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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Fay Heard of Tollesbury, a People’s War volunteer on behalf of Pat Foakes (Clewett) and is added to the site with her permission. She understands the sites terms and conditions.

We lived by the railway track at Birkenhead when the war started. My grandmother lived further along the line. I was too old to be evacuated so when there was an air raid my mother sent me to my grandmother’s. My father was a riveter at Campbell Laird’s. When war came there were jobs for everyone. My mother had never known what it was to have regular money coming in before that.

I was 14 when the war started and was working at Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight. We had a lot of air raids and I can remember the sirens going and us all scrambling into the shelter at work. We all took out knitting with us. The docks were being bombed. Often in the evenings when we went to the cinema we’d have to rush out to the shelters.

I was called up when I was 18 and went to the aerodrome at Hutton Park where they were repairing engines. I was helping the fitter — it wasn’t a qualified job I just fetched things and handed them to the qualified fitter. My mother died so I had to leave my war work to look after my younger brother. So my life became looking after the house and queuing for everything. I we saw a queue we always joined it — it didn’t matter what it was for.

One night, after I’d been to the pictures, in Birkenhead, we had to go over the docks on the bus and it was on that bus that I first bet Dick Foakes, from Tollesbury in Essex Dick was in the Air Sea Rescue Service. They had hit some wreckage in the Mersey and it had holed their boat and they had come into Cubmins Yard to fet the boat repaired. He came home to meet my family and I travelled down to Tollesbury to meet his. We planned to get married as soon as the war was over.

We got married in 1947. Everything was still rationed so I went to all my relations and scrounged food and clothing coupons. My father somehow managed to get a huge tin of corned beef for the reception at the Co-op hall.

My cousin worked in a haberdashery shop and managed to get silk stockings for me for my wedding.

We had a real cake for our wedding — not a cardboard one — it had 3 tiers.

Meeting Dick and marrying him was ‘the one thing to come out of the war!’

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