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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Mrs.Mary Archer and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was 16 when the war started and working in a grocers shop in Rawtenstall in Rossendale. My husband to be Ted used to come in to the shop for sandwiches and the like, so I knew him from quite an early age.

He worked at the Bleachers Association where they bleached war cotton; he was an apprentice electrician serving his time and as such was deferred until he qualified.

When he was 21 in October he was called up and I never saw him again for five and a half years although we kept in touch. He was in REME the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers; it had been called the Ordinance Corp, but changed to REMI in 1941.

While I was living at home in Rawtenstall we had a large three roomed cellar with large stone slabs where we could keep things for the shop that needed to be kept cool. When we hear the air raid sirens, father would put mattresses on these slabs and we would sleep down there using the cellar as an air raid shelter, listening to the planes going overhead on their way to bomb Manchester.

At 18 I had to go and do some type of war work so I took the opportunity to learn nursing, a lot of the nurses who were already registered went to join he Queen Alexandra Nurses, so they had to be replaced and so like me, lots of girls had to be trained.

I went to Withington Hospital in Didsbury, Manchester and was sent to Calderstones Hospital in Whalley Lancashire to do two months training. I was very homesick, but passed my exams and was posted back to Withington.

I remember on the first morning there, I was a young, shy girl with no knowledge of life, stood there in a long uniform far too big for me not knowing what lay before me. I was put onto a male geriatric ward and I recall going into the sluice and crying my heart out. Then I thought to myself, this will not do, I have to get on with it. So this I did for three and a half years, twelve hours a day, eight ‘til eight for nineteen shillings a week. We got one day off a week and a weekend off once a month. To come home on the train it cost ten shillings, but to do this you had to get a regulation ticket this meant two trips into Manchester, so it was hardly worth it.

Ted came home safely in1945 and two weeks later we married. I was 21, I borrowed a long white dress and silver shoes and made my own headdress, a cotton camellia and I bought the veil which cost nineteen shillings. The reception was held at Booth’s Café in Blackpool, with 90 guests, a log fire and a lovely hot meal, you wouldn’t have known there was rationing on at all.

During the war I made friends for life, my friend May married an Aussie and Anne married an American, we all keep in touch and visit one another when we can.

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