大象传媒

This is a pithy story about my mum.

I am going to try to get her to write her complete story down herself but she is not computer literate.

As a young woman of eighteen she lived in Monkgate, York with her family and came close to losing her life when a 1000lb bomb hit the Gasometer on the other side of the road.

My story about her moved me when she told me about it just a couple of years ago. As far as I can tell she was a very popular young woman especially with some of the young servicemen. A favourite location for entertainement was the De Gray Rooms (still exists) which was the place to go for dancing.

She had befriended a crew of Canadian airmen and arranged to meet them there the following week, on the occasion of her 18th birthday. When the day arrived she gathered up all the presents she had received and took them to the dance hall to show them off to her Canadian friends. They did not turn up and it transpired later in the evening that they had all been shot down and killed in the preceding week.

When she went to leave she found that someone had stolen all her presents.

This must have been too painful to relate until a great deal of time had elapsed.

A lot else happened to that family. A son and brother never returned home and her father who had been in the home guard had built up an arsenal of weapons and explosives to defend his family if the Germans arrived - that was not discovered until after his death years later.

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