大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSV on behalf of Grace McKintosh and has been added to the site with her permission. Grace fully understands the site's terms and conditions. I was 20 years when the war broke out and lived in Rosyth where my father worked in the dockyard. It was a big naval community and a new garden city. I trained as a nurse and became an ambulance duty nurse in Belvedere hospital, Glasgow which was so different to my home town with much more cramped living conditions and very poor areas, compared to my home. On duty I would often be called out to the docks to help men from the supply ships so that they could have a quick turn around. There I was introduced to some tall tales and outlandish language! Once the hospital was bombed and shattered all the windows. A little 5 year old child patient saw me crawling on my knees to check the patients who were placed under the beds for safety, and he said "don't worry lass, I'll look after you!". One particularly bad week we hardly slept for 5 days with day nurses helping out on nights and the sister was much kinder to us, realised I was tired and let me catch a few winks under a bed, out of everyone's way. In 1944 I began doing industrial nursing in London, nursing people who worked in the factories. I learnt how to turn inside out someone's eyelid with a match stick and wash them with bicarbonate of soda solution! There were no doctors around the factories so the nurses often had to perform emergency that these days only doctors would do. When the doodlebugs were coming over just before the second front started I once had to take patients to the nearby shelter 8 times in one day. I listened to a lot of people coming in to factories and found that people found it much easier to talk to me about their experiences as POWs and then they would return to the machines to keep working. Clothes coupons came out the week I got married in 1941 and so I got married in civvies, without any accessories or hat and my husband wore his RAF uniform.

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