大象传媒

The first big battle in the Atlantic was the sinking of the German batel ship "The Graf Spree" in December 1939. The New York Tiems reported that the Graf Spree fought only one battle and she ran away from that.

In Britain all was quiet. Our evacuees settled down and the mother of the little girls came to visit them. nobody realised we were at war and eventually most of the evacuees up and down the country went home, including ours.

The war news was very quiet for a long time, it was called "the cold war".

At that time, I was 26 years old and I didn't like living in Halsall, but I did join the badminton club and enjoyed that as I had also played at Lydiate. I went to church on Sunday nights and made friends with a girl who lived in a bungalow down the road. We went for walks, her boyfriend was in the army and stationed in Yorkshire. I knew I would have to do some war work and as I had always wanted to be a nurse, I volunteered for the Civil Nursing Reserive.

In April 1940, Germany invated Denmark who made no resistance on command of their king. The same month, the Germans marched into Oslo and King Haakan and his government came to England and refused to have any dealings with the Nazis. After the defeat, Neville Chamberlina resigned as Prime Minister and Winston Churchill was appointed in his place. The British people gathered around their wireless sets for every broadcast, the war news was bad, Churchill in one of his speeches said: "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

In the spring of 1940, I was called to go to the Ormskirk General Hospital. After a couple of weeks training at the Ormskirk Cottage Hospital, I spent a whole Saturday in Ormskirk looking for digs. A couple, a Mr and Mrs Carr, with no children, who lived at 189 Wigan Road, felt they should help the war effort by taking a nurse, although they were a bit apprehensive, decided that I could stay there, and as the hospital was in Wigan Road, it suited me very well. I arrived on Saturday night and if the Carrs were apprehensive, so was I.

I spent a long time upstairs in my bedroom putting my things away. I could hear Anthony Eden, the then Minister of War, giving a speech on the wireless news. After some time, Mrs Carr called me down and we chatted and they made me feel at home. They were veyr nice people and over the years I was there, they were very good to me.

I started at the hospital the next morning, which was full of nurses, just like me, but no patients. We were moved around the wards to get to know each otehr and after a week or so we had a contingent of French soldiers, all bemoaning the fact that their beloved Paris had fallen.

Well, there I was a nurse, albeit an auxiliary.

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