大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Elizabeth Perez of Stockport Libraries on behalf of Gladys Jackson and has been added to the site with her permission. She fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

I was born in Reddish in 1921 and I was 18 when war broke out, but by then I had already joined the ARP and trained part-time at the Sanatorium on Whitehill Road during the evenings and weekends. We didn't have purpose-designed ambulances at the time and had to use vans which had been converted to take two stretchers. I didn't drive the vans, there were men and women drivers to drive them. We had regular air raid practices in the Portwood area where volunteers lay on the street pretending to be casualties. If doctors had already "attended" to them they put an "M" on their foreheads to indicate they'd been given morphine. Men loaded them onto the stretchers and into the vans. We escorted them in the vans. We weren't given first aid training, but were there to accompany them and support them.

I intended to join the ARP full-time when war broke out, but they said I was too young at 18 to experience the rigours of ARP work, but they said I cold continue to do this on a voluntary unpaid basis! My friends felt that this was taking advantage of me.

I had ambitions to become a nurse, but my doctor advised me that nurses were born not made. It might have been that I had missed too much school becasue I contracted polio between 5 and 12 years old.

So I went to do war work at Cravens, an engineering works. I made nut bolts for tanks. I continued to do this until a bout of pneumonia interrupted this.

When I had recovered, I joined the Co-op laundry on Broadstone Hall Road, where we washed kit and uniforms for the services. Some of the girls slipped their names and addresses in the shirt pockets in the hope that the servicemen would reply. One day I got a letter from a serviceman in the Saskatoon Light Infantry. I went into work the next day absolutely furious thining that someone had given my address away. However it turned out that one of my Great Grandma's sons had passed my address onto one of his colleagues to write to me. (Great Grandma had emigrated to Canada some years before). We corresponded for a while, then he wrote "Don't worry if you don't hear from me for a while, I'm going on an exercise". I never heard from him again, but suspect he may have been killed in the Normandy Landings.

I remember bombs dropping during the war. I lived in a house on Reddish Road next to a children's playground. One night there was an air raid and the Ack Ack battery on Mellar's Fields between Reddish and Levenshulme was blazing away firing at the enemy aircraft. A shell landed in the children's playground and one lad who was standing at the front door of the nearby flats (instead of sheltering in the air raid shelters) was killed by the blast. One of my ARP colleagues was called out to attend and said it was a good thing I hadn't got involved as it was an upsetting sight.

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