大象传媒

I was a girl when war broke out and lived in Penygroes, Caernarvon. I clearly remember one evening early in the war, when we were sitting at home making Christmas decorations and party hats. We heard the low drone of enemy aircraft and my mother dashed out of the back door to get the washing in, while I went out of the front door with our evacuee, named Dorothy. We just wanted to see what was going on. Suddenly, there was a bright flash and before I realised what was happening, Dorothy had run back into the house and slammed the door. As I'd been taught in school, I crouched and put my hands over my head and then there was the most tremendous blast. It left a huge crater in our street but fortunately, I was unhurt.
I also remember spending the night at a schoolfriend's house in a village five miles away. In the middle of the night, we were woken up by a loud banging on the front door. Myra's mother opened the door and there stood her terrified elderly parents. 'You've got to let us in, the German have landed!' they gasped in Welsh. They had heard bangs and seen flares going off near their small hillside farm and thought the enemy was approaching, so had released all their livestock and escaped! It later transpired that 'the enemy' was in fact British soldiers on maneouvres in the hills nearby.
During the war, we ate a lot of rabbit - rabbit pie, rabbit stew etc and also lots of Spam. There were no bananas or oranges.
When I was old enough, I began to help out at the ARP office, taking phonecalls and incoming alerts. I wanted to join the WRNS but they could only offer a cooking position at that time, so I became a VAD nurse.
I spent part of the war at a hospital near Criccieth in North Wales, nursing evacuees from London. We had to scrub the hospital from top to bottom when we arrived as the previous occupants (French soldiers) had left it in a terrible state. I caught dysentery and was ill for a while.
Towards the end of the war, I was nursing in a military hospital in Bettws-y-coed and was on night duty when peace was declared and remember people rushing in shouting 'It's over!'. Later that week we had a ball at the hospital and invited several Hollywood filmstars who had been filming nearby, including Stewart Granger, Jean Kent and Steve Donohue. I had a dance with Stewart Granger, who was even more handsome in the flesh than on the silver screen. I asked for his autograph and gave him my shoulder to lean on while he wrote - he had some difficulty with the spelling when I told him my name was Euronwy!

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