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This story has been submitted to the Peoples War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Ida Owens and has been added to the site with her permission…

My father was a Military Medalist in the First World War and would have joined up again if he could.
I was 15 in 1939 when I went to join the NAAFI . I was plump then and certainly didn’t like physical exercise at all. I first went to Weeton camp and I remember crying, because I didn’t like having to do the washing up I was also missing my little brother who I’d had to leave at home, he was only three.

Eventually I got used to it and we had to go down to Salisbury to make ready for the invasion, should there be one. I next went to Chilworth, Southhampton, not far from Lord Mountbatten’s home. We were all invited there to attend a party along with lots of other different nationalities. In spite of the rationing there was plenty to eat, although do I recall only being given one glass of wine, after that it was cups of tea. But what a magnificent home it was with wonderful gardens

We next went to Southampton Water where soldiers were waiting to embark for Dunkirk, we slept under canvas, although for three days and three nights we hardly slept at all, snatching an hour’s sleep when we could. Up and down the lines of soldiers we went, dispensing hot drinks, snacks and cigarettes and baking the famous rock buns in the field kitchen.
The soldiers were in good spirits, but mostly very tensed up, they seemed so very young.

I went back to Chilworth to look after a new intake as I have said I used to be plump but by now my weight had gone down from 10st 9lbs to 7st 2lbs, no need for slimming. I came back home in 1944.

Of course I’d had a few boyfriends, but on the last leave I’d had before I was sent home I met my future husband Jim. He had survived being torpedoed whilst going after the Turpitz German submarine in the Norwegian Fiords. He had got into one of the lifeboats and this officer had asked him if he could swim and because he could, he’d had to get out of the lifeboat to make way for someone who couldn’t and he’d had to stay in the water until he was rescued. When they arrived at Scapa Flow they got pelted with stones as they thought at first they were Germans.

We married in 1946; he was de-mobbed in January and we married in May, I wore a white satin dress and pearl tiara with a veil and I carried pink roses. We had our reception at the Black Bull in Burnley, we had steak pie and chips and it was either 5/6d or 7/6d for the meal I can’t quite be sure. But one thing I am sure of my ‘little’ brother who I had missed so much when I joined the NAFFI acted as usher in the church for us.

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