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This story has been added to the web site by CSV Volunteer Rachel Newland on behalf of the author Marcia Martin who understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was 15 years and 9 months old when the Second War broke out. At the time of the announcement I was singing in the choir in Bridge Methodist Chapel, Clifden Road, St. Austell. The preacher stopped the service to tell us we were at war.

Although we were expecting it, it still stunned us, but we gritted out teeth and carried on more or less as usual.

Then the young men began to disappear only to return resplendent in uniforms of the Army, Navy and Air Force, for short leaves before returning to their units.

My father, who must have been in his early forties, was called to guard duties at the Beam Station up on Goss Moor. It was amusing to see him and his three mates, all 6 feet and over and bulky 14 stoners, cram into Dad's tiny Austin 7, which faithfully took these big men all the way up hill, through Penwithick, Bugle and Roche and out to the Wireless Station on Goss Moor. Father used to garage the car in an open shed attached to the garage in Clifden Road, and one night, just before D Day, some American soldiers stole it and crashed it down in Porthpean. So, another Baby Austin came along.

My brother, who was 4 years older than me, was at that time, in the Cornwall Constabularly and stationed at Head Quarters in Bodmin. He volunteered for the Airforce and was sent first to Canada and then down to Florida to do his training and became a Pilot Officer before returning to the UK and flying duties. He gradually worked his way up to become a Squadron Leader, retiring after 20 odd years service. He was 6'2" and big with it and was known throughout the Service as "Smokey" because he always had a pipe in his mouth. He managed to survive the war and several years in Cyprus during the troubles there, but died suddenly, on holiday in Portugal, probably as the reult of spinal injuries sustained in two crashes during the war. He was only 65 and had just returned to his beloved Cornwall to live.

When I was 17 it was getting near the time for me to join something to help the war effort and my brother told me of an opening at Police HQ for a clerk in the Aliens' Department. I had an interview and was passed as suitable, so began my daily trips to Bodmin, 6 days a week, catching a bus at Mount Charles before 8 in the morning and often not getting home until 8 at night.

The buses were far from reliable, often came to us from bombed-out Plymouth and often broke down. Most of the drivers were "getting-on a bit", too. We had one who used to scare the pants off us! He was slow on the main part of the journey but when we got to Treningle Hill, just before Bodmin, he would knock the vehicle out of gear to save petrol and we would career down the hill at a rate of knots, clutching our seats and praying!

There was one middle-aged man who used to sit next to one of us young girls and "accidently" drop his cigarette ash onto our laps so he could brush it off! There was a great deal of moving seats and doubling up when he was spotted at the bus stop! We made all sorts of rude remarks but he never took the hint.

I was so pleased when a friend from Mount Charles joined me each day. She was in the Fire Service and travelled to Bodmin too. She was such good company, especially on Bugle Bridge in the dark of a winter's night, where we had to change buses - it always seemed to be raining and blowing a gale and the bus was late. On we would go, through Bugle and Penwithick, and then another heart-stopping moment or two as we crept along by Bal Pit. There was not much of a barrier and as the lights on the bus were almost non-existant and we often had fog up there, we used to close our eyes and hope we would not end up at the bottom of the pit.

My job at HQ was quite interesting to start with. Penzance had its own Force then, but became amalgamated with the Cornwall Force, so all the aliens were transferred to our care. There were more aliens in the Penzance area than in the rest of Cornwall put together.

Most of them were fishermen from France, Holland, Belgium, etc. and were descendants of the fishermen who had come over during the first war. They escaped the Germans in their boats and settled in Cornwall as their fathers had before them. We had little trouble with them, but we had one German, a doctor at the Asylum, who argued every week, when he had to report and register, that he was Austrian, NOT a Nazi. It didn't do him any good, he still had to report every week.

I had to make a registration card for each alien and paste their photographs on them. The ones who gave us quite a bit of bother and quite a few laughs, were the Irish workers, who were helping to build the airport. We could never find them! They all seemed to have the same name and when one of the men tried to find one to question him, "Well, begorrah, and wasn't he just here a moment ago, but he had to go to the other side of the airport on urgent business, so you'd better go over there, sur, and may God go with you."

As I said, I was very busy to start with, but when everyone was registered and no-one could move anywhere, work more or less stopped. Our sergeant, a rather grumpy man and very unpopular with everyone, would not let us write letters or read a book, but ordered us to read Home Office Orders. Not a very exciting job and as every new one more or less cancelled out the last one, we learned very little.

Just before war broke out I met my future husband. I was brought up in a strict Methodist household - my father was a local preacher and we were sent to Sunday School and Chapel every Sunday and all the functions in between.

After Chapel on Sunday evenings, when I was about 15, I was allowed to go for a walk with my girl friends. Mother always warned me not to go into St Austell town and to have nothing to do with the town boys. Well, you can guess the rest. We would walk through the town where the boys would be standing in the shop doorways, and down Truro Road where they sat on the wall bordering the park. Someone said it was just like a cattle market!

Well, that is where I met my husband and we 'became an item' as they say. He was working for a blind man who was the organiser for the National Institute for Blind in Cornwall. Roy used to chauffeur him around.

The war came and Roy joined the Royal Navy as a Sick Berth Attendant. He was attached to HMS Drake in Plymouth and did his training in Pwlleli, then sent back to the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth. I used to go up to visit him whenever I could and can vividly remember sitting on a steam train in the evening on Saltash Bridge while an air raid was on, bombs falling round about, shaking and scared out of my wits, until a fellow traveller pointed out that it would be very difficult to hit such a narrow target.

In June 1943, when I was 19 years old, my father reluctantly gave us permission to marry. And so, on 26 June, after several attempts to both get leave at the same time, we were married in Bridge Methodist Chapel, on a glorious summer day. We managed to get together enough ingredients to make a two-tier cake and my uncle, who was a baker, covered it with American frosting. Off we went on honeymoon to Padstow to stay with Roy's aunt and uncle, travelling by car to Bodmin Southern Station, then onto the little train, down through the valley, where we stopped for the train driver to pick up his bean sticks and waited at one of the halts for a girl who was haring through the fields and running late to get to her job at the hotel in Padstow. I'd married into an Anglican family and was soon absorbed into that tradition.

D Day was getting very close and Cornwall was filling up with American and Indian soldiers, tanks and armoured cars. The beaches were mined and barricaded and everyone was living on their nerves. Everyone who had room had Americans billeted on them. We had one, a boy from Iowa, quiet, nice young chap. Father was forever bringing home Americans, black and white, for a bit of home comforts. How mother stretched the rations I don't know, but we never went hungry. Father used to trap rabbits up on the Beam Station and we had many a rabbit pie.

Roy was posted to a ship eventually and went up to Newcastle on Tyne to pick it up. They called in at Southend where Roy went into a sick bay on the end of the quay to try to get some shell dressings, etc as he was only supplied with a few, some splints and some morphia, and there were 72 people on board. An old Chief P.O. brought back from retirement, took pity on him and gave as many shell dressings as he could pack into a haversack. So he went to war - one Sick Berth Attendant and 72 crew!

They then sailed into Southampton. I managed to get a few days leave and a special pass to go up for a couple of days, reporting every morning to the Police. We had digs close to the docks and Roy told me that if I heard the air-raid siren in the night, not to worry but if the ships started to sound off, scramble into some clothes and get downstairs pronto. Naturally, this is just what happened. But the raid was so bad we couldn't make it to the air-raid shelter in the garden as there was an Oerliken gun out there and shrapnel was flying all over the place. So we got under the stairs. That night a house two doors away was completely demolished.

Southampton was crammed full of tanks, armoured vehicles, soldiers from all countries and the Navy - marking time.

So, back to Cornwall for me and a few more days of nervous tension. Then on June 5th all our American soldiers left us only to return that night, the invasion having been cancelled for 24 hours.

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