Cubbington woman remembers "normal working day" on VE Day as she waited for news of her prisoner of war brother's return
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Pauline, 100, of Kelvin Road, Cubbington, was a hero of the Second World War herself.
She served in the Ambulance Corps during the Coventry Blitz rescuing casualties and driving them to Warwick Hospital.
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Hide AdOf VE Day, she said: “I remember the day itself as being very dull and chilly.
"For me it was a normal working day and, in truth, we had been expecting news of the end of hostilities.
" In our depot, we listened to Churchill’s broadcast and I recall that I had to finish my shift before I could join the celebrations.
"We were still very much under orders.
"Tables were laid out in the street, essentially for the children and their mothers had made cakes for them.
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Hide Ad"We were severely rationed at that time, with meat rationed to twice a week, but somehow they made celebrating possible.
"In truth, my mother and I were more concerned at that time to know that my younger brother Freddy might come home.
"He was a flight engineer in a Lancaster squadron and on a bombing mission to Brunswick.
"He’d parachuted from his aircraft after a bomb hit his plane from friendly fire above.
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Hide Ad"We knew that he had been incarcerated in Stalag 325 and by VE Day we knew that he had survived and all we wanted was his return home.
"He achieved this by walking across Germany and France to reach the French coast.”
The daughter of a French mother and English father who met during the First World War, Pauline was born in Birmingham on January 11 1920.
Her parents had met when her father was billeted in her mother’s village in Lillers in Northern France and in 1919 her mother took the first boat available for civilians to cross the Channel and married her English fiancé in Birmingham.
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Hide AdAs a two-year-old toddler, Pauline was sent to France to live with her French grandparents while her mother awaited the birth of Freddy in England.
When Freddy was born her parents returned to France and lived in Lillers until the Germans’ arrival was anticipated in 1939.
This was when the family returned to England to avoid incarceration.
The family settled in Kings Heath, south Birmingham and Pauline and her mother, joine