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My family holiday always took place in September so when war was declared my annual holiday to Great Yarmouth was cancelled.
The first night the air raid siren went, my 20-year-old sister jumped out of bed immediately put on her gas mask and then tried to get dressed, which as you can image took some doing. Meanwhile I continued to lie in bed; there was no air raid that night.

As we didn’t have an air raid shelter at the beginning of the war we use to go under the dining table that had been reinforced with the help of oven shelves. Even when we had an air raid shelter we only used it once and that was the night the “Plant works” (trains/engines work) was bombed, it was less that a mile away from my home.
During the day I had a normal occupation, at the beginning of the war I was a shop cashier being on the end of those whizzing money capsules. After work I fire-watched one night a week in the town, on top of the YMCA, luckily I never saw any fires.

Every Sunday night I was at the railway station serving refreshments to the servicemen passing through the station, most on their way back to RAF Finningley, some of these men had nicknamed me Judy Garland.

When I changed daytime job, to working in a factory office, I also changed my evening job from fire-watching to the ambulance service. This job entailed taking wounded off the trains because they had become too ill to continue their journey north and taking them to the local hospital. Once I saw a really hunky American on the train, whom I tried to comfort because he was very distressed but I didn’t take him off because it was decided he won’t last much longer so it wouldn’t have been fair on him.

There weren’t many bombing raids on Doncaster but on incident that sticks in my mind is when a former school friend, her father and brothers were killed by a bomb on a parachute hitting their home, her mother survived. Rumours did go round that they thought it was a person parachuting so had run towards it.

Later on in the war we began having holidays again to Scarborough and once while we were there my mother and I saw a queue, which you never walked past but joined. After some time we entered the shop and it was there we found out it was a queue for vegetarians, guess what we weren’t!

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