Australians at War Film Archive

My name is Fay Whyte, Mary Fay Whyte, but I’m always called Fay and I was born in London on the 3rd of October 1918. My mother tells me I was peace baby because people were talking about peace, the First World War. I went to school to when I was very young

and I went to a little church school, St Mathias, attached to the church. We moved several times and the last home I do recall with pleasure was a very old Edwardian type of house in north London and we lived next door to my aunt and uncle, that was my mother’s only sister, and they had a telephone and that was a great thing in those days because I’m talking about the early ’30s.

When I was about 18 I read a book which influenced me very much. I can’t stop and get it out and show it to you, anyway it doesn’t matter. And I do recall the last year at school we had a new

type of lesson called current events and it was things that was happening in the newspapers and I always recall this teacher saying to me, this man Hitler if he gets into power it will be very bad for Europe and be very bad for the Jews and the Catholics. And I remember looking around the classroom and seeing such a mixture of children and thinking, how awful. What does she mean very bad?

I didn’t quite understand it. When I was about 16 or 17 I was working for a big store in London called Debenhams and I was a junior and I started to hear German being spoken, amid German refugees perhaps their father had been Jewish or their grandmother, and I thought, “How extraordinary. These are

well spoken, well behaved, well groomed people and they are refugees.” I didn’t take too much notice of that although it had some bearing on my thoughts to the war until one day in our change room there was a large notice up, ‘Join the British Red Cross, join the army’, which having no television then and only two

programs on our radio, the light program and the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] there was very little discussion about the war unless you read the newspapers, which I did. And I decided I would join the British Red Cross and my division was Westminster because I was working in that area. So I went to the offices of…

I first telephoned and then went into the offices of the British Red Cross; London 30 it was called. I must have been about 19 and a half, I think. That would have been about 1938 somewhere around there. I took first aid and home nursing and the war progressed and Mr Chamberlain went over

to see Mr Hitler and he came back waving a piece of paper saying, ‘Peace in our time’, and my brothers, I had two brothers and I knew there was going to be a war. And one brother joined the army, the other one was a bit young and he waited a while and I couldn’t, went on with my Red Cross work and with my first aid work taking

various courses as I went along. Then the commandant said to me, “You know if a war starts you have to go into hospital first and do so many hours at a hospital.” And of all things, the only hospital that could take me was the children’s hospital at the very famous Ormond Street Hospital. I was allowed to go in in uniform and do so many hours a week and the matron signed my paper

to say that I had been in and that I had worked satisfactorily and worked well.

Make the beds, listen to the children chatting, perhaps help a nurse change a dressing. And I was allowed to go down and see a, to the theatre and see an operation one day. I think they wanted to see how I would feel

about seeing a child being operated on and I was quite good about it. I knew that, I had a feeling that what they did was going to be good for this little girl so it made her better. Then I went, we carried on with my Red Cross work until 1939

and then we were so sure there was going to be a war that when I left on the Friday I had said to the manager if I don’t come in you’ll know that I’ve been called up or I’m going to do my nursing work, or whatever it was that the British Red Cross sent me to.

Well newspapers

going to the cinema perhaps once a week and seeing the news. I think seeing the marching of Hitler of all the youth and these boys shouting, “Zeig heil, zeig heil,” it was rather frightening to think that that was all on our doorstep. My mother said… My mother, who is a very sensible woman, thought, “How could we have another war now when it’s only 20 years since

the last war? It seems almost impossible.” But I was ready, packed up with my apron and my dress and my headband and ready to go at a moment’s notice. So the atmosphere was so charged that people were coming around from our local government putting up air raid shelters fortunately we had a reasonably large garden for London

and an air raid shelter was put in and I said to my mother, “You know you have to be prepared. I will go when the war starts.” It was sort of very hard for her to take it in but she understood it was what I would do. And on the Monday morning after we knew that the war had started I called my office in Westminster and they said, “Yes, you’ve been delegated to go

to Kingston House.” Now Kingston house was a very large block of flats, enormous block of flats, it had just been finished. I don’t know whether you know London, it runs parallel with the Albert Hall, it’s just two streets away from the Royal Albert Hall where all concerts take place. It was right on the corner facing Hyde Park and I had to present myself

there and introduce myself to the commandant. It was quite a journey from where I lived in north London, right over the other side of London through the West End and just past Knightsbridge I suppose if you know London at all. And I found there were other girls waiting and we were between the ages, I was just 20 when the war started, between the ages of 20 and 25.

And we’d be what I would call regular immobile VADs [Voluntary Aid Detachments] and the word immobile meant that we had brassard around our uniform, navy blue brassard, and the sort of royal crest, and immobile VAD was that we stayed in London or that we stayed, we didn’t travel very much further than London, so I could go home at night.

There were about 12 of us and a commandant who served in the First World War and she took charge and we started practising splints and various things that we would have to do in an air raid. And I must tell you they as time went on they used bodies, we got very much more VADs

came in to do part time work. We had various people who came from film companies, from the theatre Drury Lane, who wanted to do their bit, and they’d come in for two or four hours. But we who were paid, we were paid a very minute sum by the local council, by the Westminster council, we worked proper shifts, 8 in the morning till 4, from 4 till 12, and from 12 midnight

to 8 in the morning. So the regular staff worked those shifts and part time people who we all thought were very old, they were all of about 45 or 50, but I thought they were very old at the time, because we were young and it’s a bit of an adventure I think when the war started. When

there was Red Cross day the commandant’s niece Maureen and I, she became a great friend she was about a year younger than me and we were young and we took charge of a Red Cross unit right outside in Piccadilly and it was sort of easy to get people to drop money in and selling flags. We were asked to go to the theatres and sell programs all in aid of the Red Cross and people were only too willing to

have us young people in to do that. So we did that sort of thing apart from doing our own, learning how to bandage an arm or a leg. Then an American team came over and we were filmed on a deserted part of London, they actually used bodies and they put tickets on people telling us what was wrong with them.

I was part of what they call a mobile unit, an ambulance, there were 4 nurses, 1 doctor, and a nursing sister, because although we had taken degrees of nursing and first aid we were not trained in hospital work so we had to have a regular sister with us who was in charge of us. So we were 4 nurses, 1 sister, and a doctor if he was off duty, would go out with us

and we would go to a point that was made for us especially where these bodies lay and we would have to treat these people. I think we were filmed by time magazine, I do know that we were filmed by an American crew. That would be about 6 months after the war when the war was on but not on

it was really the false part of the war when children were taken away from school but there was really no action yet.

Yes, they’d have a broken leg and things like that, broken legs, broken arms, and we would have to splint it and bandage it up. We had little primus stoves so that we had boiling water to use. I think, looking back, cause one can always be clever afterwards,

but before these people were in that position they’d have to be dragged out of bombed buildings. Nobody thought about that, but they just were there for us to have an exercise. Which went all very well and we did it all very nicely. Oh the other thing we had to do which wasn’t so pleasant we had to put on

gas, gas trousers and gas masks and we had about 4 showers in this, this first aid unit was very big, it had this very big unit separate from the ambulance drivers with their ambulances. Then there was the, what did they call them? Demolition squad, because obviously if you are dropping bombs on a house,

somebody is going to have to pick up all the bits and pieces first before you get the bodies out. Well we were filmed the wrong way around, we were filmed with the bodies, but really, because they couldn’t crash houses at that time, but that’s what really happened when the bombs did start to fall. So that went on for about a year I think until the end

of 1940 when they really started bombing and they started bombing not so much the houses but they started the RAF [Royal Air Force] and that’s where I can recall so clearly standing in the garden and watching what we now call a dog fight. And seeing some of these boys coming down in parachutes, it’s really unbelievable looking back on that sight and

seeing now, last Saturday or last weekend I think there was a, in Tasmania, a reunion, and there is only two pilots left out of those and they were the people who saved us and the little Spitfire. The man I married finally was in the RAF and he was allowed to take his pants back with him, and his jacket. And there was no heating,

you know. They had these thick jackets leather jackets, fleece lined and a hat. The only thing he had to give up was his parachute but we saw them actually from my garden parachuting. We were northeast London, Hackney, Dalston, and you could actually see them parachuting and hearing them fighting and all people that had to, all came out in their gardens to watch this. It was the

most amazing sight ever.

Very real, very real, and then it’s starting bombing, then it started bombing. I had quite a long way to go home and the bombs would start off in Hyde Park where they had bombs and we were actually facing the park. There is a very large hotel right on the corner called the Hyde Park Hotel and they were hit but all minor accidents came to us.

People who were scratched, people who had fallen, people who were hurt, people who were shocked, they came to us. And if they were serious they would be taken into hospitals, I think there were nine big nursing hospitals in London, Guys, St Thomas’s, Westminster, St Bartholomew’s, and they were teaching hospitals and nursing hospitals and most of the

sisters that we had, the sisters in charge of us, came from one of those hospitals. And in between times we knitted, we made gloves for sailors, balaclavas, we never wasted our time and as the war progressed we were allowed to sleep a little bit, maybe two or three hours on night duty. I think

one of the most serious parts as I can recall was Dunkirk. Dunkirk I found there were quite a number of older people, and when I say older they’d be in their middle 50s or late 50s who came in as volunteers and they were very sweet they’d come with their knitting. And they were all going to the country they

were all so sure that the Germans were going to land. I found that quite impossible to even believe, and perhaps I was just tough or I belonged to the younger generation that, or I believed in Mr Churchill very certainly. And I think I was extremely lucky as a person; I was very lucky. There was a young woman there called Lady Listell and she

wrote a book This I Have Seen. And she and I used to walk around the gardens of Kingston House, and I said to her one day, “Do you know this is the Listell house, the original Listell house that belonged to your father in law?” And there was a big plaque, stone in the garden to say this. And she’s mentioned this in her book, this young nurse who managed to notice this plaque belonging to my late father in law or something, and

she wrote this book and mentioned me a couple of times in it because I was very war conscious, I was very politically minded. I was a great fan of Mr Churchill a very great fan of Mr Churchill and amongst one the VADs was a lady who had a friend who was a Tory MP [Member of Parliament], and she said, “Would you like to go the House of Commons?” and I said, “I’d love to.” And she said, “ Well I’ll get you a ticket.”

And she bought me a ticket and I must have, I would imagine that I must be the last person alive now who saw or heard that particular debate of Mr Churchill and Mr Chamberlain. Because I sat in the distinguished stranger’s gallery and I was the only woman there, and the war had been on for a few months and

all the ambassadors were sitting there and they were all much older than me. And she said to me when she gave me the ticket, “Now this ticket is worth its weight in gold. You look after it.” And I was very proud going into the House of Commons, sitting up and sort of leaning over and looking down at Mr Hore-Belisha, and names that you wouldn’t even know, Mr Churchill, Mr Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, all those people, and listening to this great man speak.

Terrific, terrific. I couldn’t have chosen a better day to have gone and to hear this great man speak. And six years prior to the war he was anti Hitler and he kept saying we should be ready, we should have this, we should have tanks, should have more armaments. We just had a year to get ourselves

reasonably ready, but only reasonably. If it wasn’t for these boys who literally slept in their clothes at the airfields and they were so tired, how they ever got back some of them, and some of them didn’t because they were so tired. But that Dunkirk was I heard people around me saying, and they were all

very much older than me, that now this was the end, this means that we are going to have Germans walking in our streets. And I used to say, “No way, no way.” Mr Churchill said, “No, we will fight them in the streets,” and that’s what we shall do. By that time of course both my brothers were in the army and I was at this Red Cross post.

Yes, it worried me that these people who were so much older than me didn’t think as I did.

No but they thought a quarter of our army was still there and a quarter of it had come back.

However, I think after the war really, the war started, and it was rather frightening. I would take a bus to go home and a train and I could, the sirens would be going whilst I’d be on the bus, in other words sirens to take cover, and I didn’t know whether I would reach home,

whether my house, my home would be there.

Well you just sat still. You were frightened you just sat there.

No, no you had to get home because you had to get to work the next day. I mean that was my work at the station. And I remember one particular weekend it was really bad and they bombed the whole of the east end of London, a whopping, and where we were at Kingston House

we could see the sky was red for about three days. And I do believe as many people were killed then as were killed in America during their terrorist attack. Big difference being you just got up the next day, there weren’t any counsellors there wasn’t such thing, you sort of dusted yourself off, got a clean apron out and got on duty again. But I did

find then that another girl and I, we decided, her mother decided, it would be much easier if we shared a flat or shared a flatlet and she was very kind, she paid the rent, her mother was in a far more better position. And she wanted somebody to be with her daughter as we were both near enough in age we stayed together. And then I used to go home for weekends.

And that was a terrifying time. My friend’s mother and her husband had a lovely big house right on the outskirts of London at Ealing, but they moved into the Park Lane Hotel. You see if you had a lot of money you could do things like that, you could move into a hotel where you could sleep pretty

well underneath and have your meals so that you didn’t have to give up coupons because it was a lifetime job trying to get meals. My mother would go out every day to see what was on offer and to see what she could buy for her rations, but people who had money could go out and have a meal every night if they wanted to and they still didn’t have to give up their coupons. Well my friend Betty

her parents lived in the hotel, and if it was very bad she would say, “Well you’ll have to stay here the night with them.” And we rang up and we said, “No, we have got to go back on duty,” and they’d get us a taxi. I can recall one night that was near Hyde Park corner, there were bombs dropping at the back of us and there were fire bombs dropping in front of us and I can remember this taxi man saying, “Oh God,” in a real cockney accent, “I don’t know where to take you girls,” and we said,

“Well you let us get as near as we can and we’ll run the rest of the way.” I think you got immune and you got used to it. But what I never got used to, which I did later on, was seeing a house that had been bombed and there would be a mantelpiece and

roses still standing, and yet the front of the house had gone, that wouldn’t be like what we see today, see. And so that went on for almost two years, and I slept in the shelter at night which was damp and wet and I went on duty. Then

Maureen who was my friend said to me, “I’m going, I’m going to go into one of the services into one of the service hospitals.” She went into the WAAFs [Women’s Auxiliary air Force], she wasn’t a WAAF but she went into a RAF hospital, and I rang my commandant and I said, “Well I’ve been two years now at the first aid post, I think it’s time that I went into a hospital now.” And she got in touch with me

two or three days later and said, “I’ve got you into a naval hospital, and I’ll be sending you your ticket to go down to Portsmouth,” and I can remember saying to my mother, how stupid I must have been, how naïve, “Won’t it be marvellous to be able to sleep at night.” Little did I know that where the navy was, that was a target, that was much more of a target than perhaps an office in London. And

I went down with about 12 other VADs we were all going down to a posting at the Royal Naval Hospital at Hasler. Now in England you have these big naval depots like Chatham, Hasler which was the naval hospital at Portsmouth, and there’d be one in Scotland and there’d be another one in the west country which would take in the VADs like myself

So I went in early December to the naval hospital and I got to Portsmouth and I saw these ships sticking out of the water at 45 degrees and I looked round at the havoc everywhere, and Portsmouth the train station had been bombed, it was to the sky. And I thought I seem to have gone from the frying pan into the fire. Didn’t matter there were other girls with me,

and we went on a little boat called a pinnace. I don’t know what a pinnace would be today, it would be a small runabout boat, and that was, took us to the hospital from Portsmouth. The hospital was built in Nelson’s days I think it took the prisoners of war, and it was divided by curtains into cubicles for us nurses. And we went there mostly as a base hospital

to learn the naval quotations, for darkening a ship means closing the black out, and going to the heads was going to the toilet, going ashore meant going off duty, there are various terms that are used today still which were part and parcel of the running of the hospital and nurses would have to know what the running of the hospital was.

And then after I was there about 12 months, or 56 weeks, 18 of us and 4 sisters were chosen to go to a little hospital called Colourcoats, which was north of Newcastle on Tyne, and as far as my mother was concerned that was the end of the world. I mean

I hadn’t really gone very far out of London in my life and this was our first trip. Most of the girls who went with me were girls whose fathers were in the regular service. There was a girl there called Elizabeth Keys, well Admiral Keys was the admiral in charge of the British fleet at the time. There was Ann Curry whose father was the captain of the Hood and I think I was,

I and about two or three others were quite ordinary girls who came from very ordinary lives and had gone into the service, that was our duty and I loved history and nobody could write better than William Shakespeare as far as I was concerned, and that was part of what I had to give was part of my life to my country and

I never ever thought anything could happen to me anyway. And that was, that’s going and travelling in train that went for half an hour and stopped for five minutes whilst the bombers went over or, this is the way you lived, and it is rather amazing to find you take that all in your stride.

Yes, yes. There could be two types of injuries, there would be people had been to sea and had been hurt at sea or they’d be ordinary sickness and accidents that would happen on shore. So there would be two types of

types of nursing, there would be medical nursing and surgical nursing and also the officers that had their own cabins, meaning little rooms to themselves. We took over what would be, I think was either an orphanage or a rather a large building that took either an orphanage or a boys’ club, I’ve forgotten, but that was turned into a hospital

and we were the first nurses to use that hospital and we lived across the road and we could see the sea nearer than we can see the beach here. We were almost at the sea and in the weather you know somebody had to make a path in the snow to get across the road. I think my first real unhappiness when a ship called the Sheffield came in and

the doctor on that ship had obviously gone, he’d been affected by what he saw and he was only nursed by the men until such time he was taken. We were nursing quarters, it wasn’t a big hospital, we had a theatre and we had all the equipment, but anything really

important would have to go to a main hospital in Newcastle. And I saw what, what had happened to this man who had been tied on a stretcher and I thought, “Oh God, this is what really happens when you’re at sea and bombs are blasting.” You know, so far I had seen bombs dropping now these are sea accidents now and

that went on for about, I was there about nine months, when we were hit. We naturally had a flag you see, we had the ensign and I was on night duty with three other nurses and there would be one sister. It used to be a habit when we went on night duty

we would, it was a very friendly, it was a sick quarters it wasn’t a big vast hospital. We would take it in turns to go up and visit each other’s wards and say hello to everybody who was there, cause we knew everybody, we were very friendly with the sailors or matelots as they were called, and we could talk to them all. And this particular ward it wasn’t a very big one and there was a young Greek boy,

and I always wondered afterwards, what was a Greek boy, a young boy of about 17 be doing, 16 or 17, be doing on a British ship and I didn’t have really, I just spoke to him, and I don’t think he spoke very much English and we heard this airplane overhead and then we heard it coming down. And this boy looked at me with the most awful terror in his eyes, and he grabbed hold of me and I grabbed hold of him

and we were both of us flung right across the room. The Red Cross apron as you see from that photo was blasted off me, so the blast was considerable and I can remember feeling blood run down on my face and I said to him, “Well we’ll get you out of this,” and I remember wrapping a bedspread or something around him and I could hear the rest of the sailors and people crying

and the other nurses. And I went, and the one thing you know, I suppose people in ordinary walk of life don’t realise this, the one thing that happens when a house or a building is bombed is the amount of white powder, white plastic, plaster, that is about. You know you are covered in plaster, there were two lots of stairs

sort of fore and aft to go down to the main floor in the hospital and that lot of stairs had been bombed away, and I said to him, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you down somehow.” I could hear the other nurses but couldn’t do anything about them. I thought I’ll take this boy down and then go on to the ground floor nurse and see what was happening. Meantime the nurses across the way, the front, this was just the opposite of what I was telling you before, our front was in perfect but

it was the rear that was hit, you see. So I opened the door to take this boy out to get him across the road and our nursing sister who was in charge of us, said, “What’s the matter, nurse?” and I looked at her cause I could feel the blood running down my face by then, and I said, “We’ve been bombed, sister,” and she immediately called the base, which was about 12 miles away and by then the principal medical officer

and a team of naval people came up and took charge. But myself and the other nurses cleared the ground floor of patients and other nurses came over. I don’t remember too much of what happened except that I remember pulling out an oxygen, which was on wheels, because I knew that that would catch alight if fire got to it. And I don’t really remember too much

of that night except doing those things, and three of us nurses were taken to hospital and there is a picture, the films that you see there. The end girl you see on that film there, she had a, her shoulder was ripped very badly. I had cuts to my arm and to my head. I wasn’t really badly hurt, I just had a lot of glass in my head, and Joan and I spent the rest of the night picking each other, taking glass

out of each other’s hair to get ourselves clean. And in two days time I think we were allowed to go on leave, a survivor’s leave I think they call it, from the navy, and we had a few days away. And I think the hospital was built up again very quickly after that, it was just a stray, it wasn’t a bombing

site it was somebody coming back with a bomb and he saw an ensign and he thought, “Well, that’s a place,” and he just hit us like that.

That’s what the Queen asked me, in another visit to the palace, and I don’t really know. I think we lost two and a couple were blinded. I think it’s glass and flying things that did more damage that anything else but we were away for 12 days and by the time we came back the navy had done a pretty good clear up job of what we had seen and it wasn’t.

After the hospital was bombed I stayed there for a few months and the three of us all went to different places, one little girl on the end to my right, she went to South Africa,

the girl on my left went to Ceylon, I went to Lowestoft. I stayed in England and I went to… Lowestoft had a big naval hospital, Lowestoft. I don’t know if you people know England. Lowestoft’s on the right-hand side going up where the Norfolk Broads is and there was a very big hospital there. And a very pleasant thing happened to me

on the, it was a walk from the medical mess to the hospital took a long time, most of the girls had bicycles I didn’t have one and I had never ridden one. And these two men sitting opposite me, we always travelled first class we had a very strange, we didn’t have pay books we had passports

see we were Red Cross attached to the navy. The army and the WAAFs drew their Red Cross into them and their girls there became sergeants, we didn’t we were always allowed into the medical mess and we were treated as junior officers. These two men sitting opposite me had said to me, “Excuse me nurse, isn’t this you?” and I looked at it and I said, “Yes I think it is.” And we got chatting and the naval officers

sitting on the other side all got chatting and one of them said to me, “If you had a wish, what would you like? What would you like to happen apart from the war finishing, what would you wish?’ And I said, “I wish I had a bicycle,” and they looked at each other and he said, “Don’t you have one?” and I said, “No, it takes 20 minutes to walk to the hospital, 20 minutes to walk back and an hour for lunch, and you’ve got to get everything done in that hour.” And he said, “Well you happened to have talked to the right people.

We make bicycles. Now what’s your name and where can we send it to?” Lo and behold in two weeks’ time a bicycle appeared at the station for me to come and collect. And I had to learn how to ride a bicycle at the age of 23. And it was so nice of these people and they said please send us a book that has you in it, we’d like to know that we’ve given it to somebody who is worth their while

and I met a lot of interesting people. What was it my grand daughter put in a letter to me? I just might have put it away, she said to me in a letter recently from Dublin, she said, “You met a lot of people from a lot of different cultures, different socio beings and you had

a very, a mind that wanted to reach out and know more and you did it, you did it your way, you did it all through your life.” And she said, “That’s why I’m so very proud to be your granddaughter because you’ve done all these marvellous things, and you did them on your own.” But whilst I was in London to go back to London there, at Kingston House, there were people who opened their

very large houses for us in England. And I went to two such houses, I was chosen to go to, one was to the Shelley house, where Percy Shelley owned, beautiful place not too far away, and we saw how the other half lived. And one was to Beauchamp Abbey, I don’t recall that one, what that was like, but the Shelley house I do

recall. So a lot of people through my war years influenced me in books, in reading matter, in thoughts, and I was influenced by a lot of people that I met. Although I still kept to the ideas that I had, I was perhaps a little bit intense for a 22-year-old. I laugh at it now, but I was. Somebody once said, “You know you’re very intense, Fay.”

But, course I said I feel so strongly about something.

Oh beautiful, yes. Yes, we had our own bedrooms we had our own bathrooms, two of us went and the butter that we ate at

the table was made at the farm there, and it was churned and a little piece of butter, she said, “It’s just your ration.” We knew jolly well it wasn’t just our ration, I mean the butter was made there, it was beautiful. And she said to us, “Girls we’ve just got some two new calves in, they have very special names but you can come down and choose one of the names for them.” They were all pedigree. The people that owned the house, Shelley’s house were people by the name of Charingtons

and Charingtons in England were very very big beer people, they were the people like Fosters over here, well Charingtons was the name. And Miss Charington, I had a letter from her when I was decorated, people that get the Times and people like that. Because don’t forget England prior to the war was very much a society where there were working people and middle class people, and although you have it here, you don’t think you’ve got it here, but you do have it here, because you have it here

as in not so much, I won’t say breeding, that’s silly, um the people that had it there, the people who’d lived there for generations after generations were, and they’d had it like that good. As I say those are the sort of people that we met at the very beginning, the first two years of the war,

the first three years of the war were people who we met in the navy, in the first aid posts, were people who were doing their bit because they wanted to do it, not because they were called up. And certainly I wasn’t called up, I didn’t belong to the called up class otherwise it wouldn’t have cost me anything. It cost me a lot of money being VAD because you paid for, the only thing as I say we were given 10 pounds when we came out to Australia and I can tell you the shop where I had to

go and buy my navy blue shorts as per uniform costs 10 pounds, never mind about all the dresses and the white dresses and mess dresses. But they had that sort of society, it isn’t like that now cause the world isn’t like that now.

This is what it did, it showed you how the other half lived and it showed the other half, I can recall

a charming, charming naval officer, he was a regular naval officer, he was RN. RN is of course the straight, we had three lots of gold braids you had your wavy navy which is the volunteers, in between the gold braids, and you had your wavy navy, which was merchant navy, so we were able to

distinguish who we had. And I remember this naval officer coming in, he’d been very ill I think he’d had a touch of meningitis and we were the nearest hospital so he was rushed into us. And he wanted a bed pan, now here was this good looking naval officer a year younger than me or a year older than me, and he said, “I don’t like to ask you but I can’t leave the bed,” and I said, “Of course you can’t.” I said, “It’s part of my job.

Don’t think anything of it.” He says, “May I have a cigarette cause I’ll feel better?” and I said, “ Yes, you may have a cigarette, and use your bed pan and ring me when you’ve finished. I’ll just come and collect it. But don’t worry, you are a sick man, and a charming young man.” Oh we got very fond of each other and he was a very very nice boy. That’s what happened, people of that society met very ordinary people.

There were a lot of nurses who were as I say, there was this girl called Elizabeth Keys, no that was a very sad story, her father was admiral of the fleet, she had the next cabin to me. She a big lump of a girl, large and rather ungainly and she had a very charming brother who was in the, what was the SAS [Special Air Service] at the time, and it came over the news, we had the news on in the morning, it come over the news

that this attack had been in North Africa and her brother was one of the people. But they didn’t often give you names on the news but when it was somebody as important as that you got the news and they quickly turned all the radios off, and one of them, the matron said well, “Send Elizabeth down.” And Elizabeth came up to us, to Newcastle to Colourcoats with us and she always believed her brother

was alive she never believed he was dead. That’s what kept a lot of people also going, especially in the Far East. I know Australia lost a lot of people in the Far East, but England lost a lot of people too in the Far East. When I was as Lowestoft, after I had been there about a year and a half, I was made a senior VAD, I was sent out to

what they call an ack-ack [anti-aircraft] station, a naval gunnery station. About, in between Southwold, Southwold is where they had that series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ many many years ago on television. A charming very relaxed part of rural England, charming hotels and very nice type of people, they had this ack-ack station facing right to sea and the

planes used to come over with these drogues and they had these Oerlikon, and they had one VAD which was myself and a whole lot of WRENs, [Women’s Royal Naval Service] a whole lot of naval types that were learning gunnery, and I was the only nurse on the station. And there was, and I shared a cabin with, the chief petty officer was a woman who was a master at arms

they’re very rare for women in the Royal Navy, and we had one at the station and she looked after all the WRENs. We also had a radar station near us so we had WAAFs billeted on us too, so I looked after the WAAFs and I got friendly with the WAAFs and I had my bicycle so I was able to cycle to Southwold which was about 7 or 8 miles away and meet up. And there was a lot of army all around us, this was 1943, ’42, ’43, ’44,

when the army was getting ready to move over to, so we did meet a lot of people and I don’t think apart from a little time at Kingston House where these sort of older Red Cross people, I never met anybody who didn’t think that the war wasn’t going to come our way. There never was

defeat in anything with anybody. And you didn’t getting all this cuddling up at the station when somebody had been away for 3 months, because you didn’t know when anybody had been away, you didn’t know when anybody was coming back, they just were back. And you didn’t have things called counsellors and I was rather amused when I read that letter from the, your people if you feel stressed at all. If I didn’t need counsellors when the bombs were

dropping I certainly don’t need counsellors today. I look at things quite differently today. I look at the war and as you said, the things that are happening today and I think to myself, you really don’t know, really what hardships are. It was said that it took 28 people to put one American in the front line, it took 5 Aussies probably and 5 English people to put one in the front line.

And over in England there was some resentment of course because there were a lot of them there with a lot of money and we used to go to their dances that they asked us to. Nurse staff had a big air base right at the back of us and they used to ask us to dances and

they weren’t showing off, “How many eggs would you like with your bacon?” I was sort of big brother pandering and I’d say, “I’d rather like to take the eggs back with me and give them to the girls,” because we hadn’t had an egg that year. But when you are far away you don’t have ideas. Now that young man there John Brian, that I made friends with

he’d come down from New Guinea and he used to call the hospital here at Herne Bay and when I got on the phone, he said, “Am I speaking to the BBC?” I said, “John, not the BBC, just an ordinary English girl,” and he said, “Would you like to come out and see the ballet?” cause there was a ballet or something on. And he used to take me to the cinema and I used to tell him about the time

I was in London and going out of the station and seeing these people sleeping in the underground, children, cause children started to come back you see. And these people had their allocated beds, toilets and places, and some of the undergrounds were heavily bombed, but a lot of people took shelter in them because they were heavily bombed, and he said something

very wise to me and I’ve never forgotten it he said, “I’ve read about it, I’ve heard about it, and I know it was bad and very rough on you, but I can no more feel what you felt any more than you can feel the sweat and mosquitoes in New Guinea and the damp.” I’ve never forgotten those wise words because he suffered too in his

way with fevers and illness and sickness that the Australians had when they went to these places. And the further you were away from an incident the less you are involved, “It’s only when you are involved that you feel something,” he said. “I know you had it bad,” he said. He was very sweet, very nice man.

No, never, the civilian people took overflows of

naval personnel. And soldiers but never the other way around, no. All our personnel were naval people, and believe me it didn’t stop the PMO’s[Principal Medical Officer] weekly inspection. He’d go up to the top door with his fingers to see if there was any dust there, the anchors all had to be in row going up the ward like that and he’d inspect the

heads and everything was pucker, everything had to be just so. The only blooper I ever made when I was quite young in the navy, we’d been invited to a ship, we had lots of invitations to ships for drinks. And the sister in charge was going with us 8 or 9 VADs to have cocktails

and I stood back waiting for her to go, and she said, “Go along nurse,” and I said, “No, you go sister.” And somebody nudged me and it wasn’t until after, I learnt afterwards that you always go first, the captain of the ship is the last person on and the last person off, and I never forget the sister being, she didn’t like me very much anyway, I probably had too much to say, she was, “Go along nurse, get along up there.”

“Oh, please sister I was just being polite.” I didn’t know I wasn’t being polite, I was not giving her her rank that she was the supervising sister, she was in charge. But I learnt as I went along what it meant to be in the navy. I remember a naval, we had two mine sweepers, a Dutch ship called the Flores which was manned by a Dutch crew and the

English ship, called the Mona’s Isle. All these names come back after all these years, and when one ship went out the other came in, so whoever had boyfriends on one ship knew that they were out and things like that. And I used to go to dinner on one of the ships, quite a few times I was asked to dinner, and

we started talking about the crew and what a rough life they had, and I was so surprised this officer said to me, “Do you know the discomfort these men have to go through? It’s all right for us, we have a shower, we are just two officers on this ship, we have a shower, but,” he said, “if I had to heat up water like these boys to have a shave

and decent wash do you think I’d bother?” And that was the type of, not atmosphere but that was the way that the navy was accepted by those sort of people at that time. It wouldn’t happen today obviously, when you see how turned out, spruced up everybody is today and they get danger money because they go

down to the, on beautiful ship down to the Red Sea or something. I mean we didn’t get danger money when we crossed the Atlantic, anchored off Ireland, went through the Pacific through Panama Canal, across the Pacific. We weren’t even afloat according to the Royal Navy. You see, times change they change for the better for everyone

change for working people for service people, and for people. But service life wasn’t very easy then, it was a hard life.

Yeah, one of the girls going over on the ship got engaged to somebody. Didn’t last more that a few weeks, a lot of the girls were pregnant by the time they got there. We as

VADs were on A deck with the sisters one side and the officers were on the other side of A deck. There were no chairs, we were in a cabin for four which had 8 people or 10 people in it, we had drinking water only on a half hour a day and then that was curtailed, you had baths, you didn’t have showers then you had baths in salt water, had special soap, salt water soap

and we were rounded up constantly by the sister in charge giving us pep talk about most of the officers were married and we should know how to behave. We used to laughingly call it the purity patrol, we’d go around at night on deck with a flash light to see who was canoodling with who

but it was human nature we were young we were 23, 24 that’s the time you do these things, you don’t wait until you’re 85 before you go out. And it was frowned upon very much.

Yes we came on a ship

called the Athlone Castle, we were four VADs and four two and a half ringers, two lieutenant commanders, we chummed up together. Whoever had breakfast finished first, we were two sittings for meals, whoever finished first got up on deck put down your life jacket and you bagged your places for your friends. And there were two military people on guns

fore and aft and we used to get this place where the gun was, where the gunner was and bag our place for the day and we used to just talk and just talk generally and walk and have sing songs and do things that people do, but you didn’t have very much room to do it in.

We were nearly 5000 troops, the ship normally sailed from Southampton to Cape Town with 700 people, so it was a bit of a squash as you can imagine, and there were two sitting meals for breakfast lunch and dinner. And we as nurses had duties to do, we had a roster where we had to go on duty

and the funniest thing was half way through seeing somebody you had never seen before and they’d been down with seasickness and you know they, “When did you get on I haven’t seen you before.” I mean you knew everybody and everybody knew you, on your deck and you didn’t go down below. But we did see, they had things like lime juice which was given out to sailors who were down A B C deck I think

and they had a ration, they’d come up every week. Oh, things happened to people was to be sunburnt you were on charge, no excuse for anybody to be sunburnt but it was, we travelled by night from Chatham to Liverpool, we got on at Liverpool at night and it was all blacked out you couldn’t see anybody.

And we were allocated to our cabins, and I can remember saying to somebody, “Oh if being at sea is like this it’s going to be marvellous,” and one of the naval officers standing nearby said, “Nurse, you haven’t seen anything yet,” cause going down the Irish Sea was pretty awful. Going down the Irish Sea was pretty awful, and we got down to the Azores and going all out

of line now but you won’t mind. When we got to the Azores we woke up and it was blue seas blue sky, no convoy we had the convoy disappeared, we were all on our own. And the dress of the day was sportswear. We had a dress of the day at certain times, and you’d change and you were allowed to wear sports wear. And the housey housey here which is known as bingo here, is it?

Whatever it is was played and there would be a 1930s film on board but most of us had our friends and we’d walk around and do our thing and talk together and have drinks or do things like that. But it was something that was going on forever, you never had any mail, you didn’t, the only thing they did

they used to have a day’s take on how many knots they do from one place to another and whoever had the nearest thing won a prize, you know they do a thing on it, but that was the only thing they did. I didn’t think there was very much in the way of entertainment, we made our own entertainment, we told stories and we, but it was five weeks going

across the Pacific. Only once we altered course that was because we could see some wreckage and we knew the ship had altered course. We could tell which way the sun was going, but it was so strange to see us going across the Pacific just one ship on its own with all this cargo, cargo of people. But going down the North Sea we had drill, we had drill every single day

and the worst of the drill was going down the North Sea, oh I was so seasick and I got ticked off by the, she said, “What did you say, nurse?” And I said, “I feel quite ill,” and she said, “Well you better go down to your cabin,” and I got out of it. But the girls used to drag me literally, drag me up on deck, now you’ll never get over it staying down below, you’ve got to come up on deck

and they walked around with me and I finally got over it and it was okay. But a lot of people didn’t but when the sun was shining and we were in sports clothes it was just fine but there was nothing to do, it was, there was no games you could play, you couldn’t swim or anything, you know, I mean there was just nothing to do, and just a few tatty old newspapers or, there wasn’t very much you made your

own comfort whatever it was, but it wasn’t very exciting.

That was the, well the hospital was the Admiral of Newcastle, the Admiral who was stationed at Newcastle it was his baby hospital, if there were any people coming from overseas he would bring them up to show them and he was in no time within the hospital being bombed

that Admiral was there with working teams, putting things right and digging things out and the nursing sister who got an OBE [Order of the British Empire] as did the principal medical officer sort of had to give the poor nurses something, didn’t they. But the strangest thing was I wasn’t told and I was away on leave

when the newspaper people came and they dug out some very old horrible snapshots taken and said, “Naval’s first military awards.” And my medal has a stripe going down the middle which tells anybody I belong to the Order of the British Empire, Queensland, and if I do go to their meetings and wear my medals – I used to, I don’t go any more – they know it’s a military award,

somebody there would know it’s a military award. It wasn’t because I ran a post office for 50 years or something like that, it was a military one, and we were the first nurses in the Second World War so that was something. And my friend said, “Well it would happen to you because that’s the sort of person you are.” I said, “I didn’t look for a bomb,

it just happened.” Just one of those things. And I must say truthfully I knew a lot of VADs who left for places in the Far East whose ships were bombed, many sisters, one in particular I used to write to and letters stopped coming and I knew something had happened to her. All the nurses, all the nurses should have had an award, in fact everybody who took

part in the war should have had something, we were just singled out because it just happened to be, but all the nurses worked very hard and were deserving of recognition, I think so anyway. But what we had was nothing it was, the Red Cross then gave us recognition too, appreciation of war service and the Queen gave us that. We actually had

tea at St James’s palace which was very nice, but I was so used to it, instead of taking the taxi to go to the palace we just went by bus or underground, I can’t think what it was but no fuss the second time, the first time was all right, but no fuss the second time.

It was quite exciting, I think my mother was, oh, in Colourcoats there was a

fisherman who owned a place at North Shields and he said he’d like to send all the nurses something to your home and he sent my mother down a box of fish, iced. And if you knew how precious food was then and she had this beautiful fish which she cooked so she was able to have a party, a lunch party and I was so tired I just went

up to bed to sleep. But it was quite exciting my father ordered a taxi which took us right to Buckingham Palace. And we had to queue up, that’s why I was so sorry not to be able to get the other part of, this is what people did, I think it’s so sad that people took these things but didn’t mean anything to anybody but me and when they looked at these things and took them away which is part of my history really.

But anyway that showed us waiting outside the palace and the queue of people waiting there and they did a whole double page of the Picture Post so if ever you were lucky enough to know anybody who knew that paper it was bought out after the war. But it was the only paper, the only magazine that had a coloured format to it, and it was the first time it was used and I supposed they thought it was a nice splash

of colour in the front there, red white and blue, and so. But the ribbon was always recognised by service people officers, they’d always say, “Nurse, isn’t that a medal your wearing?” and I’d say, “Yes, I suppose it is,” because the shine wore off and I wish I could drop it off, but I knew I had been told off so many times for not wearing it that

it was better to wear it and get hassled a bit for wearing it. “What did you get it for?” It was nothing really, and it wasn’t really. Lots of people should have got medals but they didn’t have the right people to see what they did and it so happened that we did and there were some

very very brave people that I met during the war and knew people

Oh, I was the only nurse there and it’s part of the coast that’s crumbling away, and I was there, there were a lot of, there was the Durham Light Infantry were there, that was 1944, yes ’44 there before ’43 I was at Lowestoft and the other time

as they had a little local dance hall where we used to all go up, I used to go down with the WRENs or go down with the WAAFs go down there and I was the only nurse and they always liked me going down there and I was a great friend of a lot of them, in fact I saw some of them after the war but as I’ve travelled so much in so many countries since then you can’t

keep up a friendship with people like that but they were great fun and on our bicycle and I can recall once I had a flat tyre or something like that and I was alone, don’t know how it would be that I was on my own and this tank carrier came along and I sort of did that to it and they stopped, and I said, “You haven’t got such a thing as a screwdriver have you?”

And the officer looked down and he said, “I think it’s more than a screwdriver you need. We’ll give you a lift, nurse.” So there I was they took me up or put me on this tank carrier and right up to the quarters and every body was much amused and delighted to see this tank carrier coming up with a nurse. Those sort of things happened. I didn’t look for them. Truly, it just happened. I was just one of those people that

it happened to, and um. There were WAAFs there were WRENs there were sailors, there were officers, other ranks but I was the only nurse out there. And if there was anything very bad there was a nursing sister who would come out every 4 or 5 weeks to see how I was getting on and

she could report back to the matron that everything was fine and things like that.

It was just part of my, I don’t know whether we should be on tape now, I little bit embarrassing for me. I didn’t realise at the time, you can cut it out can’t you, the head of the WRENs there was a lesbian and I didn’t realise that

and the girl whose place I had taken could do no wrong and she always used to stack me up against this girl and it was a bit rather unfortunate because I didn’t ask to go there I was sent there. And this was quite an honour going there because I was the only nurse and the matron at the hospital thought that I could do that work. Then

after a time I had quite a few invitations to go to dinner we had the Durham Light Infantry we had an American air force near us, and I’d have invitations to dinner with a couple of the WRENs and she was very jealous you see, and she made one or two overtures to me which I didn’t like very much and I felt very uncomfortable about. Then something happened

we had a nursing sister who looked after the WRENs in Lowestoft who was supposed to come out every four weeks to see us, well she didn’t she’d come out about every 2 months and she got very friendly with this, the naval person that I shared a cabin with and they began to have a thing going, which I didn’t mind at all because it left me free you see.

I mean we are going back a long time and that sort of thing didn’t happen, well it did in the services I suppose but I hadn’t come across it before. And one day I had a telephone call from the matron saying that she would like to see me and she asked to see me in her office. And she said, “You are doing very good work, I’m pleased with you nurse.” She said, “Why is it necessary for the sister

to be going down and spending days with you?” And I think I started to cry, I think I was very upset about this thing and I started to cry. And she said, “I understand, it’s all right.” And she said, “ I suppose the sister and,” I’ve forgotten her name now, “were great friends.” And I said, “Yes they have become very friendly,” and she said,

“I understand, that’s all right,” and we left it like that. She said no more to me but then after about a month I came back again and I was back in Lowestoft as a senior nurse and then about six months later I saw I was on foreign draft, and foreign draft was Australia. So that was it.

Well most of us expected to go foreign assignment sometime and there was just this list gets put up, they don’t tell you where you’re going but you are on foreign draft and we all had to get a passport and we all had to have a special injection, a yellow fever injection.

Which would tell somebody that we weren’t going out through Suez Canal we were going out through Panama Canal and we had various injections of, for yellow fever and other things like that and then we were posted. And my mother said, “I don’t think I’ll ever see you again,” and I said, “Oh yes you will.”

But I didn’t see my parents because they both died and I didn’t see them.

My father did. My mother died afterwards but she was, I was then in South Africa and I wasn’t able to see her, but that’s another part of one’s life that goes. Now I have my own grand children and I wish they would hurry up and get married both of them so it would make me a great grandmother, I’m

busily crocheting christening gowns for other people’s babies, grand children, great grand children and here I have a 28-year-old granddaughter who is quite beautiful, lovely girl, and a very handsome grandson. And I have another daughter who lives in Tasmania and she had two children too, one’s a redhead and I think they’re both redheads after a fashion.

She has a boy of 19 and a girl of 15 – she’s the younger of the two – but I’m closest to my oldest children because we lived together in South Africa; we were very close. I looked after them in South Africa and I am very close to them.

Yes, very exciting and you had a list of the things you had to take with you, and the list included so many white dresses, one grey mess dress

I don’t know where they think we were going, but it all sounded very very exciting and we did wear our mess dresses onboard ship in the evening, just grey dresses I think they were quite plain, we had little red capes. We had a navy blue walking out uniform too not unlike a WAAF a WREN we would call them

a WREN walking out in a skirt and a jacket with a slash on here saying Royal Naval Hospital in red and then a mobile VAD round the cuff here to tell people what we were. And then over here was a lapel a little thing here in brass which said London Red Cross number 40. London would be divided up into all these different counties, you know councils

and where you nursed, 40 was Westminster. So it was all very exciting I got a tin trunk and everything was packed up and strangely enough the only thing I really took with me was my medal. I think I went to Buckingham Palace for the second time was a Red Cross certificate making me an associate member of the

Royal Red Cross. I left it with somebody who put it in the garage I think it was bombed and when I wrote to the Red Cross recently in the last 10 years, and wrote to the headquarters, and they put my letter, they sent it on to, what department would it be where you go for things? They weren’t, I’d even had the British Empire medal they

don’t record this, “We’re terribly sorry you must be very disappointed, we don’t lose records but with the moving about records get lost.” And I suppose in those days having lots of paper, whereas today you put everything up on the computer, presumably, as I say my friend went to look on the fiche so that he would get that photograph for me, not just the photograph but I wanted

the double page so that I could treat it like that page has been treated and he said, “I looked and I’m sorry I just couldn’t find it. I spent a long time looking, and I’m so sorry because it must be somewhere.” Somebody had got it, you know, but.

Yes, it was

It was exciting for this thing we had such good food. Every one of us must have put on a stone in weight from the time we left Liverpool by the time we arrived in Australia, that’s what you’re wanting to eat here. But the food was all so good. See we had fresh fruit, we had fresh eggs and bacon and they had their own bakery and we ate as though we were starved. We weren’t starved, we

ate in England so much stodge. We didn’t get white bread. You got, I don’t know what sort of bread you got but it went off in 24 hours. And I can recall at Lowestoft all of us belting down on our bicycles because we had heard somebody’d got gooseberries and you wouldn’t know what a real gooseberry is, a little fruit like that hard green which turns red.

People used them for chutney, making jam. Its an English fruit and we all had to rush down there on our bicycles cause you would get a half a pound of these, fruit was impossible. Chocolate was out of the, although you had a sweet ration, these things weren’t available. I can recall sending a boyfriend a Christmas parcel and

in the parcel I gave him Imperial soap, and handkerchiefs. That is what we regarded as a gift. You know things were so scarce and all these things were available on the ship coming over

The Athlone Castle,

it was the Castle Line of ships, and as I said it normally went from Southampton to Capetown. That was the trip and it carried about 600 and 700 people, now they were carrying 5000 in the way of troops. So you can imagine how we were all, we had to share very heavily, you know, there was no place to sit down

on the deck you either had to sit on your life jacket or, I must tell you this it’s rather funny. You had a life jacket on one side you had a battery and on the other side you had a bar of chocolate, and when we were having life boat drill going down the Irish Sea, as I say was the worst part. A we were all seasick, the sea was a dark green, it was the end of December. December in England in Ireland is very cold and you’re up here and you’re looking

down at the sea and you’re thinking you’ve got a war ship at the back of you and another destroyer in front and there were other ships in the convoy, and you were having to go up, all of you at half past 10 to do drill and the ships, the boats were they were taken off by the men that the sailors they were put out

in case we were bombed and I looked down at the sea which was a horrible shade of green, I thought, “My God.” My light on my, over here and a bar of chocolate over there, you know one could see the funny side of it and we did laugh about it. How anybody was ever going to see anybody down there, to us it was miles down because we were on A deck.

So I think fortunately a lot of the girls, a lot of the VADs I was about he middle age, a lot older than me and there were a few younger than me, we were able to laugh about this you see we were able to laugh about these things. Some of the girls unfortunately fell in love with a few of the married officers, cause we were all

officers, I’m not saying officers per se but this is how we all lived, they all lived on one deck. There was no form of entertainment you made your own, what could you do onboard deck, tell stories or sing, very little you could do and you were going into the warm climate. The only break was going through Panama Canal and as we left the Azores and we were going across

there we were greeted by what is called bum boys these little boys on small boats, they threw up bananas to us. Well most of the girls hadn’t even seen bananas for 5 or 6 years and they were quite green. And they threw them up onto the ship so that we should all enjoy then and it was quite fun, it was quite fun, and as I say we made our own fun

and we did things and we sang from the ‘Mikado’ and Gilbert and Sullivan, we sang what we learnt at school and things like that, and the girls flirted with the men and we got along and it was. No mail came on board, you sent letters which the officers you were with had to read to send out and one of them said to me,

“Fay, don’t get too involved with so and so because, you know, they don’t tell you they are married. And unfortunately you’re with these people all day long. You get very attached to people, so it’s just like you’re nursing people – you get very attached to them.” But and then we went through Panama Canal, and that in itself is something

that you two young people, if you ever in your lifetime take a ship a sea journey try and go through Panama Canal because that’s one of the wonders of the world, I’d say. Although it’s man made, here you are this big ship, I don’t know how many thousands of tons, and you go into Colon, which is the entrance to the canal, and you are like you are sitting on land, just like this cup

is sitting there, so you’re sitting with the land either side of you and you are stationary, we were stationary for about a day and a half and some of the officers, we were allowed off the ship then, but you could only go down into the yard, the naval yard, there were iron gates you see, you couldn’t go through, I think some of the naval officers were allowed through

but the rest of us, all of us, all decks were allowed out. So you had all these thousands of people all crowded into a yard just to be on terra firma as it were. You could smell, you could smell the colour of the orient but you were already, by Panama you were in strange smells

you could smell the heat, we were all dressed for summer. We wore sportswear during the day and you got back into mess dresses at night and stockings and that. And then it took us I think a day and a half to go through the canal and then you went down, and then you were going through to lunch and the ship was going down and the sides of the ship

was a wall, you see you are going down, I suppose they were letting in the water. And all this was worked by one man by one native American sitting outside with his back, he wasn’t even interested in us, which we thought was so uncanny, everyone was calling out, you know the girls wanting to make touch with somebody outside the ship but it took a day and a half at least for we went through the different locks

so we came out into, onto the Virgin Islands on the other side, they’re beautiful islands, I think they had bananas, yes they must have grown bananas on them. And then we came out into the Pacific. That was the shortest way to take us at that time otherwise we would have had to have gone up all the way around Capetown, and all that way which I think it’s quite a long way and an expensive way and

going to the hospital we were the second draft of nurses. There was one first before us, we were the second nurses to go out into the Pacific.

Nothing, really quite nothing. We were taught at school, we were not told anything, we actually weren’t told where we were going, we were soon, somebody said, “You know we are going to Australia.” I suppose some

of the naval officers knew and they gave, they passed this message to the VADs and we all knew by the time we’d been on the ship a few days, where we were going. All we, what we really learnt at school, it was a place where we sent convicts, 150 years ago or 200 years ago but a

friend of mine said to me, “You know you are going to a new country, a young country, it should be very good for you out there,” but I never knew that, I never knew that everybody spoke English with a slightly funny accent. I don’t think

any of us knew too much about Australia and somehow it was, whether it was very slack or whether somebody didn’t think in those days, it would have been nice if we’d have had some talks about what we would expect when we arrived. Aboriginals, white people to say the least, what would we expect when we

went to Australia. I don’t think we ever gave it a thought and of course our address was the Royal Naval hospital Herne Bay, incorrect, Herne Bay. There is a Herne Bay in England which is by the sea and we said, “How marvellous we are going to the seaside.” Little did we know we were inland to the west, we were quite near

Bankstown I think and in a mosquito, 11 acres of land which was full of mosquitoes and it was said that the Americans who had bought the land had really meant to buy it up in Queensland, something Bay and by mistake had brought it down to be

near Sydney. So when we said you know we are going to be in Sydney tomorrow we were all very excited and everybody started packing up and wondered what it was like, because we had been so long at sea without seeing another person, without seeing another ship, without having any news of the war. It felt very very strange

and probably because most of us were young that we were able to take this type of, we weren’t pandered like service people probably are today. Our expectations were very low, I think. So whatever was going to be waiting for us that was going to be it. And when we

arrived it was, we arrived on Australia Day and I think there’d been either the day before, I think there had been a strike or something so we had to stay on the ship for another day, simply because nobody could move our luggage or us. So there we all were at Woolloomooloo.

I did say I’d met some nice people whilst I was in Australia yes, that was getting later. And we really didn’t know about the hospital, where is was going to be, where it was. I must to say it was big shock to most of us when we were taken out by coach to this

place outside and there wasn’t a plug for the bathroom although they had mosquito sticks at each end, rods at each end of the bed, there were no mosquito nets, and the mosquitoes just loved us because we were fresh blood and we got bitten alive there. And I think a lot of us then, we didn’t feel homesick when we were at sea, it’s strange that, now I come to think of it, we only felt homesick when we arrived on land

yet we hadn’t met anybody we were the same people still.

Woolloomooloo it’s a bit hard to tell you, but the first thoughts were how lovely all the girls were that we saw, what beautiful skins they had and how pretty they were. With sort of blonde hair

and coming from dreary England you know you couldn’t but face powder or lipstick you can just imagine how fresh and lovely everything looked in Australia and that stayed with us for a long long time, that was part of getting to know Australia really.

I think we were about

all told we were, in Brian Madden’s book he said there were about 250 of us, that didn’t include the sisters, the nursing sisters or the doctors or the medical mess. Yeah about 250 of us and of course having the, being this, in the heat of the summer there in January and going into the winter everything was

the wrong way around if you know what I mean. It isn’t now but it was then. But we got used to it and we used to go out with groups into Sydney. then of course we were allocated wards and places we had to go and we started having patients coming in

then we were given time off and we were, there was no mark on the stations, they had taken down the names of the stations. So one of the girls had to stay awake at night so they could count, we were 12 stations away from St James going west, south, that would give you an idea where we were, Riverwood. Riverwood now and it

was actually bought by the Americans. I think in Mr Madden’s book there is a picture of the layout there is these long Quonset huts we nursed in and it took about a good 10 minutes to 15 minutes to walk from your ward to get lunch and to get yourself tidy or change your apron to go back on duty, another 15 minutes. So

we had about a half hour for lunch because you had to do a lot of walking. It was about 11 acres the hospital was and we used about a third of it I think, it was quite a walk to go backwards and forwards I think. But I think the Australian people as such were so kind to us, I never went into Sydney that somebody wouldn’t

stop me in the street and say, “Oh you’re from London. Do you know my aunt? She lives in Bellum,” or “My grandfather came from such and such a place.” And you’d say, “No, I’m so sorry, I lived in north London.” And I don’t think then some friends that I made, and both the girls were my age and they said, “Oh we’re going home one day,” and I said, “But you are home,” and they said, “No, we mean home to England. We want to see England because our mother and father were from England.” So at the time

people regarded England as home. And I tell you who came out the same time as we did, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, they took up the position as, he took up his position as Governor-General about 4 days, he must have come in a ship, he landed just after we did. He took up his position as

Governor-General and she came out to the hospital there is actually a picture of her coming out and seeing all the nurses and I was in there somewhere, we all had our photo taken with her.

Not really but everybody liked to talk to us, everybody Australian wanted to talk to us, it didn’t matter what shop we went into, we formed a queue mostly

at David Jones to get dried fruit and butter to send home. I made friends with a lot of people who just came up and spoke to us because we were always in uniform and my London 30 told them I was from London, the 30 or 40 wouldn’t mean anything to them, just that I came from London. And I was here and I was out at the hospital. And that lady in that photograph there she became very friendly with

one of the girls and she made dresses for us cause we had no summer clothes, you couldn’t buy fabric in England to make a dress and you wouldn’t have worn one anyway, and she made us summer dresses and she was sweet, she came over to visit me when I was in England, that’s another story, but she certainly came to see me when I was there.

I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it, a piece of meat hanging over the side of a plate it would have done a whole family for a week, and your fish was quite different and although the salads and tomatoes were big, they were big but everything tasted full of water it didn’t, everything in England grows small but it takes a long time to grow

and because it takes a long time to grow everything is much sweeter and different it had quite a different taste. And one of the things too which we did, quite near where we got off the train was a little I think he was an Italian man, I don’t know what he was, but he wasn’t from England but he owned this little shop and he sold cakes

and to be able to go and buy a cake, it had pink icing or green icing on it, it was, now I look back it was ghastly but we made ourselves almost ill eating cakes because you didn’t see them you see, they were rationed you didn’t see them. But to able to go in and buy something that wasn’t rationed, and as I say we put on so much weight most of us coming from the UK [United Kingdom]

but I think we soon sort of worked it off, but we found the food different, very nice but different, and a lot of salads which we all liked very much indeed.

Well the best we could do was to send parcels and that’s what most of us did every time we went into Sydney we sent a parcel of dried food, tinned butter, whatever we could

do we could send, and they came to my home or to friends or to aunts. That was the only way we could do it, you know do it. But we were very lucky in as much as we were able to travel in uniform quite a way, now that boy on that photograph I showed you

his father was the head of the customs for the whole of north Queensland and he said to me, “Would you like to go and stay with my parents and see another part of the country?” And I said, “Well they don’t know me,” and he said, “Well I’ll send them a telegram and tell them you’re coming,” which he did. He was, he’d come out of the army, he was going to St, is there a college St John’s university? He was going to

university, he was going into the External Affairs Department, that’s what he did go to. And I went, I rang up the airport and I got a seat with some pilots who were going to Brisbane, I didn’t have to pay I just sat up front with the pilots. They were Australian boys that were flying up there,

I sat up in the cockpit with them and they showed me where everything was and one of them said to me, “Now you look at this map and see if you can tell me where we are, we should be passing such and such river,” and I would point it out to him and he would say, “You know that’s further into the middle of Australia stay over this side.” They were very sweet to me and

I got off at Townsville, they took me as far as Townsville and they said to me, “Nurse, are you booked into a hotel?” and I said, “No.” He said, “Would you like to come along with us because we have a hotel that we go to,” I think it was Townsville, yes. Was it? No, it was Brisbane, and this hotel was only pulled down a few years ago

I was very sorry I hadn’t gone there because I had to sign the register and it was very interesting because the army, there were a lot of army boys there and I can remember after we had had dinner I said good night to these boys and they said in the morning, “We’ll give you to so and so, so and so who’ll take you up to Townsville and you can go with them as far as Townsville.” And I remember lying in my bed and some

boys in the army were walking past and one of them called out, “Hey there’s a sheila here,” and I realised that it meant me and that was the word for a woman. And I thought to myself, “Oh,” but it was all right, we weren’t bothered.

Yes, first time

Actually, these boys made me feel very comfortable and I said to them, “Will I be sick or something?” and they said, “Well there’s a bag over there if you do think so,” and I wasn’t at all, and I think that the moving place away from the land is quite a good feeling, it was quite comfortable. Yes it was the first time I’d been on a flight and then they took me as far as Townsville where I saw my first bougainvillea

and my first Aborigine, first time, and when I went to breakfast the boys said to me, “We’ll take you to breakfast, and then I’m afraid to Cairns you’ll have to buy a ticket, we’ll show you where to go and you will go and get a ticket to go up to Townsville, and I’m sure Mr Ryan will come and meet you, he’ll know there are only two flights a day,” or whatever it was, “and he’ll know you are on

that flight.” I think one of them sent us a telegram or something, I’ve forgotten that item. But

Well they were sitting on the floor and drinking and the boys in the RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] sort of

didn’t stop, they sort of shooed me past and said, “You’ll see that quite a bit while you’re up here.” And they were drinking beer or whatever it was from a bottle and just sitting outside the hotel and drinking. But I was so sorry when a few years back when I was going to go into this hotel in Brisbane and look and see who it was,

we’d all signed the hotel register you see, and I wanted to see, and the next morning somebody said to me, “Remember the hotel you talked about? Well that was taken down during the night,” during my stay here during the last 20 years, and I thought what a pity because these are old landmarks and if you take them down you take down a little bit of history. What a pity to take down, it could have been

you know propped up, and it was where these boys always stayed and they took me there, and as I say they took me up to Townsville.

I can’t remember the name but it was a hotel that was taken down in the middle of the night I know the next morning there was a bit of a furore about it on the news and it thought, and I was going to get somebody to take me to the hotel

to try and see cause I remember going upstairs, and I remember sleeping, not outside like I did to the various houses that I got, stayed with friends, sleeping outside on the veranda which I think you can’t do these days. But we went to hospitality house which was a house where we nurses would go to

people put their names down if they were to be entertaining us, asking if we’d like to come and stay there. And one of my friends and I she was an Irish American girl, Patsy, and we put our names down and we took a ferry over to the zoo and from there we went to Mosman and from there it was a lovely, lovely part

it was a lovely part of Sydney that we went and stayed for as many weekends as we liked and we learnt a lot about Australia from these friends of ours and that was a very happy time. It was away from the hospital it was away from the things we saw. I think that about the time the Japanese suicide were dive bombing on our aircraft carriers

and things like that and we had in quite a few sailors that had been injured and things like that so it was so nice to get right away and

And Mr Ryan was waiting for me and took me back and

he mentioned that the customs house, it was in February, and that’s when you have cyclones and he said the last customs house was blown down in a cyclone so this one was put up in stone, it was concreted in and he said we live above the customs house

so they took me up, and he introduced me to his wife, and his other children, John had three brothers and a sister, and they were very nice to me, they were very keen Catholics. It’s the first time I had known any Catholics and she had said to me one day, very pointedly I’m afraid, that one day John was going to marry a very nice Catholic girl so that rather

you know we were very quick at taking the hint of things, not to get too friendly with John because he was going to marry a Catholic girl, which I wasn’t. And I said, “What about Mary?” “Oh, if Mary becomes a nun that would be the most wonderful thing ever.” And I thought, “How awful.” I thought. being young myself, and full blooded, I thought, “How awful

for this mother to wish that upon her daughter, and all her sons to be priests or to marry.” I thought it was, it was a sign of the times, of that era possibly, I think.

Yes

very much although I stayed mostly with the Allports who were living at Mosman right at, I’m trying to think we took a bus to Mosman and then right on the front, the sea was so near it was absolutely beautiful. And their youngest daughter is still alive and I’m still in touch with her

we send Christmas cards to each other. She was in the WRANs [Women’s Royal Australian Navy] she went in at the age of about 17 to the WRANs and they had, they were cousins who’d married and they were very English in their outlook, most of the people that were, their values were very English but they were more liberal they were starting to get more

liberal, and

Marrying, they weren’t marrying that had arrived over, they were marrying boys that were possibly a second generation.

And we said, and Patsy and I said, “No we can’t stay to have dinner with you, no, no.” She had a girl and a boy and the girl was so pretty and blonde and she said to me, “Had we stayed in England we would never have had this,” and I said, “What does your husband…?” I’ve forgotten her

husband’s name. “Oh, he works on the railways.” And they rented this delightful cottage on land and I was introduced to passionfruit for the first time in my life which grew all round the fences. And he brought them in and said, “Do you know what this is?” and I said, “No.” “Well,” he said, “I’m going to cut one and you scoop it out.” But when she gave the food I said, “Oh, that chicken was actually beautiful.” She said, “That wasn’t chicken. It was rabbit.” I’d never tasted rabbit

before in my life, that was the first time I’d eaten rabbit and she gave me something that she called, they were little, what would they be, not new potatoes, but they were a vegetable I hadn’t eaten before but she served it as a potato

so there was a difference in food when I went out to stay with people, in the hospital we had very much all a military or naval cuisine.

Oh yes, because we felt we were taking food away from her husband, because we would have a meal, we would have supper or a dinner when we went back to the hospital

our late meal, our meal was the evening meal depending on what your duties were. If you were on night duty you would presumably have a meal before you started out on night duty and you would have a light meal during the 8 hours and breakfast when you came off and went to bed, but so Patsy and I said,

“No, no we can’t take your husband’s meal.” She said, “No, no, there’s plenty,” and we wondered and then when she told us it was rabbit we couldn’t believe it, but it tasted just like chicken. “Well,” she said, “it is like chicken.” And she made a beautiful meal. It was made in a pot – it wasn’t roasted – and it was lovely and we thoroughly enjoyed going for meals and she insisted that every time we came

it was a change from the hospital meals which do get stereotyped after a time, it’s like you know, a lot of sameness when you are living institutionally which those days it was. In a war 60 years ago you didn’t argue about the food you just ate what was given and made the best of it. I actually ate porridge for the first time in my life being in the navy

We eat porridge now don’t we in the winter, Coco?

John’s father was awfully kind his mother was a little apprehensive of me because I was a friend of her eldest son, a girl, from England and I wasn’t a Catholic. So it was left to Mr Ryan entertaining me mostly, we talked a lot and he

said to me, “I came over as a baby of 6 months old, and because I wasn’t born in this country the top in my position could be, I have the top position I could possibly be being Irish born and

I wanted my son to be able to take a job in the External Affairs, and that’s why John is at college,” he said, “and when he finishes he will be able to get this job because he is Australian born.” That was at a time when everybody had to be British presumably cause I said to some other friends, “What sort of passport do you have?” and she said, “ Oh a British passport,” and I was

quite surprised at not having an Australian passport. And one of the girls in particular as a married woman in her 50s was going overseas with her husband and didn’t realise she’d been born in England and she had to take out papers to be an Australian, even though she’d come over as a baby, no she didn’t come over as a baby

I don’t know was she born in Australia? No she must have come over as a baby, and she had to take out papers as an Australian, as a married woman, as an adult. So these were little differences that I found out as a went along that and John became, went to the External Affairs and became an ambassador in the Far East

and we met up in different places like London and New York when we lived in Canada, he came up to stay with a friend, the friend who was an Australian Press Associate and he came up and stayed with us and we lived in Canada and then I went on a buying trip down to New York and he said, “Now you come and stay with me.” He was then married and had three children

Yes, a very nice Catholic girl. And I saw him when I came back 20 years and my daughter was living in Canberra and when I went I had a letter from him telling me he was going back to Canberra and I rang the External Affairs and they asked me my name first and put me through to a lot of places before I got through to him and I said, and we had dinner together,

and he said, “You won’t believe this but I’m looking after our spy department,” he was head of ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] 20 years ago and we had dinner together and he told me about his children and they’d married and all left the nest and he had a house in Melbourne I think and one in Canberra and he died about 17 or 18 years ago

much to my sorrow, but he was a very nice boy. And we met up in places like London and we kept in touch for years in fact.

When I finally got to Cairns Mr Ryan explained to me that we sleep outside all the time we don’t sleep in the house and he comes around at night tucking in the mosquito netting to make sure we were all right. And he said to me, “Now whilst you’re up here you must to see Green Island, which is a little tiny island, and I have a friend who is a skipper and he’ll take you there.” And I must say I was nearly seasick going there

it was a tiny little boat. And this island didn’t have hotels it just had coconuts and it had little tiny shacks on it and there were apparently people used them for holidays and things like that and he said to me, “Have you seen a coconut with its outer shell on it?” and I said, “No.” “Oh, we’ll collect some for you.” So we

got a big box we collected the coconuts, and he said, “If you know the name of the ship we’ll put them in a box for you and you’ll get them when you get to Southampton,” and it was exactly what happened, and for the first time English people saw, some of my friends saw coconuts in their matching shell. But he did show me also the beautiful coral under the sea I was able

to look through the glass in his ship, little boat, lovely corals and I was told when I came back well don’t think Green Island will be like that now because it’s been bought by the Japanese and it’s been taken over and there are hotels and country places, not a bit like you’ve saw it, and said I don’t want to see it thank you. Cause it was so lovely. And then it was time for me to go back and I was going back on an

American flight. Mr Ryan, we had to get up about 5 o’clock in the morning cause it was all illegal this flying of the pilots you see. And I sat up the front and Mr Ryan said, “I shan’t go until I see you go off,” and the pilot came down and said, “I’m terribly sorry but there is a cyclone and we won’t be able to land in Townsville, so you must try again tomorrow.” So tomorrow we did the same performance going there

and this time I got on it was all right the cyclone had done its worst or passed. But it was bit rough going, you know, after a cyclone there is wind and lots of rain and I sat up with the pilots again, but this time it was an American aircraft, although flown by the Australians and it was full, full of Americans coming down to Sydney or wherever they were

and after we had gone about half an hour there was a knocking at the door and some officer put his head through and wanted to know if it was safe, “Is it quite safe because, you know?” and I was sitting in the front peeling a peach and he said to the officer, “The nurse here doesn’t look worried I don’t know what you’ve got to worry about’

I was just skinning a peach with these boys. Anyway we got back safely and after that, oh Mr Ryan had to send a signal to the ship, to the hospital to tell them I was delayed somewhat owing to the cyclone and after a signal went up on a board, that we were not to go to these out of the way places without not by, other than aircraft, pay for them you know, be delayed or

things like that. But after that I managed to get a trip down to Melbourne so I did see, I’ve seen more of Australia then than I’ve seen of it in the last 20 years. I also went out to a cattle ranch to stay, I’d had some news that a boy I was engaged to was killed and I was very upset and I’d heard over the…

Yes,

he was at (UNCLEAR). This was towards the end of the war and the head of the Red Cross said to me, “I think you need a break, you need to get away,” and she knew somebody who owned this beautiful cattle station at Ganuganu, I know it sounds funny but it’s spelt Ganuganu and what amazed me and this was

something really amazed me, here we were out in the bush, there was trees, they had a man, you wore something like a bowling hat a striped waistcoat and he rode one horse and I rode the other horse, and they had this beautiful house on this cattle station. They had their own smoker. They had their own bacon which they smoked, and I thought it was unbelievable. I’d expected

any minute to ring a bell and the servant to arrive cause it was that sort of a house, it was almost like an English beautiful home transported in the middle of the bush and this was a returned doctor and his wife. And this girl’s parents had known the parents in England or something like that and she said I needed to get away, right away from the hospital and go and stay with some people and just

talk and get over my shock. Which I did for about a fortnight and I loved it, and every now and again I see it comes up, when I first came here I cut a piece out of the paper to see that this station was up for sale. They called it a historic station and it would be, it was really lovely.

I didn’t meet many of them. I only meet somebody like John Ryan and the people who flew me hither and yon, but we didn’t actually meet a lot of ordinary Australian men to go out and go to a dance with or socialise with. I did

meet them in homes of friends of mine. There is a big difference in what they were like then and what they are like now. How can I explain? Don’t forget a lot of them still regarded England as being attached somehow to there

and they were probably sons of immigrants. Incidentally, when I was staying with my friends in Mosman I met a family who he’d been the chairman of these little, these young boys who came over, Doctor Barnardo’s homes and they asked me if I wouldn’t stop in Australia

and take charge of being one of the matrons and I said, “Oh, I’m far too young and I haven’t got the experience,” and they said, “No you have you’re far better experienced than anyone we’ve seen. You could cope easily with these boys.” And I was very, very tempted but the home was somewhere in the Blue Mountains and I thought when it came time for me to go back,

“I can be demobbed [demobilised] anywhere. I can be demobbed in California if I wanted to. Suppose I say I’m demobbed in Australia and suppose this job isn’t to my liking or I don’t suit. What am I going to do all by myself in Australia?” I was too scared and that made me feel that I needed to go back to England

these people tried very hard, on every occasion that I met them to take up this post and I said there are far more people suitable than me, and I really thought there were.

A lot of huts, no I can’t show you in that photo, a lot of Quonset huts with gates in the front with naval personnel minding the gates, but 11 acres of these huts where we, two or three of them was where we slept in, and a couple of them were used for dining rooms. The best way to do it is to have a look at that book

I have over there and it shows you actual pictures of it and what Herne Bay was like then. We’d get a truck coming in or a lorry, a truck coming in with great big watermelons for a shilling each on them, and we all made a dive for them, they’d be about that big, you know. A shilling each for a watermelon,

where we had to wait for the bus if we wanted to take us into Sydney or places, we nearly got bitten alive waiting. There was one road I think led to, there were no macadamised roads, they were just earth, and we got bitten alive nearly. So whenever we could get a lift with any transport going to Sydney we did.

And we got the train coming back, it wasn’t too far to walk from the train I would say as far as a walk from this house here to where you walked for your lunch to Moppet Beach, it would be about as far as there. But there were no lights or things like that.

Oh, it was never really full, never at any time was it full, expect when we got the people down from Changi, I stayed I was in charge of a ward

that had the prisoners of war down, and we saw some very sorry sights, and they were people too sick to either go back to England or Ireland or New Zealand, swollen legs with beri beri and things like that. And some of us where designated to look after these people.

Never

never,

Well it was awful to see people with suppurating legs and men with extended stomachs and things like that and I suppose by this time the war was nearly six years old as far as I was concerned, we were so used to things, you just got used to everything, you can get used to a lot of things at times.

And some of these people I had in the ward came back with me on the ship, back to England when I went back on the Sterling Castle. That was in April or May of ’46 when I came back. That was taken, that photograph was taken then.

Getting up, showering, getting down to breakfast, and going onto duty finding our what my duties were whether I had an afternoon or a morning shift or, I’d probably know the time before, we’d probably do two weeks at a time from 8 to 4, otherwise from 8 to 12 and then the midnight shift. Although when we

got to Herne Bay, there were more SBAs more sick bay attendants than we had ever had before and they took a lot of the night work and the heavy work from us. I can’t remember ever working on night duty when I was Herne Bay it was mostly daytime duties for us.

It was a long stretch hauling oneself from the dining room to the ward it was a long work. We thought it was going to be a hospital instead we found eleven acres of these Quonset huts, 32 men in a ward and you

sometimes you had to walk the ward before you got down to the end. People on the whole, people were, men were very nice to us, we had quite a number of New Zealanders in and I know when it was Christmas time I said, “I’m going to decorate the ward like a ship,” and somebody told me to go down to their boat and I managed to get one of the cars to

take me down and they gave us bottles of rum and cigarettes and things for the men, we managed to see that everybody had a jolly time and what we did do which we did a lot of writing letters for people. A lot of written letters to England and shopping, we bought a lot of fabrics in shops and bars of soap and lipsticks and things for various

husbands or brothers or things like that to send back to England for our patients. That was done in our spare time I mean we didn’t regard that as part of our duty that was done just because we wanted to.

Sometimes it was very sad, one particular person that I, was we called special, I was the only

nurse to his ward and he died eventually and he contracted a type of TB [Tuberculosis] which they didn’t recognise and they thought he might have picked it up in England, in Cirencester where this man lived and it was very sad and his mother, he didn’t have a father, his mother and his sister wrote to me and

asked me to come and see them when I came back to England and thanked me very much for sending on parcels and it was very sad for me then. It isn’t now all these years on but at that time I was the one that cried not them, in telling them about him and about, knowing that when I was special to him that meant a nurse on his own in a

little ward on his own, about half the size of this room, it was going to be the end for him, there was no way that they could get through this TB that he had and it was very sad for me telling the family this but they were very nice about it and I was pleased to meet them. And sometimes people who couldn’t write, who had burns on their hands and things like that,

Well, not, they would send their love to so and give nana a kiss and things, that sort of thing, it wasn’t as personal as if they were writing themselves but as it can be, we were nurses after all we weren’t, that came with the job didn’t it.

Yes, I don’t think a lot of them did, I don’t think a lot of them did, and then a lot of them didn’t want to talk about the camp either, but you soon did discover when the doctors came around what was wrong

with them or what they lacked in their diet, you see diet was the problem in a lot of them who came. We saw most of the people from Changi which turned out to be most of the civil people, there was only about four officers, I think, in my ward, that the others were mostly civil people. Other people just died there. There must have been

a very, very big cemeteries out in those places where I know people were buried.

No, I don’t think so we had New Zealand, I think at the beginning we had some Australian patients but they opened up more hospitals as the third lot of nurses came. I think there were to be

about four lots because nobody expected the war to be shortened so quickly. I always remember being in the operating theatre when one of the men walked in with a newspaper, and he said, “The war is going to be over soon,” cause we never expected it to be over when it did and we said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “Look, they’ve dropped a bomb in Japan

and they can’t go dropping too many of these,” and we knew that things were coming to an end. It was a strange feeling there were many people many women especially there, as nurses, as VADs who were so comfortable and didn’t like the idea of going back to what was again

still rationing and no sunshine and living as we did, with short, and what were they going to do when they got back. This was I know somebody who badly wanted me to be serious with him towards the last couple of weeks said, “What have I got to offer you? I’m only a builder.” And little did he know that building would be one

of the things that flowered in the UK after the war and where else where bombs had dropped so many times, there was nothing but open ground. And a lot of girls, one in particular, I remember the vote came out whilst I was in Australia and I had left my vote with somebody in the UK to deputise for my voting and

I remember this girl, she was about five years older than me she said, “Oh, I’m not going to bother, I’m going to stay here as long as they’ll let me.” And I said, “Don’t you want to get back and sort of, don’t you care who’s going to get into government?” There was a very laissez faire attitude that a lot of people didn’t bother, but I guess I was just a little bit different, I thought about things and

I wanted my vote to be registered and be useful, and I wanted to get back.

Yes, yes and I did, and I did, and things didn’t work out particularly well, we went, as I say

and we went to Canada and after 10 years in Canada things were not better than they were ten years ago in England and when we got to England my good friends that I’d had in Canada said to me, “Now one thing that happened when you get back to the UK, for goodness sake don’t start working again, let your husband get a job.”

No, when I came back to England

and I said to him that, “This is no good. We can’t go on like this. I’m still young and my daughters feel I’m an old lady cause as soon as I walk in I take off my jacket and I put on an apron and the dishes are to be done and the fire’s to be done and you are out playing golf. It doesn’t add up. And I sign you over my cheque at the end of the month and you run your car and

I can’t have 5 shillings to get my hair done.” That was the attitude I had then, I was really starting to feel as most women did, there was a place for women too in the working world. And I was very fortunate that the person who lived in the house, we had a lovely little home that we rented, and we could have bought for 2 or 3 thousand pounds, a three bedroom house similar to this but a much, much larger garden in Harrow

and I used to go with our Managing Director who lived in Harrow and Heather my oldest daughter was off school and we had a French girl staying with us, cause of my connections to Paris I could do this and Heather was going to go over to Paris later on. And we had some work to do in the factory and the Managing Director said to me, “If the

girls want to they can come in with you and they can earn some money, this is their holiday time, but they can earn some money, they are to go out to the cinema or theatre or something.” So the girls came into town with us for a week. And then one day my oldest girl said to me, “Mummy I never realised you were such an important person.” And I looked at her, I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Well you’ve got your own office and secretary and everybody thinks you are very good at what you are doing.” And I thought, “My God, all this girl sees is me taking off my jacket and putting on an apron.” And I probably wasn’t a very happy person and she didn’t see another side of me whatsoever, and I realised that that had to stop. And that’s when I said to my husband,

“Either you got to go out and get a job, we’ve been here for two years,” and he said, “I can’t do that,” and I said, “Well I’ll go and live in a hotel and you look after the girls and the house.” So the, I was most fortunate. The people who lived in the house next door, he was with Legal and General, and he was an estate man and he knew just where their were flats available and when. And I told him that this was going to

happen and we were in the throes of a divorce and if he heard of something, and he said, “Yes I have a flat going in West Kensington, and I think it would just be suitable for you and the girls.”’ And it was because my offices turned out to be in Baker Street and the tube station was across the road and I didn’t need a car, and everything was to hand.

And Heather then went to the Harrow College of Art and Jane went to a school in Kensington High Street, and we were all very near and could do our shopping and I moved from job to job, and every time I went I got a bigger job and a better job, until this job came up in South Africa and

Heather, my eldest daughter’s called Heather, her godmother had moved to Cape Town, and she said, “Oh, Mummy it would be so lovely to live near Aunty Miv.” Well we didn’t realise, cause we didn’t in those days, that Cape Town and South Africa, Cape Town was right down in the corner and Johannesburg was right up on the top on the high (UNCLEAR). There was at least a thousand miles between us. It’s like saying here to Tasmania or somewhere like that and there is a whole (UNCLEAR) to go through.

So I applied for this job you see and I had an interview and it was a very good interview and I got rather worried, I thought, “This is silly. I’m taking two children to a country I don’t know,” and I telephoned this man the next day and I said, “Look I’ve got a proposition to make to you,” and he said, “What is it?” He was rather a dour Afrikaner, and I said,

“I’d like to go and visit South Africa and you can interview me in your offices and show me your stores, and then I will see if the country suits me because I am not looking for another job, I’m looking for another way of life, and you can interview me on your home ground, and we can see if we suit each other.” And I was very involved with somebody at the moment and that was my way of breaking clear, you see, it was never going to come to

anything and one of us had to do something and it was going to be me. You see, so three weeks when I had forgotten all about it my secretary said to me, “There’s a telephone call for you Mrs Whyte, it’s private,” and I took it and, “This is Greaterman’s here, yes our chairman is quite prepared to offer you, and if you make

arrangements and send us what will be your half of the fare we will reimburse you and see that you are settled into a hotel that is not too expensive.” So I left for South Africa and I told the girls where I was going and I added that, added that onto, it was an Easter weekend, which a long weekend in England as here, I think I added a couple of days’ holiday that I was due

and I liked what I saw, this was 1960-ish you see, ’66, ’65, and I liked what I saw and I thought, “Well, this is a new life, this is sunshine, and this is different. I am not going to be cooped up in a little flat in London and only go out when a manufacturer wanted to take me out to dinner.” You see there’s life and there’s living,

and that is what I thought I would do, so. It was even an interesting trip on the way back because we got to Zimbabwe and we had to turn the plane back. We didn’t know then that they, they had news of a bomb on board, well of course in 1965 that was very unusual, today it wouldn’t be, but we were all very horrified and we all had to go

and stand by our luggage which they all put into a separate place where out luggage was left and had to be opened in front of everybody to make sure that, it was just a false alarm but it was enough to frighten the girls because they were told by a telephone call that their mother would be arriving not at 8 o’clock in the morning but more like 4 o'clock

in the afternoon. And they were at the airport to meet me you see, so even that proved a bit exciting.

Well that was one that I actually was sort of in charge of with a nurse and every day we crossed our arms and he managed to get out of bed and we carried him that way into the bathroom, put him into a saline bath

and then we treated all the way up the side of his legs like that, what they called tullegra, and still used today, it’s fine muslin dipped in a type of Vaseline and I was very interested to see that the RAF boys when they were badly burnt in Spitfires they were treated in the same way, saline

salt and water, and these pieces of very fine muslin that were dipped in this sort of tullegra whatever it was, a fat. In other words keeping this wound opened and clean all the time till it till the skin regrew itself. That would be, then further down from Lowestoft we had

the, a lot of the smaller craft went out under the heading, do you remember Sir Peter Scott, the man who went, didn’t he go to the South Pole? Well his son had a flotilla of boats, we got some of the injured from there. You know there were just so many, they weren’t

they were men that were hospitalised and small things rather than big things that were treated, I suppose the big aircraft like when we were in Sydney there was the Glory then there was the Indefatigable, there were all the big ships. They had their doctors, the surgeons there, sick berth attendants but some men needed nursing and nursing means

being propped up in bed, the sheets being changed daily, their uninteresting jobs like the back of you rubbed with methylated spirits and soap so that you don’t get bed sores and things that old people have today because they are not moveable. That comes under nursing, that’s the more tedious side of nursing. the interesting side of nursing is when it’s a young officer off a ship or

somebody who came down off an aircraft or something like that, but the real nursing was giving bed pans and cleaning their heads, that was the real nursing. And you see the odd thing about it is the girls who were nursing sisters they’d been in a hospital for 4 years, in England you do 3 years and do a year as a staff sister, then you can

go as a real, what we were called sisters, they’ve got different names now I wouldn’t know what they were called now. And they suddenly found themselves in charge of 5 or 6 girls whose fathers, 2 of them were captains of ships the other one was a brigadier. Girls who had never lifted a cup in their cup in their life to wash. Except out of 18 of us about 4 of us. Even one girl there she said they had a pony and trap

they had a couple of ponies and trap, her father, they were ministers but I mean we are talking about people who are well oiled as we would say in England, so but in Brian Madden’s book he mentions that too, it was a big difference between the life of the VAD and the life of a sister

the life of the sister was sort of toffy nosed because she was the sister, but in actual fact she probably came from some mining village somewhere in Wales or Northumberland and became a sister, whereas the girls who were VADs either they had come from reasonable homes, good schools, and were doing this as their war work

Well, because otherwise Hitler would have been over in England wouldn’t he?

Oh a lot of people did, a lot of girls my age and boys of my age did, very much so, and very much so even more so when the bombs started dropping. You know this block of flats was an enormous block of flats, I can’t give you a description of it would be like, one of the big, big blocks of flats they have on the Gold Coast and

can you imagine down in the basement all being used, Red Cross, the ambulances, the demolition squad, the canteen, there was vast underneath and some while ago I belonged to the friends of the library and at a meeting they were talking about the library, we are extending the Caloundra library, I said, “You know

I might be old fashioned but before going up I think we should be going down,” we should be going down because you can always, you can never tell what the future’s going to be in this country, and we are horribly near Indonesia. I don’t want to say this but you are far more near Indonesia than you are anywhere near France, really, I mean the guns there could be heard over in England.

And yet we do nothing about underground places for people. And so somebody said to me, “Well do you know how much that would cost?” and I said, “Well, everything is relative isn’t it, and what about the cost of lives?” You want to keep ministers, I mean Churchill had his little dugout. Everybody had their places and even ordinary people used the tube stations because they were hundreds of feet down

it was an unfortunate bomb that got them but I mean, it did.

I didn’t see any. Where were the bomb shelters, I didn’t see any. All I saw was beautiful girls, lovely beaches, blue skies, and food. And being able to go and get the train in and be able to walk around and

buy almost whatever you wanted and I think my first dinner gown came from Myers in Melbourne. It was 3 pounds or something, a beautiful little georgette short sleeved long dresses because that’s what we used to wear if we went out to dinner in England. And I was all prepared to take one of those back with me would be lovely. But it was an extension of England

but in a different way, you see. There weren’t the hardships and there weren’t the misery and there weren’t the, night after night the droning of the bombs and the droning of the planes and even being out of London, even being out in the country, being near Saxmundham at Lowestoft, you know just before D Day, because I was there then, the droning of the planes overhead

is like something, I don’t think even they could simulate it today in a film. It was like black things row after row after line after line and you think to yourself, my god, you know who many bombers are going over, and the air would literally vibrate, that was the feeling you got. And that’s why

Australia was so peaceful and so wonderful and the air was so clean, and you lived in that. And then you would hear them coming back and then sometimes they came back and they crashed on landing or they came back the bombs that went off and the whole ground would shake, it didn’t matter where we were. I think, I don’t know, I think war 1939 1945 was a pretty gruesome thing in the UK

and when I look at England now, look at parts of England, I look at London and I see and hear from friends there, out of 10 people 9 of them would be black and one would be white. How would those people feel about going out to war, if anything ever happened again? Who is it that goes to war in this country, it’s only the Caucasians, the white people, there might be a few

but how many would want to go into the army the navy or the air force as, my grandson has had a terrible job, he can’t get into the wavy navy, into naval reserve. I said, “Why Jamie, I know my Blue Cross nurse knows somebody who was a naval commodore, maybe we could speak to him.” He said, “Granny, they are only taking in doctors or people

in the law, they don’t want people like me.” He’s a naval architect, but he’s also an engineer. He said, “They’ve got all their own, they don’t people like me any more,” so you see it’s people, young people, he’s not married, unmarried people trying to get in can’t get in

Oh

Rather, the sirens go and everybody and everybody at the first aid posts, you know at your quarters and you are sort of ready to do whatever you want to do, and you hear ‘crump, crump’, and you see we were right opposite Hyde Park, and there were guns in Hyde Park, and the thing that you do hear, which amazes me,

you hear what sounds like pieces of shell coming down all the time, all round the house. And you expect to go out and find pieces and pick them up, but you never find any. Where it all goes to I don’t know, but it’s there, you know it’s there. Early in the war, 1940 was the first frightening time when I saw the sky all red, bright, bright red, and I was miles away from the scene, and London was burning

that’s what it looked like and as I said earlier on, although the Americans, that was a terrible thing that happened to them, but there were as many people killed in London that weekend as there were killed that, nobody gave a memorial to them, nobody, I mean the King and Queen handed it to them they walked down, walked amongst the debris, they said yes, Buckingham Palace had a hit on the corner too,

you just had to be glad you saw your home was still intact when you came home. Parts of furniture got, you were always near a bomb, this is how you felt in England, you were always near a bomb. So the pleasure it was coming here and seeing beautiful girls and nice looking boys and sunshine were we’d come, England

by the end of ’45 was so drab. You know what I mean by drab, it was so colourless, there was nothing in the shops to buy or to eat, and what little there was, you didn’t, we living in a naval place, you never saw an egg. If there were eggs used it was used in something but you never had a fresh egg, and you just accepted it as your lot, nobody ever kicked about it.

What I suppose, there might have been a few girls who got married quickly to have, start a family so they didn’t have to do war work, so they, but it certainly wasn’t with the girls I was with, the point was this was England and I loved my country and I was very proud to be English and no German was going to come and walk around my space

Sad, and yet, most of us I would say, most of us, felt like we were going to new horizons because I think one only volunteered for overseas trips.

You know if you didn’t want to go you didn’t have to go, so but all the girls that came really wanted to go. Several girls did marry Australians here, I still get a VAD booklet around four times a year, but with different things in it, and I have just written to a girl I know that’s in there and said, “I’m getting on now.” Who do you write to to let

you know that you are no longer alive, you know, that I don’t want the paper any more? There isn’t an address there, because they are all sectioned off now to the north of England, to Scotland, to this part of England to that part of England, but I was in London and whether there is no longer a British Red Cross in London or not, I don’t know.

All the time it grew, yep, I was working then in the Debenham group, I was a young person then, I was 20 then and the man who was in charge of the department, he belonged to the police, he was a part-time policeman. And

one was so aware of it going to happen, see the news every night was to do with Hitler, and about Hitler. And you see our newspapers, he marched in first to Sudetenland and then into Danzig and names that you wouldn’t even know today, and Czechoslovakia and Poland, and you could sort of watch it on the map like that, you see, if you were that way inclined

and here was Churchill standing up saying, this man has got to be stopped. And unless you got together with a crowd of people, you know, isn’t this terrible or somebody knew a German who had come over, or somebody who was a quarter Jewish had managed to get out of Germany because they didn’t let a lot of them out. Doctors and scientists and a lot of very clever people came and we were lucky we had

clever people to come to us. But on the Friday when I left my work, I knew I wouldn’t be in on the Monday, I said, “If I don’t come in on the Monday, you know I’ll be working,” and of course somebody Chamberlain made the statement, and Monday morning I rang the Red Cross and they said, “Yes,

you are to go to Kingston House.” It was a very funny thing, I haven’t got it now I gave it to one of my daughters, one of our friends at the Agricultural College where my husband was was a boy called Frank Chamberlain and he was the son of the Prime Minister. And I have a picture of him with both of my girls, he came to see us in Canada, and he said to me once, he said, “You know, Fay, my father

always believed in peace until the very end, he was a vary peaceful man.” Nevertheless, Frank’s family, the Chamberlains in Birmingham owned big arms ware and so I just bite my tongue and say nothing, and I think to myself the people who really gained from war, who are the people who really gained.

Well yes, well I thought well now that’s good, because don’t forget VE [Victory in Europe] Day had started, the troops had re-landed and the feeling was everything was going to be all right. Now we got to tackle the other end we didn’t get to tackle before, so that was the feeling really.

Ye, I think so, I think so, because you see we left in December, our troops landed on the 6th or the 5th of June and I remember girls rushing in with the newspapers saying, “Look, we’ve landed.” And I used to get letters VJ [Victory over Japan] Day plus 6, plus 8, until the habit wore off, until it was just Cannes or wherever the girl happened to be

and things like that.

Yes we were in convoy down to the Azores, now if you look at the world map you’ll see the Azores just off Portugal so we actually waited in the Irish Sea to pick up a destroyer and we had fore and aft we had a destroyer and something else

and we were in convoy but when we got as far as the Azores which is as far as quite south and see they didn’t go across the Atlantic at the north because there was still a lot of E-boats [Enemy boats] out there so they went south, and it was sunny and warm, so we suddenly woke up, blue sky, blue seas, everything was flat, but we were all on our own, and

we went through the Panama Canal and we never saw another boat the whole way.

All the way to Australia we never saw another boat. And the feeling was then if it was going on going on going on, you never, we never thought we were going to end the voyage, there was all this good food, there was, we were never short of eat or drink. Where did they store it for goodness sake, because I know they picked up a lot when we went through the Panama Canal

there'd be places, but how could they feed 5000 people, plus the crew? But we were never short of food and the food was beautiful, so it was down to earth with a bump when we got out to the hospital and we, you know we were bitten by mosquitoes and there wasn’t a plug to put in the shower and it was the

men’s urinals that we were sectioned off into instead of a proper toilet and things like that. God what have we come to, all the girls started to moan and you know, things like that, but it soon sorted itself out, these do, you know and

Yes, to the time I left yes, and I was one of the first ones leaving you see

because I was one of the first ones in, so yes much improved, much improved. I think a couple of the girls stayed on for 2 or 3 years till the hospital really emptied and they finished.

Coming from ships, we had a lot of ships in the Coral Sea, coming down, see it was the

the, called the Pacific, Sydney was the Pacific part of the war for us, the Pacific part of the war, and as I say I didn’t get a medal because I wasn’t out on a ship, though I was, because when he wrote me this letter I thought, how do you think we got to Australia?

Part of the ship you see when they called out my name to go up to the King they said HMS Gallipoli and I thought, “Oh,” and then realised it was the name of the ship I was attached to.

Nearly a year and a half, by they time I left England it was a year and a half, you see and most of the girls were back by two, two and a half years cause there was a tidying up to do and I suppose the odd ship

I think after the war finished in Japan, I think the idea was a lot of people wanted to get back and start their lives afresh, and wonder what they had found when they got back to England, what was going to the reception and what were they going to find.

Ambulances mostly, mostly ambulances or they were sitting up patients in cars, but some of the VADs would chauffeur cars for people but they were ambulances mostly.

They weren’t so severe that they, if they were so very severe they would go to a, although in Australia we did have main surgery going on there. Oh, all sorts of things that weren’t necessarily injuries, appendix or operations things like that, there would be, people do get sick, as I said to you before, and people have to be nursed and I think today

there isn’t any nursing in hospitals today, I think this is the big difference, they haven’t got staff, they can’t pay people. And so there is not nursing per se, you are a nurse but you are not actually nursing, because girls go into university now don’t they, and they take their degrees. My very good friend who is a doctor of nursing she did everything in a university,

midwifery everything, in a university, hospital management and everything like that, whereas everything we did was at base level, but that doesn’t happen today everything is changed and that’s,

Yes, I think that book that I have there or the Duchess of Gloucester there is a big picture there with all the

nurses in the front, I’m there somewhere where I can’t see, but she came around she was, they were the Governor-General at the time, and various people came but when you were on the ward, you were on the ward, and I tell this story, it’s a true one. When I lived in South Africa I was very friendly with a girl there who was a VAD

and she was the daughter of her father was General Beyer, BEYER, and he was in charge of the troops, the South African Troops in Italy, and she always tells me this story, she was in the heads or something one day cleaning, and the girls came in and said, “Oh, do you know your father’s outside inspecting?” and she said, “So what?” You know, it wasn’t important to her cause she sees him enough,

she’s a strange girl, and her grandfather who was also a General Beyer was imprisoned by the English in the Boer War and here she was married to an Irishman and she spoke Irish and Afrikaans of course. But that was the sort of thing that people, who just didn’t bother but, one incident I can give you,

there was a boy, there was a man on a ward, he came from Liverpool, his name was Dillon, he was an Irish, he was a Scouse as they call that come from Liverpool. I went on the ward and did the rounds as I usually did as a senior nurse and I said, “What’s the matter with you?” And he’d got his mouth was all wired up, and of course in the upshot he was in a fight and he had broken his jaw

and the other nurses said to me, “He has to have all his food has got to be minced up and it goes through a straw, milk and things like that.” Anyway, he was handy, we was very good, a lot of these up patients used to give the nurses a hand around the ward, some of the men would be heavy and I was much smaller then I suppose, thinner anyway. And

if they could give the nurses a hand to carry a tray or a thing out to the kitchen, they did. So I was on this ward for about 4 weeks, and Dillon said to me on the Friday, he said he was going ashore for the weekend, I think he just come out, his wire clippers had just come out I think, I said, “Mind your behaviour.” I said, “How on earth can you get drunk over here?” And he said, “It’s the plonk, nurse, a bob a bottle that’s all it is.” It’s the red wine and he called it ‘plonk’

and that was the name of it. Monday morning I’m going around the ward and he is in bed again, “What on earth’s happened to you?” “I’ve got into another fight, nurse,” he said. There he was with his jaw all wired up again. You asked me what, that’s the sort of thing, and if a man fell off down some steps or something like that, I was nursing

it, I think more there was more nursing, more nursing was done in the First World War than the Second World War or maybe there were more girls available as VADs in the Second World War than the, because in the Second World War they conscripted. You see if you didn’t go in, I think after two or three years

I was already in the British Red Cross when I was 20 a year before war started, but if you didn’t go in and you were not married and you didn’t have the obligation you were, you all had cards, we all had, what do you call them, we had our card, registration card, just like we have for our driving licence

name, age and where you lived so everybody knew who everybody was, and these girls were conscripted and if they didn’t go into the ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Services] or the WAAF they were sent to factories where, I’ve got a friend, a girl who lives around the corner on the back of me right here, she is younger than me by about three years, and she said, “Oh my brother,” she didn’t have a father, “my brother wouldn’t

let me go into the armed services,” it was a sort of a dirty smell about them or something. I said, “Why ever not?” and she said, “Oh no, it was too rough.” Anyway she got married and had two children one after the other and she did work for Rolls Royce I think, banging in a few nails from time to time but, I’m not being sarcastic but here were girls who got married and had babies so they didn’t have to go into the war, but it didn’t

matter where you were, you could have been out in the country, if a bomb happened to drop there it’s just too bad.

Oh, a bit boisterous. We used to, when we were stationed at Colourcoats, just about 6 miles down the road, was it as much as six, there was a place called

Whitley Bay, and there was a submarine base just a bit further on and we’d see the submarines, we could see the submarines going along, you see. And that was the place where the WRENs and the naval types and the VADs used to go for their Saturday night dance and things like that, and looking back on that now, I think I must have been a bit raucous. Susan, the girl on that

side of me, I remember one night saying to her, “No, I don’t feel like going tonight.” And she said, “Well if you’re not going Fay, nobody’s going because you’re the leader.” She didn’t put it into words but she said, “No, if you’re not going nobody’s going to turn out, you’ve got to come.” And then somebody would say, “Ask that submariner you’re dancing with whether he sleeps with his beard under the sheets or on top.”

And I remember I was very naughty saying that, and he said, “Oh, you must ask my WREN,” that was the answer. Everybody had an answer for you, you know that was, but look, it was a bad time, it was unpleasant but I would be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that there were parts enjoyable. I met a very, very nice Dutch boy and I did a coat of arms for him

in tapestry work that you see there, “I will maintain,” that was the coat of arms of the Netherlands and I did it for him in embroidery and we kept up a correspondence for a number of years, but I met a lot of very, very nice people. And times were bad but then they were bad all over England and a lot worse where they had Germans living, didn’t they? I mean

I wouldn’t like to have been living in France with Germans under my nose, you know when one sees films, I often watch the old films and I often think to myself, how terrible, we think we were bad in England, okay we didn’t have too much to eat and what it we did it wasn’t very nice but if you had money, I was telling, you could eat out, you could eat out every night if you had money, to a different hotel because you didn’t have to give up a ration

card, that was the point. But they were only allowed to charge x amount of money you could only eat so much for shillings, you couldn’t eat more than that.

Oh, yes, yes. The

well why would I be back here now? I could have gone back to England with all my money from South Africa, I could have gone to Canada, I have friends in Canada, manufacturers. In fact, Jane one of my daughters, went back to England and she tried to go back to Canada because she said she had gone to school there, which she had, both of my girls went to school there. And when this manufacturer who came over the England came up to see us in when we were living in

the flat by ourselves, he said to me, “Why didn’t you tell me I would have sponsored her,” and she wanted to do it on her own, “I would have sponsored her,” so there were places I could have gone to. But here was the place that I thought that this was for me, this was for me, and I actually moved into a house near the Andre Herne hospital a very much bigger house than this and it had a bathroom en suite, and a big dining room, living room,

and much much bigger than this and my daughter came from South Africa with two children, I had a home for them, they stayed with me for three months, and then she moved into Brisbane and from there she moved down to Sydney and we are very close, and that’s why I’m close to these grandchildren because they have been very close to me, and I’ve never regretted coming here

and I haven’t been sorry where I’ve lived, but as I say I was very fond of that boy John, and I enjoyed, but that wasn’t to be and his mother made sure of that, and that’s life, you take things as they come or you also make them happen through your association with people, I think that’s what my granddaughter, when I come out of this I’ll find

that letter and I will quote you what she wrote to me, which is quite good. She said that I mixed with people who I normally wouldn’t have mixed with, and I took the opportunity, and I had a thirst for knowledge and for culture and you took it. Oh, one little story I must tell you. Are we still going or are we shut off? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know we were still going. I wouldn’t have…

When I was at Kingston House, one of the sisters there at one of the big hospitals and she was a private nurse to Doctor Malcolm Sergeant, now you wouldn’t know Doctor Malcolm Sergeant but he was one of the big leaders of the philharmonic orchestras in London, he was at the Albert Hall, he put on these big concerts.

When I came over here in 1965, I hadn’t been confirmed and hadn’t been baptised and I went to St Philips’ Church in Sydney and I told the minister that and he said, he called me his little sailor girl, so he gave me some books to take back with me which I read and I got very friendly with Bishop Pilcher who was bishop there then, and Archdeacon Johnson who

stood as one of my godparents. And Bishop Pilcher said to me one day, “How would you like to come over and have dinner with us one night? I have got Doctor Malcolm Sergeant coming and Doctor Moses, who is in charge of our ABC [Australian Broadcasting Commission?” “And,” he says, “I’ve asked two other sailor boys, and yourself.” Now what I have missed out? I have jumped

ahead of myself. This girl said to me, “Who wants an autograph of Doctor Malcolm Sergeant?” I said, “I do.” I had an autograph book, so the next day I brought it along and gave it to her and he wrote in it, “To Fay, I hope we meet soon,” and he signed it Malcolm Sergeant, cause he was Sir by the time we had finished but he was then Doctor Malcolm Sergeant, and now here we were sitting about, the bishop had sent a car

for me at the hospital, and I sat around this table that would be nearly the size of this room, I’m not telling you a lie, and I looked at all the glasses alongside and all the knives and forks, and I thought am I doing everything right, I was the only girl there. Bishop straight opposite me and Doctor Malcolm Sergeant on one side and the two naval officers sat on this side. Of course I didn’t speak to the doctor till we got up

and the bishop said, “We will now take coffee and dessert. I have some friends that are coming to see you.” That was to the doctor, you see. So we all moved out gracefully into the big drawing room. And he stopped, he pulled my dress and said something to me, and I said, “No, you haven’t met me but you signed my autograph book to Fay I hope we meet soon,” and he looked at me and his jaw dropped

and he said, “Oh, that was little nurse,” and he mentioned the sister’s name, and I said, “Yes that’s right,” He said, “That was…” I said, “Yes it was 4 or 5 years ago.” And he said, “Good lord, and here we are 14000 miles away from London.” As a result of that meeting, see we had no opera house then, and everything used to take place at the Town Hall.

As a result of that meting doctor sergeant gave two rows of seats completed to all the girls at the hospital, all the nurses could come down and all I had to do was ring up and give them the number every night and there were two rows of seats complete for all the nurses that were attached to the Royal Naval Hospital.

Well first of all the kindness of people, now the Allports who offered me a bed at any time, she was called Mouse, she was a little thing for some unknown reason, and she and her husband were cousins and they came over here

married and they came over here and had three daughters one who lives in America now, and Bin, the youngest who was in the WRANs who has never married and another one, daughter who has married, and she is a widow. And I hear from the youngest one every year, in fact I’ll probably write and tell her that you’ve been in here and what’s happened. She’s retired of course now, and she does a lot of work, they were

very, very good to me and very, very kind to me and I went to stay with them for some time and they were the ones that tried to get me a job over here with Dr Barnardo’s home, which were their friends. And she used to go around and buy up complete house sales of everything in a house, they had a garage outside that

was packed, bigger than my garage, twice as big as my garage, full of china furniture, everything, and her house, it was a very big house, she had hundreds of bric-a-brac, I think she finally had to get somebody in to list it all. Cause it was all divided and the house was sold for her three girls, and Bin sent me a

little brooch or something she said I thought you might like this. And the people that I met were so very kind to me, they were very, very different to South Africans. South Africans you had your English speaking and you had your Boers and your Boer was the Afrikaner, and the Afrikaner was in a hurry always to tell you, “You English

spoiled things for us over here,” cause we treated the black man like a human. The black man in South Africa, the Zulus the (UNCLEAR) you can’t compare to the Aborigine, I don’t mean to say this disrespectfully. It’s just that different ways of education or life. I know that the Aborigines

have lived here for hundreds and thousands of years, so we’re told, and they’ve managed the land. But the black people in South Africa are totally, totally different type of person. They are a very happy, very happy person. And

I like them very much, I like the black people very, very much and my daughter Heather had a girl Elizabeth for years, and she kept the children in clothes and school books and we English people did as much as we could for them, you know.

Yes, people like that person, we made friends with them and my daughter recently, and I say recently, for the last ten years, has been very friendly with an Australian whose mother has a home just near Riverwood and she knows of a lot of people, and she

was a little bit typical of the people that I met. Very secure in their Australian, very secure people in their Australian ways. They are very Anglified Australians, they don’t like other races or other people. But she is a kind woman and a nice woman

and Robin unfortunately died at about three years ago, had a heart attack, and the little things that went out although he was only Heather’s partner, they were to be married, I know Heather’s name went first on the list, Heather, Samantha and James, followed by Robert’s mother’s name, followed by

her children, in other words she gave my daughter the respect of a daughter in law and this was nice. And this was the type of person I found when I was, and there was another, there were two other families, unfortunately I’ve never kept up with them and I’m so sorry. One was a mother and daughter who were very kind to me, I don’t know where I met them, I probably met them

shopping, or they saw me and spoke to me and invited me to their home. And another girl whose father was in the writing or the printing business, and she had, this particular family, this girl, Jean, and I’ve actually written to one of the papers to try and find her, and I haven’t been lucky enough to, all I remember her mother’s name

and she would be dead by now you see. She was getting married and her husband to be was in the merchant navy, and he left me a, he came into England and he brought me a basket of fruit, that’s the sort of thing, he brought me a big pineapple or a basket of fruit that was

just a note from him he’d just come off the ship and he’d brought me this. And they were getting married and I wandered around the west end of London looking for a gift to send them, and I went into an antique shop and I bought two pictures of, was it the first fleet, something, two pictures they were actually, they were used as table mats

I bought them as table mats, I paid a few pounds for them, I’ve forgotten, I spent what I could, and a had the most enthusiastic letter back from them to say that they had had them framed and they had them on the wall. And I lost touch with them and I’ve tried so hard to find them and I’ve put notices in, somebody gave me a notice to put it in one paper, they would do this and I’ve done this and I never have, and Sydney is so big now

and there was another family that used to invite me over to Rose Bay in Sydney and I’ve looked up the surname, and I remember 20 years ago when I came over ringing up all the people of that name and all the people said, “No I’d very much like to meet you but we are not that family,” and the boys had been in the RAAF over in England and one of them had

been decorated. Not for anything that he had done but he did his tour of duty and he did it well. And his father was so proud, and the father had been a sugar planter up in one of the islands or somewhere.

None at all, my brother didn’t see his wife. One brother

came out after nine months because he was very bad eyesight he was honourably discharged, but until his death two years ago he still kept up with a regiment that he belonged to. My other brother who’s in America, didn’t see his wife for four years. In his last letter to me he said, “40 pounds in weight on our backs,” or whatever it was 40 kilos said, “Looking at the poor guys in Iraq, at least we didn’t have to carry

in weight before we…” He said, “There is nothing I want to say about the war,” he said. He was four years over in India and didn’t get home once, and he said, “The only time my father kissed me or hugged me was when I came back or went away.” I’ve forgotten when it was, very insular things like that.

I think we were so involved in our own lives, my brother sent me the telegram when my sister in law actually told him that I’d been decorated. But I wouldn’t expect him to write me letters, he had her and I think my mother was a bit annoyed because he was two years younger than me and got married before me, and that I didn’t care, I didn’t want to get married I wanted to do my own thing, see. So that

didn’t worry me, so they were like that rather nice Alice there who was a lovely woman who giving us dinner at night, or supper or tea as she called it was because she was pleased to do . And that’s how I found everybody who went to visit we had the same outgoing of kindness and emotion was these people in Australia, now in South Africa

you don’t have that. Women live in very big houses with an army of servants and I, it wasn’t that I didn’t sort of go along with that, I didn’t quite like the, the English people I met out there were all right but I preferred the English people here.

Only,

one snapshot, I’ve just found, this was taken at Essendon airport, I’m stuck in the middle there.

Yes, they took us down to we were going down to Victoria, she had some friends who were,

not Flinders, what’s the name of the mountain up the side of Victoria? This VAD, the other nurse there she had a friend and she invited me to come down and stay with her and the we flew down for nothing with that crew

and somebody took a snapshot of us, one of the crew, somebody took a snapshot of us and somebody sent it to me.

We didn’t have the opportunity because we were involved with the navy and that’s more or less what we did, and we were such a long way out you see. Unlike England where we had,

four miles would be an army barracks or a depot of flying people, Americans that we didn’t particularly like, but they were all there they were all around us, so there was a socialising of people. Whereas the socialising I did here was people who would stop and talk and talk to us, which was plenty and it was very nice and

they were very kind, and everybody at that time had a grandparent or somebody who came from Ireland or Scotland or Wales or somewhere like that. So that’s why we didn’t really socialise, not for not wanting to but then we didn’t have the opportunity. One of the houses I went to had two daughters, one of them, they were both married, one had a little boy and both the

husbands were fighting up the, you know, in one had come down from and I was reminded of it just some years ago when she said to me, “Don’t you remember you came with me to the hospital to see so and so, so and so?” And I’d forgotten. And she said, “You did, you came with me Fay.” And it was the military hospital where her husband was and I’d gone with her.

But you know time’s getting on now, at my age in another 20 years there won’t be any left of my generation who, well there’ll be some young ones coming up who still fought in the war, or been in the war, but perhaps not so much quite in the thick of it. The thickest part is when we were, when I was at Lowestoft and Colourcoats and the fleet

air arms station that I was stationed at. And when I was at Portsmouth and two of us went out to have a drink in Portsmouth off duty one night, it’s the thing that you never did in peacetime go into a pub, but we went in and they were all naval personnel there, and an air raid started. Now the pinnace the little boat that took us over to the hospital stopped at 10 o’clock at night

and I remember saying to this girl, “We are going to miss the last pinnace,” and she said, “No it will be all right.” And of course the bombs were dropping and nothing very much we could do when the guns were firing. So that was about a quarter to 11 when we finally left the pub and how could we get across. So there was these big, I think it was the Hornet, big barracks that belonged to the ships, the Hornet, and there was sentry

on duty, and I said, “Can we see the officer of the day, please?” And he come up and I said, “I’m terribly sorry but we have no transport to get home,” but the hospital was there and Portsmouth was here and to get to the hospital either you went by pinnace there or you went by car and you went all the way around like that there. So this poor man had to turn out, I don’t think we were very popular that night. Those were the things that stand out in my mind, because we were young, and they were naughty things

there were there were sad things and I sat by a man who died one night, and I was on night duty and I had to special him, that’s right, and the sister in charge came up to me and said, “If there is any change in his pulse come around and tell me,” and I went around and told her and she didn’t

do anything, and I sat by him and he died. And later on she said to me, “You know I did come round nurse,” she was explaining to me that she did come. I knew she hadn’t, but he was dying anyway, but that was sad. But I remember going home and I was on night duty going back to my quarters at Colourcoats, and having nightmares and I, it was the first time I’d seen a death. Because you know most of us came from homes where people lived long lives

and you didn’t see death, this is death in wartime, it’s quite different. But there were some pleasant days and there was some nice times.

We didn’t have any because we were out in Herne Bay and everybody was celebrating in England and then when they were celebrating in

the main street in Sydney we were on duty, so I missed out on the celebrations. I didn’t miss out on the celebration.

No, not really, I mean we were all very glad and I suppose there was a bottle or two passed around and things like that, but there was no sort of celebration as such, I think by then people wanted to get home then.

About a year and a half

I left in December and I came back I was, I was back a full year and went back the following year April, May sometime like that, and we went back to the hospital where we were discharged from, the hospital.

A mixture of being sad and being a bit frightened not knowing what I was going back to

and what I was going to do, and friends I’d left behind, and friends who’d come to see me off on the ship, which was lovely, when we left nobody came to see us off. And this was something quite different. Many times in the years that followed I thought, “Wouldn’t I have been better to have stayed in Australia? Then what would I have done? What would I have?” But you can’t go back. You can only go forward, can’t you?

But I loved it out on the, out of that station.