大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education鈥檚 reminiscence team on behalf of Mollie Pilkington and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

In 1941 I married a young soldier and on December 18th my daughter was born. My husband went to Germany and was shot in the leg. He recovered from this and was then sent to Japan with his regiment. We got no mail for two years and I didn鈥檛 know in all that time that I was a widow as the Japanese didn鈥檛 inform you when people died. In the end I got a piece of paper saying that he had died of fever. My uncle was out there as well and when I asked him about it, all he said was 鈥淏elieve what you read on that paper鈥�.

I lived with my Mum and Dad near Aylsham in Norfolk. One night my Dad came in and told us to get up because a land mine had been dropped right by our house. The Salvation Army put us up in a hall. When we went back to our house the windows were all out, so we had to have them replaced.

I remember one occasion when my first husband was still alive, he asked me to meet him in Sheringham for a day out, which I did. We were sitting on the sea front when all of a sudden he said to me 鈥淒uck!鈥�. For some reason I thought he meant there was a bird, but actually there was a trawler just off the coast and he had spotted German planes approaching to bomb it. They dropped two bombs. My husband pulled me down onto the seat. Such things were really frightening.

I remarried in 1946 to another soldier. He was a Birmingham man. He came home from India and went to Cromer, from where he was demobbed. We lived in Sheffield and he tried to get us a house, but there were so many people looking that he couldn鈥檛 get one.

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