大象传媒

When the Second World war started in September 1939 I was still a schoolgirl, attending Cowley Girls Grammar School, and little did I know what things would happen to fashion my life for the nest 60 years!

The years at school were hard because as well as coping with the school work, we had to endure nights when we had practically no sleep because of the air raids. We were lucky in St. Helens and didn't suffer much bomb damage compared to Liverpool and Manchester, but we still had the sirens each night and could hear the bombers overhead on their way to the big cities. We didn't have many air raids during the day but if the sirens sounded we would find the nearest air raid shelter and stay there until the all clear sounded. We had to carry our gas masks everywhere we went and while I was still at school we used to have to practise putting on our gas masks and filing into the air raid shelters which were tunnels built into the grounds of the school.

We had 2 German Jewish refugees who came to St. Helens and attended Cowley School. They were lovely girls and the one who was my age was called Hanalore Siegal(I don't think that is the correct spelling!!) We also had girls from Liverpool schools because it was thought too dangerous for them to stay in Liverpool all day and every day.

Another thing that we had to get used to was the blackout. You were not allowed to show any light at all at night. We had thick curtains or another set of curtains as well as the ordinary ones and if you wanted to open the door at night you had to put your lights out so that it would not show outside. There were no street lights and what few cars there were had to drive on dipped headlights which hardly showed any light at all!! All the road signs were removed so that if the Germans invaded they would not know where they were!!

I remember that the Rainford By-Pass had only just been finished but it was closed to all traffic and it was full of tanks and armoured vehicles stored there ready for
D Day.

In 1943 I succeeded in passing my School Certificate and applied for a job in the Food Office. I left school on a Friday and started work on the following Monday in the Food Office which was situated in the old Windle Pilkington School. After a few weeks I realised that that was not the job for me and applied for a job in the offices at Beechams. I was successful and started work there and stayed there until I married in 1947 and moved away to Birmingham where my husband was working in the Inland Revenue.

In 1943, just before I left school, I met my future husband. He was in the Royal Navy and was billeted in Liverpool waiting for his ship. I knew him well by sight, as we lived only streets away from each other, and although I was friendly with his sister I had never actually met him before he asked me if I would go to the pictures with him. During the four weeks we had before he sailed I started work, and when he went away we promised to write to each other, and I promised that I would continue to visit his family. Little did we realise that it would be another 18 months before we saw each other again! We kep our promises and wrote letters to each other eventually writing every day (and I still have all my letters!!!) In the 18 months that he was away he was mainly in the Mediterranean. George was on a Corvette, following the troops up the coast of Italy and going into the ports as they were liberated. Of course I didn't know where he was until he returned home because all his letters were censored.

When George returned home in early 1945 we knew that the war in Europe was nearly over and he had 6 months in England before he was due to go off to the Far East to fight the Japanese. In that time George asked me to marry him and so we got engaged.

When he went abroad again he was on a Dan Layer which marked out where the mines had been cleared. When they were in the Red Sea the Americans dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the Japanese surrendered. The ship was turned round and they went back to Greece where they were clearing the mines from round the coast of Greece and Yugoslavia. He was there until he got his demob in 1946 when he travelled across Europe to get back to England.

We were married in 1947, so the romance which started in 1943, during the Second World War, when I was a schoolgirl of 16. ended in a very happy marriage which lasted for 52 years until George died in 1999.

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