Transcript: Closer to home

Audio transcript

Mary Coomer:

After they had posted Harry as missing - presumed killed - by that time, my father's factory had been hit. He was a carpet manufacturer, but they were making webbing equipment during the war and tents and all sorts of things. And the house had been damaged; we had no windows, they were all boarded up, but they were still living in the house.

And so I asked... I went home and my mother was not very well at all, so I asked, much to my dismay, whether I could have a posting nearer to home and I would have to give up my Shoeburyness job. And there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. The DS of E didn't want me to go. And yet he understood why I wanted to go, so they said well...

Interviewer: 

The DS of E?

Mary Coomer: 

The superintendent of experiments, Colonel Lichtman. He said, would I rethink because I was one of the original people, and by this time, we had got lots coming in whom we were training. And so I said... by this time, I'd been made a sergeant and then I was made a staff sergeant there.

So I thought about it and I thought, well really, if my other brother was talking about not going to university and talking about joining up, I thought, what can one do? I better go home. I was the only girl. And so I asked for a posting nearer home.

I may just as well have stayed in Shoeburyness. For three months or four months only, they said they wanted me to go on an RSM’s [regimental sergeant major] course, a WO1’s [warrant officer first class] course, if I moved. So I said, well... I didn't know what I was going to do.

But they did put me near home, just from February '42 until September '42, I was posted as a CSM, company sergeant major, to the Royal Army Pay Corps at Hollinwood near Oldham, so that I could get home at weekends.

Interviewer: 

And is this where you met your...

Mary Coomer: 

And that's where I met Eva Ellison, plus a lot more. 

Well, my mother was absolutely marvellous, she really was. And she used to say, um, if anybody is too far away from home to get home for their day off or for their weekend off, come here. We had quite a big Victorian house with a tennis court and an orchard, so, um, they all used to come home. 

Well, I went... they were all billeted in houses, and she had been billeted there with three or four more who used to come home quite a lot, and they would go home when I wasn't there.

And when I was at the Pay Corps, it came through that I would... they were now going to train RSMs, female RSMs, in charge of group headquarters. So I went on the second training course that they did, and I was sent from Hollinwood - that was why I was only there a few months - to Brockenhurst in the New Forest, where we did six weeks' training, military training.