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My name is Beatrice Corbett and I’m 90.
I didn’t go out to work because I had an invalid mother, and I had to look after her. That was in Queensferry, North Wales. I wasn’t married, but there was my dad and two brothers too. The four of us. I was looking after the family. It was hard work. The three men worked at John Summers Steelworks. They were working there before the war, so they carried on. They were exempt.
Life in Queensferry was just ordinary, but I remember lots about the war. About the planes coming over. They’d come over from Liverpool, to get to the aerodrome here, and the guns here would meet them and send them back, and they’d go backwards and forwards. The aerodrome was at Vickers in Broughton. That’s where the planes were made, so that was the target.
And we would be sitting under the stairs, anywhere you could get, and then in the end, my dad built a shelter in the garden. Even during the day, they’d be over, and then the spitfires would come, and they’d chase them back. In the end, they did drop two bombs in a field at the back of us, in Queensferry. That caused a lot of damage to the houses. It jammed the doors, with the blast. Nobody was injured. We were lucky. But it was terrifying. There wasn’t much peace. You couldn’t go to bed.

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