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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jacqueline Wilde and has been added to the site with her permission. Jacqueline Wilde fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

Part 14

Around about November 1944 all the firemen and women were sent back from Wales to the cities from which we came. By this time I was married and I wanted to join my husband down by Aldershot at Fleet. I asked permission if I could be discharged because I had burned my hands badly a few years earlier, I had done five and half years with the fire service and they said I think you’ve done your bit and we knew that the war was coming to an end. They released me from the fire service and I went to live down at Fleet by Aldershot in Hampshire. My husband was stationed there and he was an instructor he was in the army he was also in the corps band because he was a musician. It was very nice down there, it was very different to these days, at night-time you could go and walk through the lanes and it would be absolutely full of army personnel the Canadians were stationed down there and the Americans and also our own boys. But you could walk along these dark lanes and be perfectly safe nobody would accost you, you could leave your door open when you left the house nobody would go in and steal anything. If you went down the shelters and forgot to lock your front door you’d never have to worry because nobody would ever think of stealing anything. You were perfectly safe walking the roads at night. Down in Hampshire there were no street lights because of the lanes so you just walked along and people would say ‘good night’ to you. From Fleet we used to go on the bus to Aldershot and there we used to go to the cinema, then we would come back on the bus to Fleet and we would have a meal which was a cup of tea, an egg on toast and a cake at a barn that had been turned into a café by a farmer. He did this for all the soldiers and people that wanted a snack at night. And for that we paid one shilling and sixpence for that meal, the cinema would cost us nine pence and so for a half a crown we would have a meal each, and would go to the cinema and travel on the bus for that. The army pay was a pound a week and three pounds if you were married and for four pounds you lived quite well. We used to go to the cinema twice a week or the Garrison Theatre that was the theatre that was run by the army and was free. So we were fully occupied most of the evenings and all that for just four pounds a week. My husband and I lived out of barracks, so we had a bedroom and we shared the living room with this old couple in this house. We paid fourteen shillings rent the rest was spent on food.

We woke up one morning when we were in Hampshire and found that all the tanks and the army that had been hidden in the forests around there had all disappeared down to the coast. That was when we had the D-Day. The planes at night that used to go across looked just if all the stars were moving across the sky, these thousand bomber raids going over to Germany but it looked just as all the stars were moving from the sky.

When the war was over we celebrated in the barracks down there and went up to London and joined all the celebration that was in the city centre.

This is Jacqueline Wild, Firewoman 859397.

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