the way up through India. It was so hot they used to put tubs with big ice blocks in the carriages to keep us cool. When the war was about to begin the regiments were moved to Malta where I lived for several years and where I had a little girl. That’s an Army life! I loved it though.

On Malta they built shelters underground since it was all stone, as well as hospitals. But we got short of food of course because the ships couldn’t get through. I lost two stone in a week while I was there, but I didn’t mind because I was really round then!

My son went to an underground school on Malta when it was struck by an aerial torpedo. They were all alright but were shaken up a bit. My husband went in and got our son out and he said, ‘What happened? I tried to get under a desk but the teacher got there first.’ He was only seven I think at the time.

There was a big connection between Weymouth and the Channel Islands, a lot of trading at one time, trading of produce like tomatoes and new potatoes.

Throughout the war, church bells didn’t ring because it was an invasion warning signal. They rang the bells where we were in Scotland, but about a week later they said it was alright, there wasn’t an invasion. It sounded funny to hear church bells ringing in the middle of the night. We were in Dunblane at the time.

I was born in Portsmouth but had to move to the West Country because we, the engineers, were bombed away from there. I was an apprentice engineer at the time, only 16 when I was in digs in Portsmouth.

There’s a famous story from Devizes about a group of ladies who all decided to pool some money to buy some sheep, or other animals. One of them suddenly realised that some of the money was missing and asked one of the other ladies ‘have you got the money?’ to a lady from Potterne, a village nearby. She replied ‘May God strike me dead if I’ve swindled you’ and apparently she had because she was struck dead by lightning. A big cross in the middle of Devizes commemorates the story.

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