Margery Davies

My name is Margery Davies. I went to primary school and then what was the Old County School in Llanidloes. It was in the days where you tried a scholarship to get into school and there were 70 pupils in a very intimate building.

I left Llanidloes school in 1938 to go to Aberystwyth, not very far away but a very different environment. From being one child, I was 400 girls in a hostel in Alexandra Hall. It was a wonderful time of my life. I met friends who are still my friends. We got our results together and now we get our pensions together.

I studied economics. Not many county schools in Wales did economics in those days so we were ahead of that. Life in Aber ‘38 to ‘39 was carefree but not by modern standards. We were disciplined. We were in by 10 o’clock at night; 11 on a Wednesday and a Saturday and then war broke out. The first year of the war, we didn’t know that war was going on. But come 1940, that’s when I suddenly grew up. The boyfriends were called up; there was rationing. We began to get worried about what was going to happen. Boys we knew had been killed. I did become very anti-war.

I went into teaching. The Butler Act came, 1944 act and now we had the Modern School, the Technical School and the Grammar School. And I went into the modern section.  When the men came back I was occupying a man’s job, so he claimed his job back and I moved on to the Technical School in Newtown, which later became the College of Further Education. I stayed in the College of Further Education until I retired in 1979 and now I’m living in retirement just two doors away from the house where I was born.