Megan Bradley and the Canadian Soldiers in World War II

Here is an extract from an Oral History audio file of Megan Bradley’ s March 1988 conversation with John Rawlins

George and Megan Bradley: 50th Wedding Anniversary 1987

Among memories of evacuees, low-flying Spitfires, and requisitioned land for aircraft maintenance, Megan has several anecdotes, and a particularly touching one about the arrival at her house of three big men “asking for potatoes”… These turned out to be three exhausted Canadian soldiers looking for a place to rest up and get a wash!

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Megan Bradley with John Rawlins: March 17th 1988

Transcript

I can tell you a story about the war.

One morning I was bathing Ralph, what was he, about two, and a knock come at my kitchen door, and down Meadow Lane you knocked at the door, and you walked into the kitchen. There was no porch or anything. There were three of the biggest men I saw, I think.

They were in uniform, and they looked dreadful.  And they asked me if I’d got any potatoes to sell. I said, “Oh no”, I said,” I’ve got no potatoes to sell”, I said. “Why?”, I said, “What do you want to buy potatoes for? Where have you been on manoeuvres? “.

I could see by their uniforms they were Canadians. And they’d been on these manoeuvres anyway.  And so, I said “Well I can cook you some breakfast”. “Oh, we’d rather have a wash ma’am”.

And so, I said:” Right, would you come inside?”.  And I thought to myself then, there’s these three men there and there’s me by myself, my husband gone out. Anyway, in they come and I started pumping water, because you only had a pump.

And so, they said: “Oh no we won’t wash in here. If you let us have a towel and some soap, we’ll wash in the river” – which was at the side of our house. Which they did. They took the towels. I give them towels and soap.

And while they were doing that, I had a pig on the wall. A ham, a bacon side, and off come some of this ham and I cooked slices of ham. We had chickens, no end of chicken’s eggs and bacon I cooked for them.

And they sat there, and they ate that breakfast and one of them looked up on the wall and he said “It’s a long time since I’ve seen that”, he said. “We used to have one hanging at home”, he said, “but I hope I’ll be able to go home and see it”. I often wonder whether the poor fellow did.

But you know, they went out of the house. They were, they couldn’t thank me enough. They asked me what I wanted in money. I said,” No thank you”, I said, “You go away, you’re not supposed to have eaten that”.  But do you know what they done? They put their hands in their pockets and pulled out money out of their pockets and dropped it on the table and they said:” If you don’t want it, give it to your little boy”. It was only a matter of shillings and pence. That was for the baby. They had a good wash and I lent them father’s razor.

(John Rawlins comments: “It’s amazing now when you think that in this day and age this wouldn’t happen. But in 1940 or 1941, whenever that was, there were a lot of strange children about, there were a lot of strange men about, all different nationalities and yet you felt entirely safe. When we were children, we went with these soldiers all over the place, rode in their vehicles sometimes, against the rules mind you, but you never felt in any danger. Even in the black out. Half of them were strangers. You felt entirely safe”.)

The complete audio file appears here:

Audio Recordings: Wartime Memories with George and Megan Bradley

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