Nora Carrington Oliver Watson

My home was out in India and when I left school at the age of 16, war broke out, I could not get back to my parents in India. So I had to do something because the military had taken over all the planes and ships. So I couldn’t get back to my parents out in India. So I decided to go to a secretarial college [in England] and take a training there so that I could do something until such time that I could get out there [to India]. Well of course, the war went on and I thought, I would like to go into the Wrens [WRNS – Women’s Royal Naval Service known as the Wrens]. I didn’t want to go into the Land Army or the ATS [Auxiliary Territorial Service]. There had always been some kind of naval history in our family going back and so I decided to join the Wrens.

I had to first of all go for a six-weeks training because I went in as a stenographer and that’s what they needed. So I went and did a six-weeks training and then was fortunate enough to be posted to Lord Louis Mountbatten’s headquarters in London, where he was the Chief of Combined Operations. I stayed there until such time that he was moving on when he was made Supreme Allied Commander [of] Southeast Asia and we were moving out to India. And I thought this was a great opportunity, I’d be able to see my parents again.

But on the night that I was due to join my Wren comrades, because all the troop movements were done at night, we were going up to Liverpool to get on the boat, I had said goodbye to my grandmother whom I had lived with in England until this time. And the sirens went and the searchlights went up, caught a German bomber and he dropped his bomb on the very station we were standing on. So I was injured with shrapnel wounds in the leg and the right side of the back.

Three months later, I got out to India because even though I had to have another medical, I assured them that my mother and father would be responsible for me out there if something went wrong. So on those terms, I went out and joined up with other Wren workers. And we were in Delhi, the headquarters there, and no sooner got settled in when [Lord Louis] Mountbatten could see that the Japanese were planning to invade and so we moved then down to what we knew as Ceylon but Sri Lanka now.

I had met my future husband, I should call him, in 1940 when I was just a civilian girl in England. And we corresponded for five years and got married from my home out in India in 1945. He was an Accountant Officer up in Bombay [now Mumbai] and then all of a sudden, the Canadian headquarters realised he’d been overseas much longer than he should have been and to return to Canada right away. So I requested to be demobbed [demobilised] in India so I could return with him on the same ship. And then when I got to London, I had to check into Sackville House [40 Piccadilly, headquarters of the Civilian Repatriation Section of the Canadian Wives’ Bureau] then and go on the list of war brides waiting a turn. So I eventually got out to Canada in 1946.