The Story of an Irish Immigrant

I came to England in 1936, from Wexford. I was 16. In Ireland in those days there wasn't very much opportunity, and there were 6 of us, and I was the eldest. I had an auntie here and she was working for an Indian doctor in Deptford - she came over here to get away from her husband! So on my half-day off we used to meet up. We used to go to Lyons Corner House, they used to have bands there, and the nippies...

When I first came I was in private service in a house in Bryanston Square, near Marble Arch. That was the main opportunity available at that time. Lots of jobs at that time, they used to say No Irish Need APPLY You didn't get much time off - one half-day a week, and every second Sunday, and the pay was about £3 a month (but a pound was worth a pound then!) Some of the other staff used to resent it a bit because I got more time off than them - being a Catholic, I had Sundays to go to Mass. They didn't generally bother to go to Anglican church! We had to be in by 10 o'clock at night, that was it!

There was a lot of other Irish people in London at that time; there was a lot of migration from Ireland. Previous to that, a lot of Irish people had gone to America, but England was much nearer and easier to get to.

I was married in 1939 to a man from Wexford, but I met him over here. My first son was born in April 1940. My husband came that weekend that he was born, but then he was posted to France the day afterwards. Then I didn't hear from him for 3 months. He was wounded at Dunkirk, and was brought back to England and was in hospital in Basingstoke, where I went to see him and bring my baby son, Laurence, to see him. He had been wounded, his hands were burnt.

Some years later, I had a letter from his commanding officer, wanting to know if he'd survived Dunkirk, and what had happened to him; aparently he'd saved someone in a burning barn, and that's how he got burnt. My husband never told me about that story himself. After Dunkirk he'd been an ack-ack gunner on a ship and used to go back and forward to America. Me and the family were evacuated to Blackpool. When Laurence was about 2 I took the children to their grandmother in Ireland, but I came back to London because I was worried about our flat and all. We had to go to work - I used to work making haversacks for the soldiers, and covers for aeroplanes to keep the sand out in the desert campaigns.