大象传媒

I was a teenager in the war years. For ten months my family stayed with my aunt and uncle in Milford Haven while my father fished off the Welsh coast. Once my cousin, Dorothy, and I missed the last ferry back from Pembroke Dock to Neyland. We managed to persuade the R.A.F who trained there, to take us across on the small launch the used to take trainee pilots back and forth, but not before we had signed our names and identity numbers in the log book. For us two young girls it was very exciting.
We came back home to Pakefield in 1942. One Summer evening my most frightening experience of the war happened. I was sent to collect my young brother who was playing on the edge of the cliffwith his three friends. As I arrived I hearde the sound of gun fire, I managed to shout and grab the children just as the German plane came towards us flying towards the sea. We all laid down flat on the ground. As I looked up the plane was so low I could see clearly the German markings on the side of the plane. With the sound of the machine gun fire and the roar of the plane it was terrifying. But the memory which stands out most from the war is just before D- Day, the end of April 1944, when the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was sationed in Pakefield. My friend Joyce, who I worked with, and I became friendly ith two of the young soldiers. We would go out walking with them each evening. The suspense of knowing that the invasion was imminent and uncertainty worried them considerably. We spent what was to be our last evening with them. While I was at work the next day I heard they were moving out. We ran down in our lunch hour to see them. When we arrived they were lined up along the side of the road with their backpacks and rifles all ready to march away. I recieved two letters from Norman Woollass, which I still have today. The last one was dated August 12th 1944. jpyce also recieved letters from his friend Jeff, one of them told us that Norman had been killed.
It was through the internet I found that he died on the eleventh of September 1944 and was buried in Le Havre in France. In May this year, with my husband, i visited his grave in France. It was a very moving experience and after sixty-one years it was like meeting hime again. i would like to finish with an extract of his last letter:
'You don't know what you are missing until you ponder and look around at the desolation and destruction that this war has brought to what was once a lovely little Hamlet. Then you begin to wonder what would happened had this terrible thing been rought to one's own Country and our homes to smash the things we are brought up to consider part of our lives without which life does not seem worth living. When you think of these things then you realise that this madness which for the past four years has darkened all europe and upset our lives must be stamped out before anyone of us out here can safely settle down to the life we left'.
Soon after this letter Norman was killed in action.

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