大象传媒

I was evacuated in '39, around the second week of September. I was sent to an Irish Welsh family - the mother was quite brutal. On one occasion she threw a chip pan at me. I had to go to the hospital because of my hand; anything like that the family has to be told, and so my father came to get me and took me home to Liverpool.

My father was a merchant seaman working for CPR. He started on Atlantic convoys and went on to the Arctic convoys which took food and amunition into Russia. My father's ships were sunk twice. During the war, the moment a merchant ship went down the company would automatically stop paying wages, even if you survived. My mother only knew that my father's ship had gone down when the money stopped. They didn't publish when the ships were sailing or returning - she never knew he was coming home until he walked through the door.

In Liverpool we used to go into an air-raid shelter in a commerial or technical college on Durning Road. The bombers used to come straight up the Mersey because the moonlight shone on the river and guided the planes to Liverpool where they would bomb the docks and the factories. One night my father took the opportunity to go and see his brother on the Wirral. He took me with him. That was the night the bombers bombed Canada Dock and hit an ammunitions ship. The college was bombed - it was hit by a landmine. Landmines used to come down on parachutes, the weight of the bomb would push it down through the building so they would always explode at the bottom of the building. When they came down on the row of houses it would flatten three quarters of the street. Out of 30 houses it would destoy twenty or twenty five. The college was completely destoyed. As were they the people who were using it as an air-raid shelter.

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