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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 Peggy Scott and has been added to the sight with her permission…

I was 6 years old when the war began, so I haven’t as many memories as an older person. My most vivid memory is of the time I was in Victoria Hospital Burnley, where I was on and off for most of the war. I was a sickly child; I had a T.B bone in my leg. I can remember that when the sirens sounded the porters would come into the ward and if we had a letter ‘S’ on the bottom of our bed, they would wrap us in a blanket and take us down to the shelters in the cellars. But if we had an ‘M’ on our bed, that meant we were too ill to be moved and they would push our beds down to the medical ward and we would all stay there tightly packed until the all clear sounded.

I remember lots of things which you will probably have heard time and time again. How mum used to waken us up (there were 3 girls and one boy) and we would have to sit under the stairs waiting until it was all over.

We never seemed to have enough food to eat, mum used to share one egg between three of us. I also remember being at school, we had to take our gas masks and used to practice putting them on and laying on the floor until the teacher said we could get up again.

Our family name was Thompson and my sister Dorothy met and marries a Canadian during the war, it was a sad time for us because she sailed across to Canada with lots of other wives and we never saw her for six years. She was very happy and had four children, but I missed her very much. When she came home when I was nineteen and everyone decided to go to Cananda, I was in a quandary as I had been courting for four years, so I decided not to go and stayed here.

As I said that is about all I can remember about the war, just one or two things that stick in my mind.

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