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This story was added to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People's War website by Helen Jubb, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Leeds on behalf of the contributor, with her permission.

In Joan Gordon’s book, ‘What I Never Told Mother,’ she describes her wartime memories of her life at the Torre Road Ambulance Depot:

…Our forces had been trounced at Dunkirk. The survivors were up to their necks in the sea. An Armada of paddle steamers, tugs, ferries, riverboats and cabin cruisers manned by a thousand volunteers, some of them amateurs, rushed to the rescue. Despite being dive-bombed, they succeeded in saving three hundred thousand men, and turned a disaster into a heroic epic.

Within days I passed clusters of Dunkirk soldiers standing around Harehills, looking demoralised with their hats of other parts of their uniform missing.

We stood near the wireless to hear Churchill’s rousing speech, ‘We shall fight them on the beaches…’ It echoed round the canteen and the rest of the world. We took heart. Leeds so far, had escaped major damage, but the sirens went nearly every night and the supervisor regularly blew the klaxon to keep us on our toes, and my stomach churning.

Meanwhile, (my best friend), Renee whirled me round to ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams,’ and we played Solo as if our lives depended on it. The other occupation was knitting having spent most of my life holding hanks for mother to wind, made two jumpers. It was either that, or wear old clothes until they fell apart.

Then one Monday morning, before we went off duty, our supervisor dropped his own bombshell. The unexpected was about to happen, a shake up of the shift personnel. Friendships were targeted. Renee was now on one rota and I was on another…

It was months before I next saw Renee flying over the depot doorstep. Her smile was as warm as ever but her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones and she looked emaciated…

Months went by without me seeing Renee, and I put it down to the system. So I was all the more horrified when I heard that she was desperately ill in a nursing home. I never saw her again. Lively, laughing Renee had had no resistance to tuberculosis and had danced herself into the grave. It was hard making sense of it all. Renee was only twenty-one.

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