Wartime 1940/1

A Memory of Shotley Bridge.

In 1940 aged fourteen I was put on a hospital-train from Norwich to Shotley Bridge Hospital.it was mainly full of wounded soldiers from the Dunkirk retreat. No reason was ever given for my being sent to Shotley. The School,StMarys,were never informed. I should explain that I was in a Norfolk hospital following an operation for osteomyelitis of the femur.
We were in single storey huts on the side of a hill adjacent to the golf course. I only remember two nurses,Staff nurse Ledger and a beauty I only knew as Clare. I remember all the soldiers dressed in blue with red ties. I also remember the glow of the steel works furnace which could be seen for miles around. A bomb landed on the golf course not far from our ward. I was eventually sent home to my widowed mother in Ashford in Kent in April 1941. One rather curious memory is that my illness could have been cured by penicillin but this was reserved for the armed forces! So I had endure osteomyelitis until 1946 when I was treated in the Middlesex Hospital in London.