大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Judie Krebs for GMR Action Desk on behalf of Eileen Jones, with her permission. The author is fully aware of the terms and conditions.

When the war started I was 17 and I'd never worked because I ws the helper at home with my mother. In 1938, before the war, we used to go filling sand bags at the police station yard, holding the sacks for the police to put the sand in. We knew trouble was coming when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich holding his piece of paper from "Herr Hitler".

My first job was my only job during the war, in a munitions factory. I walked out on VJ day and was threatened with court action but I didn't care. I'd done a man's job for more than five years, 3 days a week we did 12 hour shifts, then we did Saturday mornings as well. They called it semi-skilled work so they wouldn't have to pay us a man's wage. I was a "horizontal borer" which involved working on horizontal machines, graduating from drilling pistons to boring crank cases for Midget submarines.I would have walked out before but I stayed till VJ day because my brother Albert was a prisoner-of-war in Hong Kong.

My father was killed in an air raid in Eccles in May, 1941. Mum was left a widow with one son in the Army and another, Bob, in the RAF and the other four of us were at home. It happened because when air raids started we were told we had to patrol our own homes. In the end, so many civilians were being killed that they stopped that and air raid wardens did it instead. The night Dad was killed, three others died with him because they were protecting their own property. We lived in Liverpool Road, Eccles, among shops and one of those who died was Mr Holden, the grocer.

I remember having two evacuees with us from Guernsey. They were two sisters, only about five and seven years old. They were called Joan and Eunice Noyen and I can see them now, in the red blazers my dad bought for them and the red-and-white gingham dresses my mum made for them because they'd only been allowed to bring a small case each. They stayed with us a month, before being moved to what was considered to be a safer area, and I've never seen them since but I've never forgotten them.

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