大象传媒

This contribution was given by Peggy Merrett to Edgar Lloyd and is added to the site with her permission.

I was called up I had a very interesting job in the ATS, just outside Oxford where the RAOC - the Royal Army Ordnance Corps - and the Admiralty connected together to send the equipment for the army, navy, airforce everything abroad....all the posts. The RAOC had all the goods and they despatched them to all the ships. It was a very good experience for me, because I'd only mixed with the same group of people in school and all my activities before the war. It was very interesting. We were locked up while we were working because of the codes that were there....and let out very miraculously into Oxford to see all the shows which came down, the ballet, the opera and everything which came down from London where they couldn't perform because of the bombing. So we had plenty of entertainment. We were taken around to different places where the army or airforce had a dance or something like that....it was 1941. If I was allowed home to Wales we could thumb a lift or get a lift from anybody...nobody was ever molested or had any unpleasant experience whatsoever. Trust was prominent....I sometimes came down with black American troops, anything to get home for the period and then went back on the train. My experience was excellent we had wonderful accommodation in camp, very good food which was surprising. We were very fortunate because the Royal Engineers had much better food than the RAOC...they had wonderful steaks always and invited us to go to lunch sometimes which was lovely. You expected to be bombed all along the sides of the road in Oxfordshire were stacks and stacks of materials ready to be blown up. It was a wonderful experience.... It taught me to communicate with all sorts of people, which I wouldn't have done before I was very very shy. They say birds of a feather join together and that is fairly true but on the other hand you mixed with everybody and you were comrades. I'm always very glad that I went and I did feel it was the right thing to do anyway...although I was in a reserved occupation before, and my mother and father, of course, were dreadfully worried. They expected me to be raped on the very first day....but preferably that than Germans. I left the service when I was expecting a baby. Ray came back early in 1944 and we were married in the June. He had just missed Arnhem because the plane didn't take off....and I knew that D-Day was coming up, not exactly when it was...so I sent him a telegram saying yes we would get married, because I knew he'd be off again and probably get blown up...so we did a week later, and then of course we were away on honeymoon on the 6th. I think people did take a gamble that it would come out alright. You had faith...we thought we were going to win didn't we. Since the war we've become friends with some German friends - they're marvellous...one was in Poland and suffered terribly, and another was in Hamburg and had no food, no money, no accommodation and got brittle bones because of it. And they came over to stay when our little grandson was here who always had soldiers and the soldiers were always Germans and he always beat them of course, I thought I'd better tell him...so I told him(he was about four I think)..and he said: "are they coming in tanks?"

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