|
|
 |
| |
Nell Woolmer with the New Journal’s Father Christmas, Don Ryan |
Hamper Appeal sends out a big thank you to our war heroes
New Journal readers’ generosity puts a smile on faces at Hillwood Resource Centre
HETTY Megan did her bit. When war broke out in 1939, not only did she have to face five long years without her newly wed husband Charlie who was away fighting for freedom, but it was all over for her dream of being an upholsterer.
Instead, she learnt to be a welder, so she could patch up fighter planes battling the Luftwaffe above London.
She was among the older people at Age Concern’s Hillwood Resource Centre when the New Journal’s Father Christmas – looking suspiciously like our distribution manager Don Ryan – made one of many hamper drops in the run-up to the big day.
The hampers – paid for by the New Journal’s annual festive collection – found so many worthy homes this year, from single parent families to older people struggling to make ends meet, or missing their nearest and dearest.
Mrs Megan, 92, grew up in Polygon Road – just a 100 yards away from the centre. She had managed to get a much-coveted job as an apprentice upholsterer but when war broke out, and Charlie was called up, she was seconded to important war work.
“I fancied being a land girl,” she said. “We’d seen Princess Elizabeth do that and I liked fresh air. But they sent me a on course to learn how to be a welder.”
Her job was to patch up the bullet and shell holes in RAF planes so they could return to front-line duty – bringing home to her the horrors of what her husband was facing in the army.
Mrs Megan remembered being thankful to be alive during the war Christmases.
She recalled: “We all missed our men so baldy, but we did our best. People put tins of food away in their cupboards to save up for the holidays.”
One of our goodie packed hampers made her day, she said.
She added: “During the war we had no choice but to get on with it.”
Kilburn-born Nell Woolmer worked as a cleaner in a convent in Quex Road as a girl. She had left school before she was 14 and scrubbed marble staircases all day long.
Her father had joined the RAF after the First World War and stayed in the service. When hostilities broke out in 1939, the family moved en masse to an airbase in Cirencester, where he had become the chief fireman, organising crew to rush out and help stricken planes.
She recalled planes taking off and never coming back. She said: “I became friends with two airmen. One day, one did not return. His friend was so distraught he took off in his plane and crashed it, nose down, in a field. The death of his best mate was just too much for him to bare – he decided he could not carry on.”
And Ms Woolmer recalls German prisoners housed near her air-base home.
“We actually felt quite sorry for them,” she said. “They’d come up to our garden wall, and we’d make them tea, even though it was rationed at the time. We’d apologise that we didn’t have any sugar.”
Such generosity and compassion towards the enemy – when she was watching pilots every day risk their lives to hasten the end of the war – shows what stuff Nell is made of.
And it shows why the gift of a hamper, sent with the love and thanks from the readers of the New Journal, is a small but important gesture.
|
 |
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
