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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Christine Wadsworth of Wakefield Libraries and Information Services on behalf of Mrs K. M. McIntyre and has been added to the site with her pemission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

On the 16th December, 1939, my husband Roland Sayers and I married. Both sets of parents were dead against it as they thought that we were too young — I was 18!
After three months, Roland was called up and at the age of 20, my handsome husband, who was 6 feet 3 inches tall, became a Gunner in the 3MAA Royal Artillery. We spent his embarkation leave in Cleethorpes, staying in a small boarding house before I saw him off on to the train. As he got on to the train, he turned round and got off again and came back to me and said “Kathleen, I’ll never see you again”. He was sent out to the Far East, but before he had even fired a shot and whilst still dressed in his wool fatigues, he was taken prisoner by the Japanese on the fall of Singapore. Roland died of starvation as a prisoner of war, on Tuesday the 5th of October, 1943. He is buried in the Kancharaburi War Cemetery, Thailand.

My brother, Cecil Arthur Brown, joined the Merchant Navy and was Captain of the ‘Trident’. He, his wife Ethel and our Mother, went by ferry across the Tyne to get to his ship. Cecil kissed them goodbye and then he came back to them and said “ I’ll never see you anymore”!
He was in the wheelhouse of the Trident when she hit a mine. After the explosion, two lads came into the wheelhouse and said that they had all better get out. Cecil said that he didn’t want to live as he had lost both his legs and went down with his ship. He was 27 years old.
There is a memorial to the men of the 'Trident' on Tower Hill.

Newcastle was often bombed and I once saw a Junkers 88 come down in the Tyne.
Wilkinson’s Pop Factory near where I lived in Newcastle was bombed and three hundred and fifty people including children, who had been sheltering in the basement, were killed.

One bomb hit a church in North Shields and a friend of mine who I had been at school with had her head blown off. When I came home and found out, I fainted. I was out for half and hour.

I once saw a Junkers 88 come down in the Tyne.

I worked in munitions in Newcastle, then Solihull, Birmingham, on Hurricane Bombers. I had filthy digs with a straw mattress to sleep on. I got spots on my hands, then I was covered with them. I didn’t know what it was! A relative came and took me home where I saw a doctor who told me that it was scabies. All the family got it, but we used Derbac soap and after three days it cleared.

I didn’t go back to working in munitions, instead I went to Ripon to work in the NAAFI. Up at 6.30am, I made coffee, had breakfast, then cooked breakfast for the soldiers. We served Canadian, American, British and Australian troops and of them all, the Canadians were the most well mannered.
The NAAFI had to be fumigated because the floors were covered in cockroaches. They were everywhere.
It was from the NAAFI that I saw York being bombed.

I once went home whilst working in Ripon and being very hungry looked for something to eat. Mother didn’t have any food in the house, only leeks, so I fried the leeks and had a leek sandwich. I still like leek sandwiches to this day!

I was happy working in the NAAFI and eventually got the job of manageress, staying there until the end of the war.

Eight years after my husband Roland died, I married Bob McIntire, who I had known at school. A local government officer, he too had seen action as a Sergeant in the Medical Corp for six years. Whilst stationed on Malta, he, like the islanders had been very short of food due to blockades and his weight dropped to six stones.To escape the bombing they often sheltered in caves and in one of them found some tins of corned beef which they opened and ate. The meat was still fit to eat, even though it had been left over from World War 1!

This year, 2005, being the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, I was invited to go to Thailand to visit my first husband, Roland’s grave, at Kanchanaburi, along with my daughter and others like me, who were widowed in the war and their families. It was a very moving and emotional experience.

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