Tom and Mary Baxter

When most of us think about WW2, we imagine soldiers on the beaches, fighting for every inch of ground. But what about the parents, wives, girlfriends, children and workers in reserved occupations that were left behind, worrying about loved ones and trying to make life as normal as possible?

Mary Baxter, originally from New Stevenson, was 19 when war was declared. Her father owned Grays Inn and, while she didn't work, she helped out when the bar was busy.

"We always listened to the six o'clock news on the radio," says Mary. "The war was declared on a Sunday when we were at our lunch. I can remember the moment it was announced and although I wasn't sure what it would all entail I didn't realise how much disruption the war would cause. None of us had and idea and it was all supposed to be over by Christmas."

Mary has two younger brothers. Ian was 17 and at university studying medicine when the war broke out. He was allowed to finish his degree and spent six months gaining experience of work in a hospital before he was called up after working in a hospital for six months. Evan, at 15, was too young for active service but later volunteered for the RAF and was taken on as air crew.

"Ian was a man in his own right, so there was nothing Father could do about it," says Mary. "I remember discussing what it must have been like for other families in the area. New Stevenson was a mining area and there was a lot of poverty at that time. I remember one family who stayed at the pithead. The father was responsible for the lift and none of the family had been out of New Stevenson but all the men were called up, leaving just the mother behind. A lot of people had never been further than Glasgow so it must have been a huge disruption for many families."

Little did Mary realise at the time but the war was to disrupt her own, as yet unmade plans.

"Tom and I were just engaged when he was called up," explains Mary. "He went away for six months' initial training before heading off to North Africa with the Signal Corps. He came home on embarkation leave and wanted us to get married before he left."

Like many couples at the time, Mary and Tom had to arrange the wedding in a very short space of time. Tom's first job was to try to persuade Mary to get married at all at such short notice.

"He went to see the minister on the Sunday and explained that I wasn't very keen," recalls Mary. "The minister said if he could talk me into it he'd call the banns from the church steps and we could get married within 48 hours. Needless to say he talked me round and then it was a rush to get things ready.

"I was clothes-mad and had spent all my clothing coupons on cotton things for the summer and a green coat and dress with grey accessories because, of course, I hadn't realised I'd be getting married, so I had to be married in the green coat and dress.

"We had a tea to celebrate then we went to Edinburgh for two days' honeymoon before Tom left for Catterick to get kitted out for the Far East."

Tom left on July 10th and Mary didn't hear from him again until her birthday on August 13.

"I didn't know it at the time but his unit was supposed to go to India," says Mary. They were taken off at Lagos in West Africa instead and they were flown from there to El Alamein. The boat went on to India and sank with all loss of life so Tom was very lucky. He wrote to me when he arrived and from then on we both wrote every day. I listened to the radio all the time and watched news reels at the cinema avidly because those were the only ways to get news. On the reports you could hear the El Alemein guns in the background and I remember thinking, 'That's fine, he's in the Signal Corps so he'll be away at the back.' What I didn't realise was that he was actually in front of the guns but I'm glad I didn't know."

Back home Mary's family were in the fortunate position of not only having the pub, but also having relatives who had the grocer's shop and relatives living abroad.

"My aunt and uncle had the grocer's shop next door to the pub so we didn't suffer from starvation," laughs Mary. "We didn't have an abundance of anything but we never went without. We also had relatives in Canada and Australia who used to send us food parcels, mostly containing tinned fruit.

"I made the best scrambled egg and no one knew it was dried egg. I also made custard creams using dried egg but I could never master them with real eggs after the war.

"There was a limited amount of beer and whisky available in the pub which was the only relief for a lot of people because there wasn't much else to do, apart from going to the cinema."

According to Mary the people on the Home Front just had to get on with their lives as best they could.

"We did have some air raids, because they flew over us on the way to Clydebank," says Mary. "There were only two incidents locally that I remember. One was at the ICI plant in Mossend and the other was a landmine which landed near Clelland. We were lucky really because we didn't have the same fear as the people in London - it must have been terrible for them because they were bombed day in and day out, night in and night out."

The end of the war came when Mary and a friend were at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow.

"We were seeing Tosca," she explains. "They stopped the performance in the middle and someone came out to announce that the war in Europe had ended. A huge cheer went up and everyone went mad. My friend's brother had been in the RAF and been killed over Germany so we had a bit of a weep too. All I could think was that Tom would be back home the next week. We saw the rest of the show and by the time we came out Hope Street was jam-packed full of cars, all the tram cars were lined up and people were doing eightsome reels and it was great fun."

But it would be considerably more than a week before Tom would be back home. After El Alamein he went to Cairo where he spent the next nine months and then another six months in Uxbridge before he was demobbed.

"He came home in a brown demob suit with a raincoat and a brown soft hat," recalls Mary. "It wasn't easy for either of us to get back to normal because after four years apart we'd both grown up. Being 21 back then was so much different compared to today because we hadn't done much or been very far.

"Before he went away I'd had him round my little finger but not when he came back. Things hadn't changed for me but they had for him, so I was the stumbling block really. It was so different from today - today no one would wait for four years for someone to come back and I wouldn't blame them.

"I was lucky though - I was only one of thousands whose husband was away but at least he came back."