Margaret Marriott was 17-years-old when a 1000-pound Nazi bomb reduced her family’s Liverpool home to rubble.
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The streets of war-time England are a far cry from the peaceful surroundings of Kempsey.
Born in 1923, Margaret, affectionately known as ‘Peg’, was a high school student when World War II began and engulfed her home country of England.
As total war gripped the country, Margaret herself volunteered for service, spending three years in intelligence operations for the Royal Air Force from 1942 until the end of the war in 1945.
A teenager during the first years of the war, German bombing was a constant presence in the life of English civilians.
Margaret can still clearly remember looking up and seeing dogfights between German and English aircraft above the streets of Liverpool.
On May 4, 1941 – the day before her family’s home was destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb – Margaret said that firebombing raids had almost sent the house up in flame.
“One of the incendiary rounds came through the roof and one of the beds caught on fire,” Margaret explained. The home was momentarily saved when her father threw the flaming mattress out the window.
The day after, when the 1000-pound bomb destroyed their home, Margaret and her family were sheltered beneath it in a bunker.
The bombing caused the house to collapse on their corrugated iron and sandbag shelter, with the family waiting for more than 10 hours to be dug out.
Among the rescuers was her father, who was an air raid warden tasked with warning the neighbourhood when German bombers approached.
Margaret reasoned that the heavy bombing her family’s home sustained was due to its proximity to a nearby railway track, the likely target of the German aircraft.
The following year, Margaret applied to join the Royal Air Force.
Margaret said she wanted to be a driver, but after doing an intelligence test, Margaret recalled “they said ‘we could use your brain elsewhere’”.
She was sent to Snaith, a town in Yorkshire, to work in intelligence operations.
Margaret explained that her role was “to collect and collate information” from the pilots and crews conducting bombing raids on Germany.
“We put the words into the mouths of the men who briefed air crews,” she explained.
