I loved the school but was still unhappy, and failed the next year with 58%. 60% was a pass. We did our homework at night in the school. I was then transferred back to Marion Cottage, where I was greeted, “So you’re back, like a bad penny.” After a few weeks, I heard while I was in church that they would like some people to go to Australia, so of course I volunteered. Passed the medical and was all set to go when I was told I could not go. I didn’t find out until later years, when I was allowed home for a holiday. After being home for a while, my foster mother said, “If you want to go to Australia, fine, but you have to get your sister to go with you.” I was shocked.; I had never mentioned my sister, but the Homes would do anything to get emigrants to go to Australia.
When I arrived back in Barkingside everything was back to normal. After a year I was sent to a job in London. It was a nunnery run by the Anglican sisters, as near to the Catholic church as one could get. I was free and quite happy. I wrote a letter to my foster mother telling her how much I liked it. The sisters were very nice. We got up at 6:00 in the morning when they rang the bell, called the Angelus, and went to a morning service, and again in the evening at 6:00. We also had a nun who presided over our meals. She sat at the head of the table. Her name was Sister Barbara. I liked her very much and wrote to my mother in Norfolk about my experiences.
A week later a Homes agent appeared at the convent at 4:00. I was told to pack my things and go back to Barkingside Girls’ Village Home, where I was sent before the governor of the village and told I had been writing not very nice things about the convent. They wouldn’t believe me and so I stayed there another year. I found out later my foster mother had shown my letter to our Parson, Reverend Eastman, and he told my mother “next to the Pope” so I was removed after my mother wrote the letter directed by Reverend Eastman. There is quite a rift between the Anglican church’s High Church, as they are very close to Roman Catholic, even using incense.
I stayed at the home for another year and then I was sent as a parlourmaid to Reverend and Mrs. McDonald, who was head of a Barnardo boys’ school called William Baker’s Technical School. I stayed there for three years. I got a very good reference from them.
I was able to leave at last to pick my own job. As the war was imminent I went to work at the Navy, Army & Air Force Institute. It was in the barracks at Colchester. I worked in a store almost like Tim Horton’s but with more inventory in the place.
After a while I left and worked in a clothes factory making uniforms. I laid out the material from the bolts of cloth that was on the table, marked the pattern out, then cut out the cloth with an electric cutter. About ten uniforms at a time and they were sorted in piles to be sewn by the people using sewing machines in another part of the factory. I liked that too, but they didn’t pay much and I now lived in a boarding house.
Then I took a course in shorthand and typing, but didn’t have a typewriter at home, so I passed the shorthand course but failed in typing.
I also worked in an airplane factory, working on ten feet of plywood that would go towards making a mosquito bomber. It was a small plane. Part of it was made with large panels of ten or twelve feet of plywood. They laid the large piece of plywood on a large table. The plywood in transit would become cracked or split, so I would use some glue and sticky paper, also a small knife, and glued the split, sometimes quite large, and rubbed them together until they were moulded fast together. It was very dirty, sticky work. One sheet after another, all day long. I glued and rubbed hard with the handle of the knife until it was solidly in place. I stayed there for a few months and didn’t return.
I also worked for a while as an usher in a cinema but showing people to their seats was boring, so I left there.
By 1940, war was getting quite serious and everyone eighteen and older had to volunteer for war work or be drafted into a factory. Not liking factories, I decided to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, W.A.A.F. I went to join but they would not take me because I had cut the tendon at my heel. I wanted to join badly, so I agreed to have an operation on my foot at the Royal Northern Hospital in London. I was nineteen years old at the time. They called it a keloid scar, uneven at my heel, and it would stop me from marching.
While I was in hospital Gladys came dashing in to say we had found our mother I got up out of the hospital. My mother and her husband now lived at 64 Green Lanes, Haringay, London, E.C.I. I left the hospital and went to see my mother who I hadn’t seen since I was seven. I do not remember too much of the day. Mr. Halliday was there and I did not say too much to him. I stayed the night and went to bed. I heard my mother and the man arguing about my grandfather’s will, saying that they should get the money.
I also asked her why she didn’t come to see me. She said, “As I couldn’t get you out, I didn’t come to see you or write.” So the next morning I said I had a ticket to go to Norfolk to see my foster mother. I stayed there until my foot healed and went back to London to try for the Air Force. I passed the test, although the doctor told me no for a while. I visited my mother in London before I left for the Air Force. It was a quiet visit.
We went by train to Buckinshire, on the border of Wales. It’s quite a distance from London. I think we were issued our uniforms before we left London. It was a large Air Force base. Very hilly, and of course very hungry. We ate kipper. We were then taken to our Mission huts, large aluminum structures with a coal stove in the middle. The girls at the ends froze while the middle girls cooked. We learnt how to fold our sheets, etc., exactly right. Then we arrived at the dining hall, we had kippers. Started learning how to march and salute all the officers. I liked it, but was having trouble with my foot. The marching didn’t help. I don’t know why when there’s a war on they bother about marching so much. I could have done the work fine.
As the month went by, the Sergeant who marched us back and forth to our work, etc., gave me the name of “Wilting Lily” because I was either passing out when someone tramped on my heel, or complained of my sore heel. At last I got sent to a sick bay. The doctors attended to my heel, and back to work and marching. After a while the doctor sent me to a specialist who said I needed a skin graft on my heel, but after consulting with other doctors, they decided to discharge me. I cried and begged the doctors to let me stay, but of course no good. I was to be medically discharged with a good conduct record. Outside, my Sergeant was waiting for me, and wanted to know what had happened to me. I told him “Wilting Lily” was being medically discharged. Well, her face changed, she could not believe it. She would have liked to get out too but couldn’t. I found so many people afterward who would have liked to be in my place. The last week before I was discharged I was coming back from sick bay when I started to cross the parade ground when I realized the whole parade ground was full of Air personnel being reviewed by King George VI, and as no one was allowed to move, I had to stay at attention in the middle of the parade ground. I felt like a nut, as I couldn’t get back to my quarters. So that ended my military career.
I jumped a few years ahead and left a few things out - after we had lived in Norfolk, mother got two more children. Their names were Connie and Florie Geary. Florie was younger than Gladys and Connie was younger than me. We got on well together until the time came for me to leave school. Then I was replaced with another girl older than the others, about eleven, named Agnes Close.
There were two other families in the village that had children from the Homes, but they were luckier than me, as only Agnes and I went back to the Home. The war was coming so the children were allowed to stay during the war. Agnes joined the W.A.A.F. like me, and Connie joined the Navy and was stationed at the white cliffs of Dover. She told me it was a terrible place, guns day and night. Never met again; only one was Agnes who took my place. She made eyes at a grandson of mother’s and married him and became a farm wife.
Before that happened, Agnes and I went on leave to Norfolk and took poor Auntie, who was a spinster and didn’t have much fun. So we took her to the pub and got her drunk. The next morning mother and Auntie sat on the well and mother told her off for getting drunk. Only took two drinks, and we didn’t have much money - 10 shillings a week, about two and a quarter dollars. Auntie could have got married to the only man in the grocery store in the village, but in those days the eldest in the family stayed and looked after the farm. Mother’s husband died of cancer, so mother with all that room and a couple of children would be nice and she didn’t make us do work, we just played in the fields or read at night.
Mother got electricity in the house, but in those days they weren’t grounded and every time we had a bad lightning storm it would strike the house. It struck one day at lunch time and the room turned blue. Later on the lightning protesters, but they didn’t always work, because by today’s standards we would never have passed. They still used a lantern to go to the outside toilet.
One day Gladys and I wanted to go at night. She was an awful tease and would wait for me to sit down and would run off with the lantern. I was always scared by creeping noises in the orchard, so I would dash out after her. This day I almost caught her when the gate swung back and hit her, knocking some teeth out, so I told her if she did not find them she would grow dog’s teeth. Mother wanted to know where Gladys was so I said she was coming. Of course you would never find the teeth. Anyway, they were her baby teeth.
