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This story is taken from an interview with Edith & Ruby Wilson, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview was by Walter Love, and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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[Edith, tell us about the evacuees in Fermanagh]

I didn’t really know very many of them, but there was this particular boy. And that’s his book there that he wrote about it afterwards. Robert Harbinson. And really, I didn’t like him anyhow because when we were in church he was sitting behind us, this was in the choir. We had plaits down our back which we hated, my sister and I. And he started to pull at it. He would touch us first, then stroke at it. Then he went outside, after we left the church, and I had a puncture. He came over, he hid for a while first, then he came over and he started coming round us. So my sister, she got a hold of him and I hit him with the pump. So that was it.
The score was pretty level.

[Did you have any sympathy for the evacuees?]

Well, I did for some of them. Some of them came into pretty big houses, and it might only be a man and his wife in it, or even a man and his sister. And they used to come there, and they didn’t understand them — they weren’t used to children. And they just didn’t have them, and they wouldn’t stay at all in it.

[Ruby, what do you remember about the War?]

I started my midwifery training the very day war was declared. It was a shock, really, when war was declared. And then Blackouts, rationing. All patients, when the sirens would go off we moved them down to what we thought was safer quarters, but we grew tired of that. And so did the patients, because nobody was getting any rest.

And then later when I came back home to Ireland, to the little hospital in Enniskillen, as a temporary night sister. Again a very busy place. You mentioned Castle Archdale. We had to cope with accidents, if the boys were on manoeuvres, if there was a crash, a rescue.

It seemed for 5 yrs as though it took a great deal from my life at that stage. But it was wonderful the way the people coped.

[People were good neighbours]

Yes. They shared everything. If you had a surplus of something, you shared it.

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