大象传媒

My Wartime Memo

Where do I begin? September 1939 when my small world collapsed, aged 11 my childhood centred round Weaste Salford all my family lived close by Aunties, Uncles, Cousins and Grandparents, Holiday time was best when we could spend whole days at Seedley Park with our jam butty鈥檚 and bottles of water.
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THEN came the war, because we lived close to Salford Docks on the Manchester Ship Canal it was decided the children in the area had to be evacuated. I had always gone to Seedley Council School but my sister aged 6 had started at St Lukes Infants School,I was transferred to St Lukes School to be with her, We were duly sent to Lancaster. I can remember being in a school hall where people came to choose who they wanted, my sister and I went with a Mr and Mrs Dodds who had a nice terraced house just two up and two down, they both went out to work, so lunch time we had to see to ourselves. I remember writing home and telling my Mum it was great we did not have to pay for the pies for lunch you just gave the shopkeeper a book. My Mum went mad as this meant we were getting food on tick, which I had never heard of. Friday was bath night in a tin bath in front of the fire, and it was decided that as a neighbour at the back had two girls that we knew, it would be OK to all bathe in the same water, that did not go down well with mum either, as my sister was not settling and I suspect Mum was missing us it was decided to bring us home, Dad said Weaste was not on the map so we would be free from the bombing.

When we arrived home we had no schooling for a while, as all the teachers had been evacuated with us, but slowly more children and teachers came home and school got back to some normality. If you could call it normality by this time the air raids had started with a vengeance, and each evening we went to sleep at the parish hall as they had a cellar, which had been converted into an air raid shelter, we had to take our own bedding and sleep on the floor, at a later date they did get bunk beds, we had tried going into an air raid shelter built in the back yard of one of our neighbours, but that was not a great success, in the mean time there was a large shelter being built in our street, which we hoped would solve all our problems (little did we know).

The Christmas blitz 1940 a friend asked me to go with her to pay a visit on her sister who had just had a baby, she lived in Sandy Grove which was maybe mile and half from us, we arrived about two o鈥檆lock did some jobs for her, and as we were preparing to go home the sirens went, so we had to stay put, while there a bomb was dropped on the houses at the back of where we were, which shattered all the windows in the house we were in and brought a load of soot down the chimney and shattered the door, we were terrified, the next thing ARP men were shouting to us to get out as the building was not safe, two frightened schoolgirls with mother and baby had to move very quick and we ran to Halton Bank School for safety. We stayed in the school until the all clear siren went which was early morning we then had to get the midwife to come and attend to mother and baby,

When we arrived home there was great relief from our parents, but things were not great with the houses as all the windows had been blown in due to the blast from the bombing, we duly tried to help with the clearing up as this was Christmas and things had to be spick and span. Six o鈥檆lock came the dreaded sirens once more, so what do we do now Dad and sister wanted to stay put Mum and I wanted to try the new shelter in the street, as the bombing got worse we decided we had better move fast, so to the new shelter we went with lots of our neighbours already in there, we were quite happy for about an hour laughing and joking even dad decided to join us, and then it struck a bomb dropped on our house which was just at the back of the shelter, and the shelter collapsed trapping us. We had to wait until the ARP wardens came and told us to get down and crawl through a gap about two feet square, which we managed to do slowly, when we emerged it was to see our house and adjoining houses just a pile of rubble, three of our neighbours who were elderly and infirm died in there home, and one lady did not survive the shelter. We then had to make tracks very quickly to the Parish Hall as the bombing was still going on and it was just horrendous.

Next morning we had to go back to what was left of our house but there was nothing worth digging for, we retrieved one dinning room chair, one bottle of whiskey (how this survived we do not know) and a mantle clock( made in Germany) I think that sums it all up nothing. Our next venture was to get to my Mums sister who lived in Stretford approx 8 miles away, which we managed by getting lifts on lorries and walking.

Mrs Muriel Church.
Lowton
Warrington
7.6.2005

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