大象传媒

The very first worst moment was Christmas 1940 when I was living in Sheffield. A very bad blitz began with the sirens at 7pm, so armed with my drink etc I went under the dining room table where I stayed until 10pm. At that time the next-door neighbour came to invite me down to their Anderson Shelter at the bottom of their garden. I was surprised to see how many of the neighbours were sheltering there. The bombing went on for hour after hour and we wondered would there be any Sheffield left!

At 6am the next morning the all-clear sounded so I went home to bed for a couple of hours before going to work in Sheffield. When I arrived at work I was upset to learn that one of the girls I worked with had been killed in the blitz. This news scared us all, so when I got back home in the evening I made arrangements to return to my mother鈥檚 home in Colne, Lancashire. So the next few days I got busy packing up all my household articles and within four days I had moved back to Colne.

I stayed in Colne for a couple of years and got a job inspecting aircraft parts with British Thomson Houston, a firm who had moved their business to Colne from Coventry because the latter was badly bombed. After two years I got fed up with country living and working 12 hours a day so I decided to look for a flat in Cleethorpes on the East Coast, so that my husband who was stationed eight miles away at the RAF in North Coates could come home each evening by bicycle and live with me.

He had a 48 hour leave, so I arranged to meet him at Grimsby where we stayed in a hotel for the weekend. We took a bus to Cleethorpes, and during the journey a lady asked if we were on holiday. I told her we were looking for a flat and she recommended me to go to her daughter-in-law who had a large house on the seafront at Cleethorpes. Her husband was an invalid so she was glad to have us stay with her.

We settled down and enjoyed our stay, then five months later I found I was pregnant; I had waited seven years for this news and I wasn鈥檛 going to let anything spoil it, but four months later my husband came home and said he was posted to South Wales. So, as upset as I was, I had no option but to make arrangements to move back to my mother鈥檚 house in Colne. I bought a new pram and, taking all the seats out, packed all my baby clothes underneath so that no-one would see them. I also had a large suitcase with all my clothes etc inside, but sorry to say it was stolen and I hadn鈥檛 a thing except what I stood up in! The Government paid me 拢12.00 and gave me 50 ration coupons!

My husband was in South Wales until my baby girl was born and then he was sent abroad and didn鈥檛 see us again for nearly three years. He came home in November 1945; in August 1946 my son was born and eight months later we could afford to start buying a house. My husband got his old job back and so ended our war.

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