Just before World War II, I married my sweetheart, Daniel. We had a small ceremony and shared two weeks of wedded bliss before he was sent off to the war. I would get letters from my love nearly every week and I missed him terribly.
Four months after Daniel had left, I received a telegram. It was extremely difficult for me to open it because I knew a telegram usually meant bad news.
I summoned up the courage and read the contents. My Daniel had been declared missing in action.
I was so frightened. In some ways, I believed that the poor girls who were told their men had been killed were much more at peace in their hearts.
But Daniel being missing was not the only predicament I had to deal with. I felt changes in my body and I knew what they meant – I was pregnant.
Thinking my baby wouldn’t have a father, I decided to hide my pregnancy from the people around me. I felt compelled to do this because having a fatherless child was a much greater concern then than it is today.
It was a very difficult time for me – I had no family, Daniel’s mother was in ill health and his father had passed away the year before. I had no-one to turn to.
I went to the country to stay in a Catholic home for pregnant single girls. The nuns didn’t ask me any questions about keeping the baby and I simply told them I was a single girl who’d gotten herself into trouble.
I stayed at the home for the duration of my pregnancy. When I gave birth, the nuns took the baby from me and adopted it out. I wasn’t even told the gender of the child. After a brief recovery time, I returned to my town to resume my duties for the war effort.
It was one year and four months after Daniel had been sent to war that I received another telegram – this time telling me my husband had been rescued from a prisoner of war camp.
He arrived home six weeks later, a mere shadow of a man. I hardly recognised him. It took many years for him to recover from the horrors he’d endured. Even more traumatic was the torture he had suffered while in the camp, leaving him unable to give me children.
I never told Daniel about the child I gave away. I was ashamed of my weakness and terrified he would leave me if he ever found out.
It has been more than 60 years and this is the first time I’ve shared my story with anyone. I only hope that if Daniel is looking down on me from above, he understands why I did what I did.
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