大象传媒

This story was submitted by Lisa Watson of Leicestershire Library Services on behalf of Audrey O'Leary and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

In June 1940 I was just six. I was living with my mum and dad and my dad's mother in a three bedroomed house in Rochdale. I had noticed some strange things going on since that beautiful Sunday morning last autumn. It had been odd. My parents, obviously worried, had gone out into the road to talk to neighbours, then had come back indoors to listen to the wireless - I had to be very quiet. Whatever the man on the wireless had said must have been very bad, everything seemed to stop. They told me war had been declared. What was war? It was a lovely day and we had a great Sunday dinner. And tinned peaches for tea.

Some time later we were given Identity Cards. I still remember my Identity Number. And gas masks. We had to carry them everywhere we went, at first in a cardboard box with a string handle, later I had a waterproof cover for mine, with a shoulder strap. We had practices in school when we had to put them on, nasty, smelly rubber things that were hard to breathe in, but if you blew hard when you were wearing one you could blow air out of the side against your cheek and it made a very satisfying rude noise. Giggles all round. We knew that gas masks were important because the nasty Germans would one day come and gas us. I couldn't see how they could do this: I supposed they could lay gas pipes under the ground and I had a very vivid picture in my mind of men in black uniforms, wearing shiny metal helmets with big spikes on top, creeping about on our back lawn turning on all the gas taps.

I didn't see my dad much because he went to work after I had gone to school and came home after I'd gone to bed (he was on 'war work'), but lots of my friends in school had fathers in the forces and didn't see them at all. Dad brought stators and armatures home for my mother to rewind on the bench in the kitchen.

Then one day I came home from school singing and chattering as usual, but Mum told me to be very quiet - there was a soldier asleep in my bed. My bed? I wanted to go and look but she wouldn't let me. She said he was very tired and mustn't be disturbed. Mum had answered a knock on the front door to find an Army officer who had asked if she could possibly find a bed for one of the bedraggled soldiers lined up outside the front gate. When she agreed, one man had said, "Take me, Missus, I've only got short legs and I've got to take two steps to everyone else's one". That night I had to sleep with my Grandma in her lovely cuddly flock bed. The soldier was still asleep when I went to school in the morning, but I did eventually meet him. His name was Bill and I think he came from Wakefield. He took over the open space in the hall under the stairs where he could clean his kit and his rifle. I was not allowed to stand any nearer than the edge of the carpet runner in the hall but I could watch and talk to him when he was more himself. I did see his dirty, damp uniform with tidemarks on it, but it was cleaned, I don't know how, and he always looked smart afterwards. There was a hall somewhere in Rochdale where all the soldiers could meet. Bill, like my Dad, didn't drink, so he didn't get drunk like the soldier who came to our neighbour. After what they had all been through, we couldn't blame him. I loved Bill in the house and the rest of the family got on well with him. My parents corresponded with him and his wife for some time afterwards. I only found out about about Dunkirk when I saw the film "Mrs Miniver".

Later in the war, my Dad came home after midnight so tired he could scarcely walk up the street. He let himself into the house, took off his shoes so as not to disturb anyone, climbed the stairs in the dark and was just about to take his trousers off by the side of the bed when he realised it was a single bed, not my parents' at all, but that of one of the elderly maiden ladies who lived in the house at the end of the next block! What larks! He made a quick and silent retreat and we don't think they ever knew about their nocturnal visitor - my Dad certainly hoped so.

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