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As a very small child I am sure that I remember my Godmother, Marjory Roberts, holding me in her arms so that I might look out of a window with her as she waved off her husband Bill to war with, I believe, the 75th Field Regiment, R.A., of Ark Force, the 51st Highland Division. (Although a booklet published in 1942 in the, "Army at War", series by Eric Linklater does say that this unit was composed of Territiorials from Aberdeen!) Bill had been a professional footballer of some renown with Bristol City FC until, as a Royal Artillery Territorial, he was called up to fight. She was standing, holding me and on this occasion not singing, "Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run", as she was wont to do, at a first floor window of her flat in the house in which I now again live, having returned to it when in my late fifties. Marjory was not to know that neither she nor I would see Bill again for some five years. He was taken prisoner at St. Valery, being one of the unlucky ones of the rearguard who did not escape from the beaches.

Like so many other women, Marjory did not sit around and mope. She became a Red Cross nurse and worked at the General Hospital in Bristol, not far from the house.
Marjory worked shifts and in order to snatch some sleep whenever she could she invariably carried a feather-filled pillow with her in the basket on the front of the handlebars of her bike on her journeys to and from the hospital. Her duties in those days included going, as a member of a small team, to the scene of air raid devastation to tend to the dead and injured. They were out and about at the height of the bombing.
One day, as she was cycling along Coronation Road that for part of its length runs parallel to the road in which the hospital is situated (it is still there today), the pilot of a low-flying German 'plane decided to strafe anything that was moving there, including "Auntie" Marj on her bike! The bullets zipped across the road in front of her and into her pillow, sending the feathers flying! Miraculously, she was unscathed. A lucky escape indeed!

Bill eventually returned from the war and briefly played professional football for Newport (he was a Welshman and had been capped for playing for his country) but he never regained the reputation or, presumably, the skills that he had possessed before his years in Stalag 1XC at Bad Sulza and possibly other prisoner of war camps. He has, however, achieved a certain immortality, as the pictures of him in his heyday, to be found hanging in the Boardroom of Bristol City FC at Ashton Gate today, testify.

And Marjory? She died in June, 2004, after herself spending some time in that same hospital and this anecdote may serve as her memorial.

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