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Part 1 of 2

When the war started I was 16 and when it finished I was 22 so I gave quite a few years of my youth and sometimes I don’t think a lot of younger people appreciate what happened.

The first things when they came home was that we had to get all the black-outs up and there were no lights outside and it was fairly quiet. In June 1940 we had Dunkirk when all the troops were retreating. When they came back you could see them walking about and they didn’t know what to do with them. There were all sorts of people, their arms were in slings and their uniforms all torn and there were two American hospitals in Malvern. Some of the wounded were also taken to Ronkswood because that was built as a military hospital originally but when the war ended it was taken over by the government. The wounded soldiers used to come out from the hospital into Worcester to the Packhorse pub with their sticks and things.

When the war was on a lone bomber came over in daylight in October 1940 and dropped six or seven bombs. One of them hit the Mecca and killed about 7 in the canteen around 12 o’clock lunchtime and one was dropped by the railway line which didn’t explode. They also dropped one at our house that ricochetted. It didn’t explode but it was bad enough that they had to evacuate six houses that day in Lambeth Road in St. Johns. The railway line ran at the bottom of McIntyre Road by the cemetery and they were evacuated. I had to sleep on a friend’s floor for two to three weeks. My mum and dad went to my grandmother’s but there was no room for me. Eventually we got a council house.

There was a big hole in the roof over my bed and had it been night time, well…. There wasn’t one leaf left on the privet hedge. When I left work at lunchtime, we knew something had happened because the bus stop used to be outside St. Nicholas Church and all the walking wounded were standing in a queue where I lived with their arms up and plasters on their faces. I got off the bus in Bromyard Road and I thought I wonder where it is and I walked up along this road and turned the corner and I could see it was cordoned off and I could see a lot of people standing there and that’s when I could see that our house had a big hole in it and they said it wasn’t safe and they had to pull it down eventually. That’s when we got the council house which was right at the other end of the town and I didn’t have any friends and, of course, it was dark. I wasn’t very happy at all because I had lost all my friends.

The pilot of the plane which hit our house was using a machine gun. At the time, my mum worked at Dents the Glove Factory on the left side of the park from St. Johns and my grandmother lived just by the park. When the siren went and the bomber came over, he was flying so low my mother could see him in the plane. They ran out of this small factory and ran across the road to my grandmother’s because she had a cellar and my mum said that as they ran across the yard at the back of the house the bullets were hitting the gratings on the cellar. After that her nerves were shredded to pieces because it was so terrifying.

When we got the council house my very best friend, who didn’t want to go anywhere, joined the police force. She used to do shifts and occasionally she would come up in her uniform and have tea and me and my mum used to like to see her.

I don’t know when they started calling up the women but they wanted to billet the war workers with us. My mum had two war workers who were from Nottingham. They were only 20 and had never been away from home before. My mum had plenty on her plate with five of us but I had to share my bed with one of the girls and the other had the box room. They worked shifts.

When I was first called up they put me in an office for a few months because someone was leaving to have a baby but then they shifted me into the factory, which was where Cadbury’s used to be on a trading estate towards Hindlip; it was a Royal Ordnance factory. In the factory they made 9mm cases, the small ones that they used to use in sten guns which they dropped over France, as well as 303 bullets and tracers for the RAF. In peace time the factories were manned by ex-servicemen who were disabled. Lots of flats and concrete houses were quickly built to house people who came up from Woolwich in London to work at the factories.

I used to get up at 5.15 am to catch the bus to work. There were lots of people using the bus and it used to drop us off in time to get to work for 7.00 am and work until 5.10 pm. There was a guard on the gate at the factory and they used to search us when we came out at night. We then used to catch the bus home. We worked a fortnight of nights and a fortnight of days. Working days wasn’t too bad but when I worked nights I used to feel sick because of the change. I used to be able to drink a cup of tea at night with no sugar but I could not drink tea in the day without it. We had a break at night around 12.30 am and had to walk to the canteen in the dark. We used to take sandwiches into the canteen but things were rationed. I was brought up in the 1930’s in the Depression and this was now the 1940’s. We were not wealthy.

I remember one day I had a girl working next to me who came from Sevenoaks in Kent. She used to go home some weekends. I used to ask her how she got on and she would say that she had spent all the weekend in the shelters. We felt lucky that we were not. One day she said she didn’t know what she had in her sandwiches and she asked me what I had in mine. I told her I had dripping and tomatoes and she asked if she could swap. There was a lot of rice in the canteen, they seemed to have sacks of the stuff. We used to have a lot of rice puddings with sultanas and nutmeg on the top. When we came home we had our cooked meal but of course food was rationed. You were supposed to have one egg per week and your card was marked to say you had had it. I looked at our card and said to my mother that we had not had an egg for 16 weeks.

One day in the winter when the coal fire was burning, my dad put the ration of butter on a plate. The butter was hard so my dad asked me to warm it in front of the fire and it slid off so the whole of the ration was lost. My dad called me a stupid girl for doing that.

Coal was also rationed and you had to fill in a form to have coal. One of our girl lodgers from Nottingham named Rhoda, worked in the office at the Raleigh car factory. My mum asked her to fill in the form for the coal ration which included slack. In around 1942 Rhoda was called up to work in the munitions factory and it was difficult for her to get home. When I was about 19 I used to visit Rhoda’s mother’s in Nottingham for the weekend whilst Rhoda was working shifts. She said she would ask her mum to arrange for her uncle to take me to the Palais de Dance in Nottingham because she knew I loved dancing. He was about 40 and had never been married but he was a good dancer.

Another lodger named Helen came from the north of Scotland to stay with us. She had travelled down and was sat in the Labour Exchange and my mother said she looked absolutely worn out and felt sorry for her so she said she would take her in. Rhoda had a boyfriend who was in the Navy and Helen had a boyfriend in the 51st Highland Brigade with Monty out in North Africa. Every so often the sailor used to say he had been torpedoed again and asked Rhoda to send him some more photographs because he had lost everything. In around October 1942 the time of El Alamein, the Germans were blockading Tobruk. Helen’s boyfriend got malaria and had to come out of the Army altogether.

My husband was a prisoner of war in Germany and I met him after the war was over. He was captured in the desert of Cairo in North Africa when the Americans landed. He had only been there about 3 weeks before he was captured and he was then in Germany for about 2 years.

It was very dreary in those days because the news was never really good. All we heard was that the Japanese had sunk the Prince of Wales and the Hood was looking for the Bismark up by Norway somewhere. Unfortunately they hit the magazine with something and there was a thousand men on board and only three survived. That would be on the news when you came home from work at night. They would say on the news that 8 of our bombers failed to return, well there were about 7 men on each bomber which meant that around 56 men had lost their lives. We used to sit there and think how terrible it was. When Monty got there he beat Rommel, although he outnumbered us with tanks. One of the reasons people did not like the Americans is because they were working overtime in their factories to provide us with arms even before they were fighting themselves.

When I heard the news on the wireless, the noise of the tanks was so loud but you also heard the sound of the 51st Highland Brigade playing bagpipes. It was a strange thing to hear.

At the time Worcester was absolutely bulging at the seams with servicemen. There were a lot of airforce stations at Defford, Pershore and Honeyborne around Worcester and they all used to come into Worcester. The Canadians were also at Pershore; the Dutch were at Malvern and the Americans were stationed at Aschurch in Gloucester and all around there. If you wanted to marry an American you had to go to Aschurch to be examined before they would give you permission to marry.

We battled on with short rations and all the forms to be filled in. When I was at the factory, just before D-Day, they came around and asked us all to give blood because they had to get the blood banks up. I didn’t want to do it because I had always been sickly as a child but they said I had to. Whilst they were taking it I collapsed and went off sick. When I returned to work, I was taking my certificate up to the office when all the loudspeakers around the place were on and telling us that our boys had landed in France. All day long they kept putting news over the wireless and they were broadcasting to the French Resistance telling them not to move until they were told to do so because it wouldn’t be helpful. It was very touch and go when the boys first landed. When Monty got to Caan he was days trying to take it and when he did he bombed it out of existence. It was unrecognisable as a town. Churchill said you cannot win a war without killing people, it’s got to be done. Churchill kept us going. The men fighting with Monty thought he was marvellous. Churchill said if we are to win this war we have to take it to the German people.

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