大象传媒

On 1st September 1939, I was evacuated from Birmingham to Warwick. This was with my school, King Edward's Grammar School, Camphill. On 3rd September I was in church when it was announced that war had been declared. After a few weeks we went back home. Later on in 1941, the school evacuated again, this time to Lichfield.
Birmingham suffered a lot of air raids most nights. After the bad raids on Coventry, the following Tuesday, we had a very bad raid. The planes were always trying to bomb the Austin Works at Longbridge (now the Rover Company). On the next Friday, another heavy raid was on Birmingham, we had mobile guns on the streets that night and in the nearby park, Cannon Hill, there was a naval gun. In the road at the back of where I lived there was a bomb dropped. The noise is terrific. I had always been told, if you hear the bomb whisling, it will not hurt you.
Food was rationed of course, and you never saw a banana or orange. You only had one egg per week, but they brought out a powdered egg, which people used to make scrambled eggs etc.
When you were eighteen years old you were called up for active service. I volunteered for the A.T.S. and on 4th August 1944 I went to Pontefract, Yorkshire, where I did my training. I was then posted to Leicester and I worked at the Pay Office in Newark Street. In 1946 we moved to Nottingham, where I stayed until I was demobbed in 1947.
On V.E. day we had some leave and I went to a street party with my mother in Birmingham.

'This story was submitted to the People's War site by Sara-Jane Higginbottom of the CSV Action Desk Leicester on behlaf of Pauline Cartwright and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

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