252348 Irene Brooks Womens Land Army from:Middlesex I first met the beautiful Woman's Land Army uniformed Miss Irene Brooks,then of Brook Drive, Harrow, Middlesex in mid-1942, when we were both aged 17, having both been born in 1925, she on the 28th July,and me on the 7th November 1925. In 1942 I was a Private Canadian infantry soldier, a member of the 1st Battalion Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders Pipe-Band, stationed in the Marine Hotel at Selsey Bill, Sussex with the Glengarrian's C & D Companies while awaiting the expected invasion of the Nazi Germans from across the English Channel.
One lovely weekend I noticed a young lady, who was on leave, and somehow she had managed to seat herself on top of one of the two huge concrete anti-tank blocks at the end of the roadway that reached the beach water of the channel. Miss Brooks explained that she just wanted to enjoy the scenery while "...looking out to sea..." even if it was a forbidden area.
Miss Brooks and I became friends from then until 6th June 1944 (D-
Day) and I never saw her again until August of 1945 when I was in the process of returning to Canada to become a post-war veteran aged 19. However, by then my dear fiend, Irene, was now Mrs F.W. Wright, a mother whose husband was a former RAF officer, their baby girl was born in December of 1944. That lovely child was named Jacqueline Yvonne, but her beautiful mother, later became Mrs. Swann, who died at age 50 in 1975, in the State of New York. By then the pretty Jackie Wright had become Mrs James Stewart of Rochester N.Y. and she is now a widow with her own children, to be aged 93 by 7th November 2018.
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