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'This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Gwilym Scourfield of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Edna Johnston and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

Sixty Years Isn’t Enough Time to Forget!

I was twenty when the war began. I lived in Sunderland then and worked at the NAAFI in Richmond in Yorkshire. I volunteered to do the NAAFI work. It was before the war I met my first husband. He proposed to me in the NAAFI. ‘Shaky Stewart’ they used to call him; a funny nickname; still makes me smile. My husband and I were married right at the beginning of it all, - in 1939. He was a sergeant major in The Green Howards.

No white wedding, I’m afraid; I had a smart two-piece, bought with all the clothing coupons I could save and muster. We were wed at the registry office. My new husband was soon posted out to Ireland. I followed him in 1941. It was a dismal place; Omar, County Tyrone, where we were billeted. I didn’t like it at all. When he got transferred to Coulsdon in Surrey I followed him back.

I couldn’t follow his next posting, though. They sent him out to the desert in North Africa. He survived the terrible fighting in El Alamein, Tobruk and Tripoli, but he was tragically killed on the very last day of the war. He was taking a cigarette whilst riding on a lorry travelling over very rough ground in Syria. He was thrown off the truck to his death. The telegram came when I was back in Sunderland. Mum had gone out shopping. The shock was terrible. I fell to the ground in a faint. Our little daughter was six. He never knew her.

I was in Surrey when the doodlebugs started in 1944. One morning, after spending the night sleeping in the shelter with my little daughter, we saw the full horror of what they could do. Emerging into the morning light we saw bodies and bits of limbs all over the place. Buildings had been reduced to uneven piles of rubble and the awful smell of burning and masonry and death was everywhere. You can never forget such sights. They haunt your sleep. My little girl would go crazy at the sound of the sirens. She fell once and concussed herself, trying to get to safety.

I decided to go back to mother’s house in Sunderland after that.

But you can never escape those fears. I still panic to this day when I have to go into an enclosed space, or hear the sound of low flying aircraft. I don’t even like thunder. The feeling doesn’t go whatever comfort the years without war have given. Sometimes lying in my bed at night I still think I hear those planes. It only needs something to trigger it off — like the terrible London Tube bombings, for instance. I don’t think I will ever forgive either the Germans or the Japanese, either. Memories never die. There were happy ones, too, of course. I have married again and have a lovely family now; there is much to be thankful for. I wouldn’t want to see another war, though, not ever!

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