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I had to go into war work, but Woolworths, where I was working, put in for an extension so that I could train a new cashier. You could go into a factory or the Fire Service; as a married women, I couldn't be sent out of the country. We had married in June 1941. Bill, my husband, proposed from the back of a bus, but I didn't hear him and he later wrote to me. He went abroad in September 1941 and I joined the Fire Service in March 1942. We were based for a time in Highgate and later in an old lying-in hospital; a stork on the building was taken down during the war. We went to the Spanards pub and took the Fire Station dog 'Nero' with us. He was an airedale and always being brought back to us by Battersea Dogs' Home. I remember the night Moorfields Eye Hospital was bombed. When I went into work the next morning, patients were on the pavement in their beds. At that time, we were based in an old chest hospital in Shepherdess Walk, City Road in the East End. The Fire Service was using half the building and the rest had been bombed. Our room opened straight off the street and, after a while, a policeman was put on the door. I've never seen such poverty: children with no shoes and holey jumpers. There was a lovely cake shop: spotless. I worked in the stores. The men went out with the lights; the van had every light from a tiny torch to a searchlight. We had some good times and I made lifelong friends. In Highgate, we were two streets away from the head office and a fortnightly dance was held there. After one dance, we returned to our rooms at 1a.m. to find that the men had taken all our mattresses and blankets off our beds. Of course we got our own back and did the same to them! On another occasion, my friend Flecky and I went to a Fire Service Officers’ dinner in Ilford in the back of a Fire Service van. At the end of the war, VE night, five or six of us from the fire station went up to join the crowds outside Buckingham Palace.

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