大象传媒

I was fifteen and a half years old when war was declared in 1939. I remember standing by the radio with my parents that Sunday morning, I felt quite excited but at the same time a bit apprehensive wondering what was going to happen. Nothing did happen for a while - I went to work as usual in the mill. I didn't like the blackout but like everyone else I had to get used to it.
I joined the WAAF in 1942. I was eighteen in the March & went on 15th May.
Looking back the thing that strikes me most is how young and naive we were and most of us had never been away from home without parents or family. I had to report to Bridgenorth in Shropshire. My mother went to Leeds City station with me. There was another girl on the platform with her mother and since we were going to the same place we travelled together. We were stuck with each other for some time after that!
We spent four weeks in Bridgenorth being issued with uniforms and learning 'King's Regulations'and how to conduct ourselves out of camp. We were drilled and went to endless lectures and were shown graphic pictures of sexually transmitted diseases on both men and women - frightening the living daylights out of us; maybe not such a bad thing as we were thrown into the company of a lot of young men.
After the training my companion and I were posted to Manby in Lincolnshire. We were billeted in what had been married quarters. We had the downstairs room and were ordered to report for work early the next morning which meant that we had to be up at 4.30am. We didn't have an alarm clock so we decided that we would sleep in turns for 2 hours each - needless to say it didn't work very well. I don't remember what time we got to work or what the reaction was - it was a long time ago.
When I enlisted I was given the choice of being a cook or a balloon operator. I chose to be a cook - I didn't know then but cooks were fairly high on the pay scale. After I qualified as a cook I was posted to Bomber Command (R.C.A.F.). One of our jobs was to cook bacon and eggs for the crew before they went on operations, also when they came back (those that did)- this could be any time of day or night. Sometimes crews thought to be lost would turn up later having had to land somewhere else or having baled out.
I have one big regret, I missed D-Day. All leave had been stopped for the previous 9 months in preparation for the big day. On 4th June 1944 I was taken to an isolation hospital suffering from German measles. Two days'later I heard on the radio that the invasion of Normandy had begun so I had to follow it on the news bulletins. I was about 40 miles away from camp so I didn't even hear the planes.
When I got back to camp a fortnight later it was still very hectic - the crews out on bombing raids all the time. Because the village was very close to the camp it had to be cut off from the outside world. The villagers couldn't leave and the telephones were cut off. I don't know how long that lasted - probably from the day before D-day until the landings were well underway.

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