大象传媒

I was told later that it was 鈥渓and mine鈥� that destroyed Padstow Street but I never understood how that made sense.

In later life actual memories, family hearsay and recorded history merge into what seems real and with this in mind my story is told only from what I believe to be actual memory.

The two silver paper bells on either side of the high mantle piece and paper streamers from the centre room light shade should have been visible but when I looked all I recall was heavy dust settling on the whole room, a glimpse of my mother standing under the stairs with her hands to her head and father covering me with his arms under the table. I do not recall any noise from the blast which demolished the lower end of the street and killed the occupants of the house two doors down.

I remember the three of us out in the street and a white charabanc type emergency ambulance centre parked near the Joynson Memorial Hall but I do not recall going in. We then were walking up the worn stone steps of Ancoats Hospital with drops of blood on the steps as we did so. I later learned that this was from my father鈥檚 cuts about his head and from myself all caused by flying glass from the window at the time of the blast.

I remember my father driving with my mother and I through the streets of Manchester past the White City Stadium archway, which really was white and the roads around Trafford Park were wet with overhead cables and hoses strewn across the road in the path of the car..

There were lots of toy soldiers and polished wooden floors. My mother and I were temporarily accommodated in the nursery at Gaddum Hall in Bowden Vale where my grandfather worked as a chauffeur for Mrs Gaddum.

The rest of the war was a mixture of schooldays with morning prayers for the British troops, the occasional air raid
in the Anderson shelter and suspecting any stranger in a long coat as being a spy.

The portraits of my parents showing marks from the flying glass still hang on my wall.

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