Family Life - Mrs Joan Boardman

·1 hr 38 min·5 clips

Military Histories shares an oral-history interview with Mrs Joan Boardman from the Royal Dragoon Guards Audio Archive. She starts with a Northumberland mining village, a birth on 25 October 1925, and a move to Ashington when she is about nine. School ends early. She leaves at 14, works for an aunt in Felton, returns home, and waits tables in a cafe while she hopes to become a nurse. A dance changes the direction of things. Out with her sister, she meets a group of soldiers and meets Jim Boardman. Her sister is already on leave with a boyfriend among Scottish soldiers, which places the scene in the social world where service life and family life overlap. From there, the interview follows marriage into army life with a man from the 5th Inner Skilling Dragoon Guards. The domestic work starts to matter more than the uniform. She remembers hot quarters, a son named David who would not eat for six weeks, and a Medical Officer who says drinking is what matters most. Another wife goes into hospital with a dysentery infection, so the children are shared around the quarters. She takes two boys, while Helen, the RSM's wife, takes the other two. The boys are lively and hard to contain. They run across the main canal road and frighten her with the traffic. Then the food story turns. The boys eat everything, and David finally manages a proper meal of baked beans on toast after six weeks. Schooling is never simple. The children go out with an armed escort, and the little nursery school has a young trooper at the door whom Janet nicknames for his ginger hair. She also recalls living by the sweet water canal and thinking the country was beautiful even when the surroundings were shaped by war. She reflects on the first few months in Germany, when a newly married posting sat under the shadow of wartime devastation. The closing note is for army wives, with gratitude for the burden they carry when husbands are away.

As heard by us

Army life is rendered as home life, with heat, children, and the daily work of coping.

Mrs. Joan Boardman's account gives service life a domestic scale: a Northumberland childhood, the move to Ashington at nine, leaving school at 14, and early work with an aunt and in a cafe before nursing training.

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Why you'd press play

You want a family-life Army history story from the home front.

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