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A Guernsey Student Nurse at Ascot
Gwenda Long interviewed by Rebecca Kendall for Radio Guernsey, 18/2/05, transcribed from CD by John David 25/11/05

I………. I am joined now by Gwenda Long, who was a radar operator during the Second World War. Now I met you the other day, and you mentioned that you had been a radar operator, I couldn’t resist the opportunity of inviting you in, thank you very much for coming, can you tell us how you got into the forces in the first place?
Well, I was eighteen, dying to get away from Guernsey, in those days you didn’t just go off and get a job, and I wanted to nurse, I had some friends working at Ascot, and so I thought ‘Right, I’ll do my first idea, and apply’ and so I started off in 39 at Heatherwood hospital, Ascot. You did sort of six mopnths as a very young probationer, and I liked it, and you had to then sign on at the end of six months for the duration of the war. I wasn’t too sure, because it was a very different atmosphere, and it was a children’s hospital that I chose, and we had evacuees from a hospital in the East End of London, so I was nursing older people, and what I couldn’t bear was, if you just sat on a bed to talk to somebody ‘come along, you haven’t any time to talk’ and that was the whole sort of atmosphere, and then of course I didn’t know what was happening to my own family, my parents were here.
I………. Of course, in 1939 when you decided to become a nurse, the atmosphere of war was already pervading?
Yes, and the battle of Britain started in September, and we still went up to London, and we had bombs in the grounds, and as it was a TB hospital there was glass everywhere, and when we had an air-raid warning — we did have air-raids near Ascot - we had to then, middle of the night, any old time, because it was orthopaedic TB they were on boards, and we had to lift the mattresses up, put them underneath, and so forth, but it was mainly because I was homesick, and I didn’t want to sign up for anything until I had caught up with my parents.
I………. What was it like for a young girl leaving Guernsey, in the days before women really did go into professions, apart from of course nursing and teaching?
Well, I did it in the way my parents had agreed to, because I was staying in a nurses home, and I was under control, looked after. I don’t think at that stage when I was just eighteen I would have gone off and got a job. You could go to college or university if you were bright, but you didn’t do what my daughters have done and go off to the Far East and travel around and do things at all. You were lucky if you went to France, it was very different. But my nursing wasn’t exactly to get away from Guernsey, because I had thought of doing it, but having four other friends at this hospital it made it much easier.
I………. How did you go from being a nurse to being a radar operator?
I got very homesick, so I didn’t sign on, and my father was a schoolmaster at the Boys Intermediate, they were up in Oldham, my two brothers at Elizabeth College out in Buxton, my sisters joined the Land Army, and my very great friend, whose father was the headmaster of the intermediate, Freddie Fulford, she turned up in Oldham, she’d been working on a farm, she said ‘come on, we’ve got to do something now, lets join one of the services’. We couldn’t get into the Navy — Wrens were just beginning — so we applied for the WRAFs. We joined up together, which made it much easier, and we did six weeks in Harrogate.

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