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I was sixteen years old at the start of WW2 and I was working in the local bakery shop, which was classed as exempt from war service, therefore I wasn’t called up for the women’s armed forces at that time. The day war was declared I was in church. The minister spoke from the pulpit and told us that war had been declared, we could hear the sirens which signalled an air-raid warning.

I worked in Hailsham, East Sussex until I was 18, and then I was called up for war work in Phillips radio and Valve factory, in Mitcham in Surrey. I was working on small parts of radios for the army, and small radios which the troops had to fix to their throats, we also made valves for torpedoes. Our department won the George Medal for working right through the air raids — a dangerous but essential job. One night during an air raid the factory was bombed by a doodle bomb which dropped through three floors. As luck would have it, I was in the shelter that night.

I didn’t have a regular boyfriend because all the men had been called up for Military Service. There were Canadians and French Canadians based in Hailsham with the English Royal Artillery .We used to go dancing on a Saturday night at the drill hall in London Road, Hailsham but all the social activities had to end at 10pm. We could go to the Cinema which is still George Street, but all the army personnel had to leave their tin hats and rifles in the foyer. I don’t know how they knew which one was theirs — as they were all identical and it was always full up.

We were quite lucky with the styles of clothes during the war, as they were cut with less material which we used our coupons for. When we had a special occasion we had to beg, steal and borrow coupons to wear something new, had coats made out of old blankets, and underwear out of parachutes! (If you could get hold of them.) We had old clothes for work and clothes for Sunday best. Trousers were not looked on favourably for women unless you worked on the land, and I didn’t wear trousers until 1943.

My Husband and I met at the end of the war. He was in the Polish army fighting in the underground of Warsaw, and was taken prisoner when Russia invaded. When the Russians joined the Allied Forces they turned all the Polish prisoners out, who joined the British army in North Africa. He was posted to Monte Cassino, Italy and there he was wounded in the Battle of Cassino. Fortunately he was one of the very few to survive and he came to England to be de-mobbed. We met at a local dance in Heathfield, East Sussex and ended up meeting every week as we were dancing partners. Our relationship lasted and we have been married now 58 years. Because he was Polish we found that it was very hard to be accepted by other people into British way of life. I think that people here were very ignorant and thought he was German because he had an accent. He had to register every week, as an ‘alien’, and had to be screened at Newhaven to make sure he wasn’t a German. After 21 years he was finally naturalised.

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