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15 October 2014
WW2 - People's War

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Wartime Memories of a Wartime Wedding

by BurfordACL

Contributed by听
BurfordACL
Background to story:听
Royal Air Force
Article ID:听
A2661590
Contributed on:听
24 May 2004

Terri Sanders

21 May 2003

In 1939 I was in the Civil Service working in Faraday Building on Ludgate Hill. There were no women in Government Offices before the war, but although civil servants were a reserved occupation - so many men volunteered that we were requested to transfer and I moved to the Treasury in Whitehall. My train journey was only 15 minutes, but during the Blitz the journey got so bad that we all slept in the underground rooms beneath the Treasury and Downing Street and only went home at weekends

Some of the rooms are now on show to the public. It was a strange, good, but frightening life. Theatres and cinemas opened, large underground Lyons Corner House restaurants - Covent Garden as a dance hall - every type of uniform and nationality you could think of - and the Guards Barracks invited us to their dances.

One day I met my future husband on a blind date, he asked me to marry him that night - I refused. This was March 1942. He was in the army, back from Dunkirk. Three weeks later, he asked me again - I said 鈥淵es鈥. We planned to be married in June, but one evening in May he telephoned to say that he was leaving the next morning - he was in the Eighth Army and went out to El Alamain. I had known him for just three months and did not see him again for three and a half years.

After that, I thought that I would volunteer for the A.T.S. The Civil Service released me and I went to be a driver, but I was too short. You had to be 5ft 2in, and I was only 5ft 1in - so they sent me to the Air Force. My height was all right, but they suggested I try another job, and I finished up in Meteorology. I did my training in London, and was posted to an operational Bomber Station in Suffolk - Lancaster Bombers. I spent three years there, and when V.E.Day came in 1945 my fianc茅, who was now in Italy, was eligible for a month's leave, but of course, they did not tell us when ! I kept my leave as long as I could, but had to finish on August 18th, so I came home on leave and he turned up on our doorstep on August 14th. We hadn鈥檛 seen each other for three and a half years, and we had only met about eleven times ! We had to get married by the end of my leave so that I could spend his month鈥檚 leave with him, or else I would have to go back to camp.

August 15th and 16th were V.J. Days, no shops, no post, no papers. All my family and friends dashed around with contributions to the food. My aunt made a tiny fruit cake with hoarded fruit, and we covered it with a cardboard 鈥渨edding cake鈥 cover. We telephoned for a Special Licence, which did not arrive until after the wedding. No coupons in the forces - so no wedding dress, but Lord Nuffield had arranged for some beautiful wedding dresses to be made in the States, and sent over to London, where they were stored, to be borrowed by service girls.

We telephoned them, and my Father went and picked one up on Friday afternoon. It was beautiful white satin, embroidered with pearls, plus a veil and headdress. I wore it the next day, with a bouquet of flowers from the garden and, my sister a bridesmaid in a borrowed dress. Afterwards, my Father took it back and I never saw it again. We were able to have a month's leave together, and then he went back to Italy for another six months.

When I happened to mention this at Nuffield House Museum, they had never heard this story before and asked me for a photograph of myself in the dress, and a short write-up, so I am now preserved in a museum!!!

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