Former Worthing window dresser recalls wartime childhood in Shoreham, her appearance in an Ingrid Bergman film and her marriage to the 'catch' of Bentalls

I picked up a few stories about her childhood in Shoreham. She’s a remarkable lady, with a mischievous side that goes all the way back to her youth.

Gloria Wall was born in Gravesend, Kent, to Laurie and Gladys Faulkner in 1938. Her family moved to Shoreham around the beginning of the Second World War, living at 25 Erringham Road. One of her earliest memories is that military trucks occasionally ran into their garden wall, having come down Mill Hill and not turning quick enough at the bottom.

Gloria recalls Farmer Frampton’s cows wandering into the garden after the wall had been knocked down, which happened more than once. She also remembers there were hardly any shops on the south side of the High Street, with anti-aircraft guns all along the quayside of the river there.

During the war, the family moved about a lot, as her father was an air mechanic. Like so many families, they would try to take their children somewhere they thought would be safer. In the case of Gloria, her mother decided her parents' place in Cliffe, Kent, would be such a place on some occasions.

"My Grandmother went in to farming, more vegetables, y’know, than animal, we had cows but it was a vegetable farm. We used to have big stew pots, cos she had ten kids, plus had to take the two POWs, or didn’t have to but they did, they let them live in. And she used to have these two pots going all day, every day.

"Wasn’t called a range in those days but she used to, of an evening, feed everybody. She’d stand in front of it, pull her dress up at the back to warm her bum, and she always had peach or pink bloomers on that come down just above, just below the knee, and that’s there in my mind to this day. I don’t know how she did it, I really don’t, she was a marvel."

Gloria still has a picture that one of the German POWs living on the farm painted of her. She spent a lot of time with her grandparents in Kent and it was the only time during the war that she saw any bombing, because the big oil refineries were only five miles away. However, while Gloria was at her grandparents' farm, a bomb dropped near her home in Shoreham.

"It was a German going back and he hadn’t released all his bombs away before he got back at the bottom of Mill Hill, exactly right at the bottom on the corner, cos there’s a little joke about that. It filled up naturally, it was a dirty big pond with bushes and trees, of course. There was nothing built in front of my mum’s house at all, it was just the Downs and farmland and fields, but with that bomb, it all filled in naturally."

It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like after six years of war, as a child, to suddenly be able to go investigate, play, with wartime restrictions lifted but probably, most of all, finally seeing more of her dad.

"I was not a quiet little thing when I was growing up, real tomboy. I only had one brother, little brother, my mother's little darling, could do nothing wrong. We went along to Buckingham Park, well I left me brother as a baby in a pram, and got all the way back, walking up Erringham Road, left me brother behind, in his pram, as a baby. Oh I’ve never run so fast in all me life, all the way back. He was snoozing when I got there."

Gloria’s recollections of that special time are recounted as through a child's mind's eye, with a wee glimpse back to how Shoreham once was.

"Everything was normal up until there was this knock, knock, on the front door and the only thing I thought strange, my mum said to me, 'Oh, will you go and answer the door'. I was walking to the front door, I was looking round, and she was in the kitchen, I could see her, I was thinking, ‘she’s letting me open the front door’, you know, and then of course I turned round, and opened it, and there was Dad."

He dumped his kit bag and picked her up. But he had to go straight back and Gloria remembers seeing him off on the train at Shoreham Station but they explained he would be coming home more often.

After the war, Gloria and her friend/accomplice Michael Head, at the grand old age of seven or eight, were among the first of their friends to cross the footbridge over the River Adur, which had been closed to civilians during the war. This was strictly against her mother’s wishes, which Gloria said with a grin.

"Bungalow Town was unknown territory to me. As you came off there were no buildings, there was just bushes, and erm, small trees. I’d say more bushes and brambles, that’s all that really would grow on pebbles.

"It was all mines and we weren’t allowed, also, there was two girls attacked the other side of the Beach, so my mother didn’t want me going across, cos, remember it’s a stone bridge, wasn’t it. Once you walked on to it, nobody could see you. We used to run, or try and have our bikes with us, you know, as girls, you know, for protection, cos, on the sea side of the bridge, going over, it was sort of a field.

"When we went in to the town, the buildings, the High Street going along, there’s only single level mainly, and shops here and there, nothing like it is today. You could see right over, there wasn’t anything built between the High Street."

With the war finished, Gloria got to visit Mrs Marjorie Samuelson at her wool shop in Shoreham High Street, a lady who turned out to be a source of fascination and great fun to be around for young Gloria.

"She was lovely, she had a poodle and he couldn’t walk. She made a scooter she used to push him in. I loved her dog. The shop was an olde worlde shop, it was all dark and drapes and velvet. I couldn’t stop looking around, it was magical to me, and it was all old, you know, I can’t explain. It was like, I think, even before my grandparents, it was all old stuff, but she was lovely.

"It was her that told me about Pantomime Row and also how they brought the railway carriages over, because, when they started the film industry, all the big film stars all lived in London, so they had to come down early morning and stay, you know, until they finished filming, get back on the old slow trains, you know, steam trains, back up to London, and then do that every day. And that’s why he built Pantomime Row."

Marjorie Samuelson was married to George Berthold Samuelson, producer of more than 100 silent movies, known as 'Bertie'. Living at Western Close, Lancing, from 1933, they had four sons, the eldest two, David, and Sydney.

Gloria carried on going to see Mrs Samuelson at her wool shop whenever she could but with the end of school on the horizon and the reality of work looming large in her future, she suddenly found herself in a situation where she had to take quick decisive action.

Her parents went into school to discuss her career prospects with the teachers and, to her horror, because she was good at maths, they decided she ought to try to get a job at a bank. "Well, I wasn’t having that," Gloria told me, and her mind was made up that she needed to act fast.

"I didn’t hang around, I was only living at home until I was 16 and then I was up in Kingston, working as a window dresser. I had never played hooky, until one afternoon, I thought, this is getting too dangerous, so I didn’t go back at dinner time, I went in to Worthing."

Gloria walked into Hubbards, the biggest store in Worthing, and asked if she could train to be a window dresser. "I didn’t go back to school, I started straight away, and I was just 15. I knew what I wanted, I couldn’t draw, for the life of me, if I draw a circle it doesn’t meet, but I just, I could walk into a room, like here, you know, when you move in, you walk in, I can see it. I could see the window before I dressed it, if you know what I mean.

"I decided I’d do a scene, and all I got from the department a pile of three yards pieces of material and I did a cottage, with a garden. I got buttons from the haberdashery department, they were all the flowers, and the petals, and unbeknown to me, my display manager had it photographed, won this big competition.

"I could never work in a bank, I wasn’t having that, so, I was very lucky. When I went into the shop, I went straight to the reception and I asked if there was any chance that I could have an interview with Mr Hubbard. Apparently, he was standing behind me, of course I didn’t even know. It's just luck. I went to the enemy camp up in Kingston, Bentalls, in their shop there, that was their biggest store."

Around that time, Gloria had a photo-shoot on Worthing beach for a national paper. She was allowed to pick out a swimming costume from Bentalls' selection for the occasion. She was obviously a head turner, as a photo from the Worthing Gazette on Wednesday, April 8, 1959, shows, being headlined 'Pretty girls in our shops...'.

Before Gloria moved up to the Kingston, she had a taste of the movie business. After checking, we think the film was Battle of the V-1.

"It was a war film and they filmed it on Shoreham Airport, a lot of it. Well that’s when I used to go with the Jivers, the rock n roll. I was all into them skirts that went out there, all the net petticoats, you know, you had it all.

When it was home time, we’d got a lift with a couple of lads and we were driving along the bottom road and there was all of these lights, inland, and we were all curious. So, of course, we drove up the airport and there was this, well I’d never seen one so big, it was like a bomber, and there was crowds of people, with photographs going on, and bits, and people yelling out things.

"Anyway, we were standing watching, and somehow I’d moved away from the three others, y’know, not far, and this bloke came up and started talking to me. He came round the next day and took me out for lunch. He said 'I’d like you to come up and see the studios and things'. He was really sweet and every time, he sent a car to pick me up and on the back seat was always a box of chocolates, or, because I smoked, cocktail cigarettes. The film stars used to have them.

"Anyway, that was how I got into the film business and I went up about three times to the studios in London and I did a part, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness it was called, and she was such a well known film star, I was just in awe. I think I must have walked around with me mouth open the whole time. It was in the war and I know I had a smaller child. We were all covered in mud, we had to have it all over, course we loved it, you know. It was just like crowd scenes."

It was while she was working at Bentalls that Gloria met her husband, Jon Wall. He was born in Burma and had to escape with some of his family at the outbreak of the Second World War when the Japanese invaded.When Gloria moved to the Bentalls in Kingston, she was given staff accommodation. "All the girls in the hostel, or whatever they called it, were going on about this bloke, 'you wait till you see him, he’s in the linen department, you’re gonna fall in love, everyone does'. Well, I mean, as I was actually engaged then.

"The linen department happened to share a table with the display department in the canteen, and so, of course, we’d sit opposite each other, hardly speak, you know, give each other the cold shoulder but there was always parties going on, and I timed it just right. My girlfriend from Hubbards made me a very slinky dress and I was wearing that when I got to the party. I just happened to be walking down the stairs as he came in the front door, in my four inch heels, and that was the start of our relationship."

After the wedding, the happy couple couldn’t afford a honeymoon, so they had one night back up in Kingston. They were trying to get away secretly.

"The best man ran out with us to the car and him not thinking, he went up Mill Hill. Well you couldn’t go anywhere after you go up, you have to turn round and come back, so of course, all the cars followed us up, and Farmer Frampton happened to be coming, or he must’ve seen what was going on anyway, coming out of his field of cows. He came out on his tractor and it was the slowest tractor ride for him, down Mill Hill, keeping all the cars behind us so we could get away so that they couldn’t follow us, cos they didn’t know where we were going."

• This article is dedicated to Gloria's son, Tim Wall, who died two years ago.