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Salisbury life.
I got married just before the start of the war. We had a flat above our newsagents shop in Milford Street. We sold chocolates, but they were scarce and you didn’t have the variety. I used to eat as many as I could! One night a plane came over and dropped, I think, 5 bombs in Milford Street, along by the cinema. We hurried home with the sirens going off. As we passed the Cathedral Hotel all these people came out in their nightclothes! I’ve never seen anything like it!

My husband joined up on 1st April 1941. He rode a motorbike in the army and had to go to London for training and I stayed and worked in the shop for a time. I went up to see him in London and when I came back, I didn’t go to the shop but back to my mother’s house and got a job in New Street making parts for aeroplanes. Their factory had been bombed out and so they had moved there. They made the fuselage in New Street and the wings in Castle Street. Opposite was where the Americans were stationed. They used to have their meals where Woolworths is now. What I remember most about the Americans is that when they came out of New Street, they used to spit. I thought it was awful. I didn’t have any time for the Americans at all but a lot of women did! They used to say “I’ve got my cousin or some relation staying from America But they weren’t. They liked the Americans because they had money and of course, we didn’t.

I went to visit my husband when he was stationed near London and caught a train to see him. We went so far along the line and then they stopped the train and we had to come back because the track had been bombed and they sent us another way. It took 5 or 6 hours to get to London because we were going backwards and forwards all the time. At that age you didn’t worry. You didn’t know what to expect I suppose. I stayed there for about 6 weeks until he went abroad. When I came back I went to work in the office in an aeroplane factory. I was living with my mother and she had a shelter in the living room, it wasn’t very high. I was saving my new clothes then for when my husband came home. You used to be able to buy any clothes and underwear on the black market right here in Salisbury Market! You could buy what you liked — you had to pay for it of course! I put them all in a suitcase and put it in the shelter, there wasn’t much room in there anyway — it was ever such a jam, no room for anyone to get in with the cases!

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