Pat Nelson

"I left school in 1947. I wanted to be a hairdresser, but my mother said, there's no money in hairdressing, I want you to go work in an office. So she knew best I thought, mum knows best!

So she said, "I've found you a job, it's in the Co-op, the R.A.C.S. - the head offices in Powis Street" which was in Woolwich. So she said, "Come on I'll take you down there". So she took me down, and we had this interview, and I started work on the 6th January 1947.

It was a terrible, terrible winter, the snow was about six foot deep in some places and there were power cuts because there wasn't the coal. I used to work at the back of this main office block and I worked in the back in this warehouse place on the top floor. It was freezing cold and I used to sort statements. There was pink, green, yellow, pink, green, yellow and I used to sort all these statements.

We used to go home early in the afternoon because of the power cuts, and the trams weren't running, because the weather was so bad. So I used to walk from Woolwich to Eltham. It was a long way, but when you're young things don't affect you the same way. I used to get terrible chilblains. And that year Princess Elizabeth and Prince Phillip got married, and the day they got married we got the afternoon off. That was in November 1947 and we got the afternoon off!"

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