大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Bernie Hawkins and has been added to the website on behalf of Mary Prince with her permission and she fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was brought up in an Irish Catholic family and lived in Deptford. I was 23 when the War started and spent the early years of the War making sure mum was all right. Father had been sent to Bristol to work and eventually mum settled down with a family in Bridgewater, where my father could visit her every weekend.

Back in London, I got a job helping the War effort working on the inspection bench at the munitions factory in Woolwich. There was an Irish chap called Jack McGann, who used to go around the benches on a motorised scooter wearing his tam o鈥檚hanter, picking up finished work. He was a sergeant in the Irish Army who was waiting to be called up to fight with the British forces. One day he told me that there was a party at the club the following night and asked me to come with him. I said yes, but a woman at a nearby bench who had overheard this told me that he had taken her and her daughter to the Empire the previous night. I didn鈥檛 like this, so I didn鈥檛 go to the party. The day after the party, Jack asked me why I didn鈥檛 turn up. I told him that I wasn鈥檛 going to go out with him if he was in the habit of taking other women out!

At lunchtimes, I used to stay at my bench eating sandwiches while most of the rest of the workers had lunch in the canteen upstairs. One day, soon after Jack McGann had asked me out, the manageress told me that I had a lunch waiting for me upstairs. I told her I hadn鈥檛 ordered any lunch, but she insisted it was mine. When I went up to the canteen, it turned out that Jack had bought me the lunch. I told him I wasn鈥檛 going to eat it but he said that there would be a lunch there for me every day until I did. When he asked me out again, I told him that I was still married and waiting for my freedom (I was waiting for a divorce). He took a week to think about this, but then cam back to me and told me he was determined to have me anyway. I鈥檓 so glad he did. We eventually married and for the next thirty years and more, until he died in the nineteen-seventies, we had a wonderful life together, travelling and dancing all over the world. Jack could sing, dance, play the concertina and had the gift of being able to play anything by ear. I had always danced. I remember asking my father 鈥淲hy are all the boys and men so clever, playing instruments, singing and everything, and I can鈥檛 do any thing?鈥� He said, 鈥淎h, but you can dance!鈥� I could too. I used to be lifted on to the table to dance for relatives and friends, and when I went to convent school, I was sometimes taken out of class to dance for the Irish priests. I have danced all my life, all around the world. I think I got my dancing from my Spanish grandmother.

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