Bomb Girls - Britain's Secret Army: The Munitions Women of World War II by Jacky Hyams

Author:Jacky Hyams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography, World War II, Weapons, Historical, Munitions, Military, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781782197164
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2013-08-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

LAURA’S STORY: AN ANGEL AND A ROSE

‘WE WERE TINY COGS IN A SECRET ARMY’

Laura Hardwick was born in Trimdon, County Durham, in 1921. She has the double distinction of being both an ‘Aycliffe Angel’ and a ‘Swynnerton Rose’. She spent two years making bullets at Aycliffe until she was called up and had to leave home to work at Swynnerton in Staffordshire, where she helped make detonators for the Navy. After the war she married and remained in the Bishop Auckland area. Her husband, Bill, died in 1996, age 80. She has one son, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren. This is her story:

The Germans knew we were there. But they never found us. Lord Haw-Haw [the nickname of Germany’s propaganda broadcasters] was always making broadcasts, saying we had been bombed – he called us ‘the angels in white coats’ – but the truth was, the factories in Aycliffe could not be seen very easily from above. They built air raid shelters for us workers – but we were never in them. We just had to carry on working.

My very earliest memory is the day I started school, when we lived at Etherley Moor, just outside Bishop. One of the families living near us had a little girl the same age as me. So we started together, hand in hand, walking through the gate at Cockton Hill Infants School, not far from where I live now. I made friends with that little girl, of course. And then she died. When that happened, I didn’t want to go back to Cockton. I was so upset, my mum, Emily and dad, Joseph, sent me to another school, Escomb. All I can remember of that is one freezing-cold, snowy winter when the older kids pulled us little ones to school on a sledge.

We were just an ordinary working-class family. Dad worked in the steelworks but when WW1 broke out, he and his brother were found to have hammer toes – which we all have – so he couldn’t march properly. So he went to work in the pits for a while. I was the eldest. Ethel came over four years later and my brother Robert was nine years younger than me.

In those days, everyone you knew was poor. But we managed. It’s not like you read in books, where kids had no shoes and were running around dressed in rags. We weren’t like that. I was not brilliant at school. Ethel was the brainy one, she wound up going into nursing. I do remember one thing, as kids we always played shops for some reason. Ethel seemed too babyish to me, with nearly five years between us, yet when Rob arrived, I was nine years old and I mothered him. He always seemed to be with me as we grew up.

In those days, you left school when you were 14. There was an 11-plus exam but I didn’t pass it. There wasn’t very much work around here, so I wound up working on a farm with a friend who was the farmer’s niece.

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