大象传媒

This story has been added to the People's War site by Liz Andrew of the Lancashire Homeguard with the permission of Joyce Manifold.

I was fourteen and had just started work in a textile machine workshop in the Bradford area of Manchester when war broke out.We were a family of eight - seven girls and one boy. I was there when the Germans bombed Ashton Old Road - we were taking shelter under the stairs in our house when a bomb exploded nearby. It was horrible when we came out in the morning. Houses were flattened and some of my school friends had been killed. We had to walk to work through the rubble because the trams and buses couldn't get through.

When I was seventeen, and unknown to my mother, I volunteered for the Wrens. I did it for a dare. I was sent to Tallyhoun Castle near Dunbarton for training - learning to be an officer's steward and then to Westfield College in London. I'd never been away from home before.

My brother, Charles, was in the Territorials when War started and he was at Dunkirk when he was only seveteen and a half. It shattered his nerves - he never really recovered. Before the war he had always been joking and laughing - but never again.

I was attached to Fleet Air Arm stations all over the UK and Ireland. I looked aftre cabins and waited at table. My sewing skills came in handy - I was always having to sew gold braid on uniforms!I enjoyed it. Being in the Wrens was great - there was terrific comradeship and you met some really nice people.

I was posted to the the Fleet Air Arm base in Shropshire. It was here that young boys trained to be pilots and practsed their low flying technique. I later learnt they never came back - a full squadron of young boys.

I remember the sky being black with our planes - the shadow made you really cold - and you wondered where they were going .

I practised all the marching for the VE parades - but in the end they wouldn't let me go - You had to have a pleasant look but not smile or laugh - and I didn't look pleasant enough for a parade through London!

I was still in the Wrens in 1946 when I had my 21st Birthday and was demobbed at Plymouth, which had been dreadfully bombed.

I met my husband after the War in 1948 - he had been a POW for three and a half years in Italy and Germany and he was still painfully thin when we got married.

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