IT might be more than six decades since Vera Curnow was doing her bit for the war effort, but she still recalls it as if it were yesterday.

Vera and her daughter Angela Shore got in touch after reading the stories of others who did their bit during the First and Second World Wars.

Angela says: “Mum is now almost 95 and she has lived in Colchester all her life, except for when she went to Welwyn Garden City during the Second World War and that is where she met my dad. He was Cornish, which is where the surname comes from.

“But mum has lots of memories of Colchester because she was born here and went to school here and they came back here after they got married.”

Vera, whose maiden name was Lingard, was born in Fairfax Road in June 1919 and went Canterbury Road School, which no longer exists.

Gazette:

                                       Vera at school

Her grandfather, George Lingard, ran the Grenadier pub and she would often go there with her brother and sisters.

But she says she did not excel at school, where the teachers did not think she would achieve much.

“My teacher told me I had the brains of an earwig and I would never amount to anything.

“I left school at 14 with no qualifications, but I was never out of work,” she says.

She went on to get employment in a boot and shoe factory in the town and then, during the Second World War, she went to work helping to make Mosquito planes.

“I went to Welwyn Garden City to work on the Mosquito planes. We called them Mozzies, and I had to bend the pipes, which were really long.

“It was quite tiring, repetitive work and it used a lot of muscles.

“I still have a problem with my shoulder sometimes because of it, all these years on,” says Vera.

It was inWelwyn Garden City that she met her future husband, Jim Curnow, who was in the Air Force.

“We were in the pub, me and my friend – I would never have dared go in a pub – and in walked this man with dark, wavy hair and I thought he looked all right,” she laughs.

The couple were married at St Giles Church, where Vera had also been confirmed, in 1945 and remained married for 60 years until Jim’s death in 2006.

Angela says Vera worked for most of her married life, including running a sheltered housing scheme, called Walnut Tree House, and working as a home help.

Gazette:

                        Vera on her wedding day

“I was very thorough. One day I was cleaning out the drains and one of the ladies asked me what I was doing because no-one else who had worked for them had ever cleaned the drains.”

She even met royalty as a result of working for Joyce Brooks when she was Mayor of Colchester.

“I was one of her guests at the Oyster Feast and I met the Duke of Kent. I told him I had left school at 14 and he couldn’t believe it, but I told him I had never been out of work because I have always worked hard.”

Angela says the family took Vera back to Welwyn Garden City five years ago for a trip down memory lane and she visited the Mosquito museum and was pictured with a model of one of the planes she helped create all those years ago.