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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Violet Fallowes and has been added to the site with her permission….

I joined the ATS when I was seventeen years old and was soon taught to drive. We had to transport the officers around and drive at night to different searchlight batteries in the Cotswolds, often when the German planes were overhead and seeking to put the searchlights out of order.

I went to Borton on the Water outside Cheltenham followed by a posting to Leicester where our job was to meet the trains that came in carrying the wounded men from overseas. The trains always came in at around midnight and we would take tea and sandwiches to the lads. It was difficult driving during the blackout as the headlights were more or less covered, there was just a little slit to let out the minimum of light.

Another job I did was to drive an ambulance, we had to go to the homes of servicemen who had gone AWOL from hospital and then sent a note saying that they weren’t fit to go back to their units. Our job was to take them back to the hospital where they would be assessed properly as to whether they were fit or not.

I met many people and made a lot of friends, I remember a Scotch battery who taught us how to do the Scotch reel and a Welsh battery who were wonderful singers, sadly they went to Dunkirk and not one of them came back.

On a lighter note, I got engaged three times during the war; in fact it if I had accepted an American officer, it would have been four times.

Towards the end of the war I came out on a Class C Release as I was a tailoress by trade and my expertise was needed to help make de-mob suits.

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