Joan Gillan’s life was almost cut short by a cockroach 83 years ago.

“When I was 14 years old I disgraced myself on my bike,” the 97-year-old said. “In those days, Grey’s Bridge in Sandys had wooden planks. You could see the water below as you rode over it. One evening I was going to babysit on Boaz Island and what we think happened was that a cockroach flew into my face. I pulled my wheel and went straight over into the water and onto the rocks below. To this day, I hate roaches.”

Someone saw her body lying in shallow water and summoned help.

“There was a hospital on Ireland Island but they did not accept females of any kind,” she said. “They [the rescuers] had to borrow a pinnace from one of the war ships and take me from Grey’s Bridge to the Foot of the Lane in Paget. From there I was taken to the old King Edward VII Memorial Hospital.”

She spent five weeks being treated for a compound fracture of the skull.

Her father, Edward Harvey, was an engine fitter from Hampshire, England; her Bermudian mother, Gladys Smith, was a teacher.

They lived in Dockyard; first on Victoria Row and later, on Albert Row. Housing was based on a rigid class system. An engine fitter fell on the lower rungs of the social ladder.

“Housing was determined by this class system,” said Mrs Gillan. “The classes did not mix. My mother hated living up there. There was no electricity and there was a bathroom at the end of the row shared by everyone.”

A ferry took her to classes at Mount Saint Agnes Academy every morning. In rough weather she and nine other students would be stuffed into a cabin on the smallest boat possible. This made for an unpleasant crossing, but the logic was that a smaller boat was needed because demand was lower on a windy day.

“The door of the cabin was locked so that if the boat turned over they would know where all the bodies were,” said Mrs Gillan.

She loved to write and once dreamed of becoming a journalist. Her father dissuaded her by saying she was too soft.

She graduated from Mount Saint Agnes in 1934, and is the school’s oldest living alumna. She went on to a teachers’ training college in London, England. War broke out just after she finished.

“It would take an idiot to not see that war was coming,” she said. “We were fitted for gas masks and everyone received one. Everyone was quite sure we were going to have gas attacks, which thankfully we never did.

“In the summer of 1939 I managed to get as far as Norway on a vacation. I went back to London just as Hitler invaded Poland. Not three days after my return I was called up to help with the evacuation.”

In September 1939, 100,000 children were hurriedly moved out of London to the countryside, because it was thought they would be safer there from the bombing.

“The evacuation was the worst organised thing that ever happened during the war, really,” said Mrs Gillan. “Myself and another teacher I knew got a summons to turn up at 2am at some awful place. Wherever it was, the evacuees were all boys. Poor children and poor us too. Some official there, allocated ten boys to every adult. They said, ‘these are yours and these are yours’. My friend and I had 20 children between the two of us. The train driver was supposed to be the only person who knew where we were going. There were all sorts of mad orders being given to everyone. On no account was anyone to lock the doors on the train.”

She and her friend endured a difficult journey to Nailsea, Somerset.

The boys were teenagers from a rough part of London and spent the journey fighting and trying to shove each other off the train.

In Nailsea, families had been forced by the government to take on the evacuees whether they wanted them or not.

Mrs Gillan said: “An official notice would come to say you have three rooms, and you only need two. We are sending you two or three evacuees.”

When the train arrived in Nailsea, the children were assigned host families at the train station.

“After a while a family would come back to us and say, ‘Could we exchange this boy for another?’” said Mrs Gillan.

Later, she taught at a school on the outskirts of London. When the bombing began in earnest classes were often taught in underground shelters. She was given evening fire warden duties, which entailed patrolling the neighbourhood and extinguishing any small fires caused by bombing.

Despite the danger and chaos she had no desire to return to Bermuda.

“Everyone had a purpose,” she said. “It was exciting.”

She married Ronald Gillan in England in 1944 and they had a son John. At the end of the war the couple suffered a terrible winter where her baby son contracted measles, whooping cough and polio, and her husband struggled with endless bouts of bronchitis. Food was still being rationed which made it difficult for him to eat enough to keep up his strength. A doctor recommended the couple move to the warmth of Bermuda.

They moved to the Island in 1947. Mr Gillan found a job as a buyer at Master’s. Mrs Gillan taught for 30 years at the Bermuda High School for Girls.

Today, Mrs Gillan loves reading and “dabbling” in writing, and has won several honourable mentions in the annual The Royal Gazette Dr Stanley Ratteray Memorial Christmas Short Story Contest.

Mr Gillan is now deceased. Mrs Gillan has two children — the late John Gillan and Jennifer Meacham — five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.