大象传媒

Teacher training in top-coats

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sue Hendrie of the CSV action desk on behalf of Hannah and has been added to the site with her permission. Hannah fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

Just before the war started I got into Liverpool University and that pleased my mother because it was further away from Germany than most other universities and she thought I would be safer there, as the Germans would never get that far - but they did of course.

The war made doing the degree even more difficult than usual because we had to swot sitting in our coats, covered in rugs and things because there was no heating. Then when the sirens went we鈥檇 have to take our books to the shelter, or the cellar actually in the house I lived in, and just carry on there the best way we could.

When we did our exams we still had to sit in our coats because the blitz in Liverpool had completely blown off the big glass dome roof of the university鈥檚 main hall and we were open to the sky. We prayed that it wouldn鈥檛 rain but as it was June that was unlikely. Then every so often the sirens would go but we still kept on working. Sometimes we heard planes going over, Spitfires whining, making a funny sort of noise like a wasp. They would be going out to sea to stop the Germans coming our way. How we passed any exams I鈥檝e no idea but we did. We just had to get on with things.

My family had lived in a house north of Sheffield but after the war started Mother got a fright when a big anti-aircraft gun was put in a field at the bottom of our garden, so she upped and put everything into storage and went into lodgings. She then moved from one lodging to another, so every time I finished at the university for a vacation I didn鈥檛 know where I was going to live. Mother used to send me a letter saying, 鈥淚鈥檓 living now in so-and-so place鈥� and I had to go there and find her - mostly in little villages in the same area. It was funny really.

At the beginning of the war I always wanted to be a teacher but as I was finishing my degree course in 1943, I was offered a research post with Doctor Krebs into wartime nutrition. I wasn鈥檛 keen though and I couldn鈥檛 really get into it. I had signed up to do teaching and that鈥檚 what I wanted to do. I wanted to get near the children and thought that teaching would be useful to the war effort. My great friend from university, however, left teaching and went into the services and she did her bit that way.

Eventually I did get my degree and went to teach evacuees in Harrogate. They were from the East End of London and the poor little souls were so disrupted from their homes. I taught all kinds of evacuated children, little ones, right up to teenagers - everybody up till they were of an age when they would be useful in something else. Children used to leave school then at 14, so I didn鈥檛 have them much older than that, not till after the war. The classes were not very big and had about 40 children in each class.

Some of the children were absolutely wonderful and they just wanted to learn no matter where they were. I was teaching science and I think it鈥檚 a subject that children are very interested in. I was lucky to have a subject they could see was going to be a useful thing if they could do it. Some of them, however, were very depressed being away from home and wondering what their families were doing.

I met my future husband at university while we were both science students there, though he was already a research student and ahead of me. After university he went down to London and did research into RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) until 1943 while I remained in Harrogate teaching. Then, when the RADAR was being actively used in the forces, and because he was an ecologist, he went up to Scotland to do research on an experimental farm into reclaiming land to farm for arable purposes to help the food effort. Most of the work was aimed at trying to reclaim the Scottish countryside from bracken - but that still seems a hopeless task! They tried everything, even pigs to root it up but they didn鈥檛 get very far with solving the problem. He did, however, get his PhD degree out of the work they did and that was in 1945.

We eventually got married after the war when we were settled and in jobs. He lectured at Glasgow University and I helped him in practicals but I later went back to teaching.

My training had been very difficult but I had got through it and I鈥檓 very glad I did because I loved teaching.

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