A walk down Memory Lane
Nancy Olphert, at Newbuildings, who is celebrating her 90th birthday and her 64th year as a member of the Mothers Union, holding a framed picture of herself at 16-years-old with her Service medal, Defence medal and her original Mothers Union membership card. INLS 1211-504MT.
Nancy Olphert fro Newbuildings, recalls the motivation behind signing up for the War Effort.
When we moved to Dullerton I had enlisted from there. When I left school I worked for maybe about a year in Ebrington factory, the shirt factory. I was on the speed bench there, they had it marked all out in squares and you had a shirt in each square and I was only in there about a year when I took Scarletina. There are two types, Scarlet Fever and Scarletina, and I was taken into the Strabane Fever Hospital and I was there a week, unconscious.
When I came round I noticed there was a nurse standing beside me and I said to her ‘Where am I’ and she said ‘Oh, you have been here all week, so you have. You have got Scarletina. You have been very ill’.
I must have been in there about six weeks and the skin all peeled off your face and everything, you know and on your body, and then eventually they eventually let me home, you know.
You weren’t allowed then to go back to work for a long time, so with us living away up there in Dullerton, you see, you had to cycle, because there was only one bus on the Dullerton Road, and that didn’t suit us. It was 8.30am in the morning and it was leaving the Depot at 6pm at night, you know? So we cycled into Ebrington Factory and back out again at night, and it was alright in the summertime but in the winter time? You know? Sure the snow was up behind our hedges and that. and I thought ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll chance this any longer’, and at that time the war was on and I had thought about joining the Wrens, you know, but then I thought to myself ‘Life on the waves is not for me’, so I joined the WAAF.
I sent away to Belfast for the forms, and you filled them in and a week after that I was sent to Campbell College in Belfast, you know? and There was a lot of Irish girls there then and the following week you were called up and you were all shepherded then to the boat and you were shepherded then to Heysham in England and we went from there to Morcambe, to the billets. We were all put in civilian billets, because, I think the Army, the Navy and the Air Force had taken over all the private houses and all the private hotels to house the troops and I was lucky we were in a lovey house.
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Weather for Londonderry
Thursday 23 May 2013
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