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This story was submitted to the People's war website by Pam Riding of Kirklees Libraries on behalf of Mrs Eastwood and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

At the end of 1942, I volunteered and I was called up in January ‘43 and was sent to Scotland, to Greenock on the Clyde where I was for two years. Then I went out to the Middle East, to Egypt and I was there until the end of 1945. I came back and was demobbed, I think, in April 1946, so it was quite an interesting war as far as I was concerned. Because in Greenock, which is a natural harbour, we used to get most of the big ships in the Navy. We could see them from our office and I was in the Signal Distribution Office, sending messages to and from the ships and we also used to get the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth (the old ones), which were troop carriers for the American troops. So when the Queen Mary was in Greenock, the Elizabeth was in New York and vice versa . They used to pass, so I understand, in the middle of the Atlantic. They didn't have any convoys, they were too quick and quite a lot of Wrens were on the ships coding the messages, but I wasn't a coder. It was a very interesting time in the Middle East, because Alex in those days was a lovely place to be-very hot, but very nice. We used to go down to Cairo on leave, up to Palestine, as it then was, Jerusalem, Syria and Beirut and if you could find someone to fly you over to Cyprus you would have your leave there. When I went out, the war was still on so I went out in a troop ship and we were three weeks getting there, but the European war ended in May and the Japanese war in August and after that the numbers were very much run down. I came back in December, at the end of 1945, so I was there for just a year.
I went back to Alex about three years ago, I was on a cruise ship, but I didn't recognize the place at all-it's quite different now. My husband was in the 8th Army-he was at Alamein . That was my war. I was still at school when it started - I was 19 when I went in the services and came out at 22. My sister was also in the Wrens and she was in South Africa. So, we were both in Africa at the same time -she was at the bottom and I was at the top, but we never met. While I was in Greenock she was stationed in Liverpool, but our leave never coincided.

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