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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Kenneth Thomas Houlton and has been added to the site with his permission…

I was living in Salford and was nearly 10 years old when the war broke out. I recall standing with my brother Ben along with the rest of our school and two of our teachers in the school yard, waiting to go to Kirkham Station. We were to be evacuees and had each of us been given enough food, bedding and the minimum requirements to last us a week, all this, as well as carrying our gas masks.

When we arrived at Kirkham we were taken to the marshalling yard, from where we traveled by coach to Elswick. I remember we were all lined up and people who either wanted an evacuee, or were made to have one, as the case may be, came to choose one or two of us. The lady we were to go to had not been able to come herself, so she had sent a friend to collect two boys.

I remember being quite happy to go with this lady and when we arrived at our new home it was an old fashioned little white washed cottage in the countryside, with no gas or electricity. The rationing didn’t seem to bother us, we always had full tummies, so we were happy. They people we were with were lovely to us and we soon got friendly with the local lads and lasses and we were off roaming the fields. Some of the children who came with us had never seen cows or apples growing on the trees, it was a whole new world for us and my brother and I were very happy in it. We dug a pretend air raid shelter in the field, putting wood over the top of it and going down into it playing our games. We wore clogs, all the children wore them and very comfortable they were too.

I went to the local school for twelve months; until I was eleven, then I transferred to the senior school at Poulton le Fylde. I was there for 5 years until I was 14. During this time my parents moved to Preston, but I stayed in Elswick, I didn’t go to Preston to be with my parents as I would have had to change schools, however, I was more than happy to stay where I was.

I left school at 14 and in 1943 went to work at Atkinson’s; they built lorries and as Leyland Motors had turned to mostly building tanks, the building of lorries like a lot of other manufacturing became important war work. At 14 I was doing a man’s work, learning to use the drilling machines and lathes.

Although, of course later, I was aware of the horrors that people did have to suffer, I have to admit my childhood memories of the war were mostly happy memories of days filled with laughter and sunshine.

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