大象传媒

I was a librarian in Coventry, and when the war started I came home, I didn't know then that Coventry would be bombed like that, I came back because I thought well I can get a ward job, perhaps I can take up nursing. I met a school teacher, that I knew his daughters, and he said, "Oh, Olga, you've come back home" and I said yes and he said, "Come and give us a hand tonight we've got a lot of refugees coming down from Liverpool", children, you know, evacuees I think they called them, and he said, "They're all at the YMCA tonight and we've got to find something for them to do while we find homes for them". So I went along to the YMCA, and I think there was only one other girl there, and my husband was a member of the YMCA and he was there helping as well and by the time we'd sorted all the kids out he said, "I feel like going for a walk would you like to come with me?" and I said oh yes certainly, and I got to know him just like that. I鈥檝e known him all my life, but of course he just wasn't anything in my line at all, I knew him as a choir boy but he didn't know me, we got to know each other and I said to him when I was going to Cross Houses, I said look you're very young, he was eighteen and I was only twenty, I said you're too young we're not going out seriously go and have a bit of fun with some more girls, it was getting a bit serious and we would perhaps meet up again later. We split up there, and when I came home one day someone said did you know George Nicholls had had a bad accident, he's been crushed between two buses. So of course I went to see him to find out how he was getting on because I was at Newcross by then, and it all went from there. Somebody had left a bus on in the garage without the brake on and he was working on the back end of a bus in front and he suddenly realised that he could hear something, he could sense this bus was moving and he threw himself to one side but it only caught him down the left side otherwise he'd have been killed.

We used to go out for a walk, because we had no where to go really, if we only had a couple of hours off and nurse Jones and I where going for a walk and it was deep snow. And when we got down the road past where we were in the hospital there was a car stuck in the snow, and so we said we would get some shovels or something, we dug this car out and it was Lloyd George, and his sister, and they were driving up to his home in North Wales, and he wrote a lovely letter to the matron to say thank the nurses who dug him out of the snow drift.

This one night I was walking up from Atcham, I used to walk all that way and up Cronk Hill, and when I got to the top I could see somewhere burning and you always could late at night and you felt the bombs bang, you could feel the earth shaking, and it was Coventry. The next morning they said that they've devastated Coventry. But also from the top of Cronk Hill I could see Liverpool burning, you could see it that distance away. So it was quite a chilling experience to look at, but there are trees and things that weren't there then and so you had a clearer view of what was going on. I loved Coventry before the war, it was a lovely place to be, the people were so charming and hardworking, they had interesting jobs because it was full of industry, they made cars and everything there. The people that came to me, my subscribers were absolutely lovely, and I was heartbroken after I saw it, to see the Cathedral smashed, they built another one but it's horrible now, it's a horrible place now, Broadgate the big central area that used to be, they've literally put a another block of shops and markets and things in the middle of it to block it and why not leave it, it was so beautiful. You could see the Cathedral from quite a long way away and now you can't, so I was sad about that. Of course when they're talking about the IRA and what's it's been doing over thirty years, two of my colleagues went out to lunch one day and I heard a terrific bang and I looked through the window and said to someone, what's going on and she said, "The IRA have put a bomb in the basket of a bicycle," they used to have baskets where the boys delivered goods in those days and they'd left a bomb there outside Henns the Jewelers and my two colleagues must have been just walking back and they just vanished and we never found them. That was in early 1939, so it's been going on a lot longer than people talk about.

If you married, it didn't matter what you did if you were in a bank or a teacher, you had to give your job up because there was a man who needed it, it's true. Certainly nurses weren't allowed to marry, but from then on what Matron did, Matron Caine, she called in nurses that she knew who had married and had to leave and she knew they were damn good nurses and we had about three of them back as Sisters. That's the quality of Matron Caine, it wasn't only what she did for me and my husband it's what she did otherwise as well, and from then on other hospitals started doing the same thing, during the war. Afterwards when their health service started they did care whether you were married, single or whatever as long as you were willing to, and of course you didn't live in with the health service, the nurses don't live in where as we had to live on the premises and of course if you were married, you had to put up with living in and your husband was living somewhere else. It was a very interesting time and especially to meet some of the other nurses who had by then married and had children and were perhaps in their forties, and so glad to come back because they never thought they'd be able to, but the only ones they allowed to be married were what they called community nurses, they were mostly midwives, they were about the only ones that were allowed to be married, strange.

If you wanted food, the rations were so awful, you only got an egg once a fortnight, you had about a slice of bacon once a week, two ounces of meat and I think it was about a quarter of a pound of butter a month, I mean the food was absolutely dreadful, you had a pork butcher where they had liver which wasn't included or pigs feet which weren't included on the rations, I used to queue for nearly two hours at one of the big stalls in Wellington just to get enough food, of course we grew our own vegetables, we kept chickens and all you could do was supplement food the best way you could because they rations - you couldn't live on them, they wouldn't keep you alive. We all had something at some point that was from the black market and then there were things like clothes rationing, you could only have a dress once a year or if you wanted a jacket you had to wait for two years for another one and those used to be sold off so people could get money.

My mother said what are you going to do when you get married what are you going to wear, and I said I didn't know, I never have been fussy about clothes, nothing ever fits me properly and so she said she had some lovely blue velvet and would I like to have that made into a dress, she was going to make curtains with it I think but anyway she let me have this and we had a friend who was a very good dress merchant and she made this lovely blue velvet dress and a blue velvet cap and a muff. I'd always loved Lilies of the Valley and we were married on May 1st and I wanted Lilies of the Valley but of course they were late that year and then on the morning of our wedding a friend of my fathers, he'd never had a daughter and he was very fond of me, he turned up with a great big bouquet of Lilies of the Valley, he said I remember you telling me so I put glass over mine and I鈥檝e grown these for you, so I got Lilies of the Valley for my wedding. It was a strange time and yet you lived through it, you made the best of what there was, you did have people who did moan and grumble and you'd say oh shut up, there were a lot of people worse off than you, there are people fighting out there.

This story was submitted to the People's War by Carlie Swain of the 大象传媒 Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Olga Nicholls and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Nicholls fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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