大象传媒

"I am a pupil from Heaton manor Comprehensive School, Newcastle upon tyne, entering Betty Proud's story onto the website, and they fully understand the website terms and conditions of use"

I left school the summer that the war started, I was 17.Me and my family travelled to a cottage in Northumberland to stay because of the dangers of bombing in the war. Sadly, my younger sister got very ill with diphtheria and she was taken to Walkergate hospital for over 6 weeks, so we had to move back to walker where we stayed, as my father wanted the family to stay together. As I was 17 I needed to get a job so I worked at Rington鈥檚 tea and as tea was rationed we had to keep books so that the man who delivered the tea couldn鈥檛 fiddle the amount we were supposed to get.
The only experience I had with nursing was the St. John鈥檚 badges I had received when I was in guides. I started working in walker accident hospital which was kept by the people in the shipyards. I had no training whatsoever but I just picked everything up as I went along. In the hospital we did x-rays, minor injuries, lots of eye treatments for the welders and we worked all day and night because the shipyards worked all day and night. We even had to get up and come down in our dressing gowns to see to people in the middle of the night! The doctors from the health practice made sure everything was clean and sterile so the hospital was very hygienic. There was no M.R.S.A or any other diseases that patients could catch easily due to instruments not being sterile.
In the war there was lots of air raids, me and my family used to hide in the cupboard under the stairs where the boiler and the gas metre was kept and thinking back if that was bombed we would have been goners! Mysteriously however whenever you seen a bombed house it was always the stairs that would be left.
I got married during the war and my husband was in the artillery down on the coast and I must have known at least eighteen pilots that were killed who i had known from school, the hospital and from everyday life.
It wasn鈥檛 all bad though, because I was a nurse I was invited to all the dances and parties and I learned how to shoot a rifle so I could defend the hospital.I was told that i had a very good shot.
We got by on rations very easily. At my wedding everybody in the street made their speciality and brought it to the wedding so there was lots of food. For wedding gifts I received coupons off all the people in the wards for clothes and I had a proper cake not a cardboard one!
Overall I lost friends and family members, my mother losing her two brothers in the navy and I lost lots of friends that I knew from my school Heaton Manor.But the war had many sad experiences and some exciting happy ones also.In my time in the war i have came across lots of different experiences and different locations but the hardest thing about it was that i lost many friends and had to say goodbye to lots of people i used to know at school.

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