大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Audrey Clegg and has been added to the site with her permission..

I was sixteen when war started and worked on munitions at Prior Engineering in Bacup. We made bullets and striker pins for magnetic mines and worked a twelve hour day 8am to 8pm. When I was nineteen I was sent to the ICI factory, they made the perspex windows for aeroplane cockpits and operated a three shift system including the 10pm to 6am night shift.

My father who had served in the First World War was away, working in Shrewsbury attached to the RAF. Mum was at home busy looking after us. We had to manage for clothes as best we could, I knitted and mum would sew and make things. I had three brothers, George who was 20 and an air force pilot, Eric who was 18 and had gone into the Royal Navy and the youngest one who was only six. Happily George and Eric both came home safely at the end of the war.

I had a boyfriend called Harry Clegg and in 1940 he was sent to Burma and was there for 6 years. He was a Warrant Officer Class One with REME. We married in 1946 four months after he came home. I wore a blue grey two 鈥攑iece and a hat with feathers. We had the reception at home and the neighbours all gave mum tins of things to help out with the meal.

At the beginning of the war a bomb dropped not far from our house and all our windows blew out so we had to move out for three months. We went to stay with friends and Joyce and I, where we stayed, are still like sisters. Many lasting friendships were formed during the war years.

We managed with the rationing and I can remember eating dried bananas from somewhere, they were black, but we ate them. We went out to dances at the Ambulance Drill Hall and to the cinema in the pitch black, often bumping into lampposts. Sometimes we would go by train to Blackpool to the Winter Gardens dancing.

On VE Day, when at last the war was over, we all danced outside the Mechanics Hall in Bacup.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.