大象传媒

I was living in Hendon when the war broke out, working for my father in the textile trade.
My friend Eileen and I regularly helped in a canteen at British Columbia
House, Lower Regent Street. This was mainly used by Canadian and Free French troops. The officer in chage of the French was the brother of the girls with whom I went to school in Paris some years before.
One Saturday afternoon there was a very bad raid on Woolwich Arsenal. Eileen and I went home but we had to get out at Hampstead as the tube would not go to Golders Green. We had to walk up the stairs, the deepest on the tube and they seemed to go on forever!
When in Amersham, I worked at the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) every 4th night from 8 pm to 8 am. We usually went to bed at midnight and had no raids ourselves although we could hear the planes going overhead and could see the fires burning in London.
In 1943 I joined the wrens. Our GP had stopped me joining earlier as my mother had been ill. I started for a week in Mill Hill as Leeds was not ready, then I went there for a month, then Rochester. I was at Chatham Barracks but after a year changed to work in quaters as my eyes got tired. I had a month at Sheerness and then went to Wavendon. That is where I met my friend Mary. We went to her farm in Norfolk and later she and her three children came to our beach hut in Southwold. I also knew Margaret Ward Perkins whose husband worked at the British School in Rome.
On VE Day I was in quarters about to go on leave in London. The hairdresser died my hair blonde and we arranged a dance that day.
On VJ Day, I was again on leave in Yorkshire visiting a mill and stayed the night in Manchester.
I spent some time after Wavendon closed, working in Rochester before leaving the wrens in March 1946.

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