大象传媒

'This story was submitted to the People's War site by Edward Fawcett for Three Counties Action on behalf of Margaret Newboult and has been added to the site with her permission.The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'One of my earliest memories was of the hole being dug in the backyard for the Anderson shelter about August 1939 when I was about four years old.A cousin aged 14 was staying with us about that time and I being a child kept kicking a football into the hole in the hope my cousin John Stephens would go in for it but instead he put me in! John was from Penryn in Cornwall.My parents started getting worried that he should get back to Penryn and I remember we took him to the station on the night before war broke out and the blackout was already in place with just the odd blue light showing.The train left Sheffield quite late and he got to Truro just as war was being declared.Sheffield was blitzed on 12th December 1940 and the next morning my father went to work but had to come back as there was no way through so he took us down to the city centre.I remember seeing hosepipes across the pavement,small fires still burning and a burnt out tram.The school I went to was also hit and damaged and we ended up having lessons in people's front rooms.Quite a few houses were being used for schooling.We always had to carry a box with a gas mask in it and we occasionally had drills to try it on.We always could tell when the German planes were over us as they made a different noise to ours.We always slept in the air raid shelter.The school had a shelter and once when the sirens went off in the daytime I decided to leg it home instead of going into the school shelter but an elder girl stopped me in the playground.I came home once from school and a barrage balloon had come down near Mrs Bailey's house and all the cables were stretched out across the backyards including ours.One of the houses was scorched by the burning barrage balloon.A couple of times our road was blocked off because of the possibility of unexploded bombs.One was in the chapel and one in the Co-Op,but both times they were false alarms.On VE Day I remember the following put up on the blackboard:- May 8th VE Day, but we carried on as normal at school.One time my mother got pneumonia and so did the lady next door,possibly because of going into the shelters during the winter months.My mother's doctor was a more modern doctor,possibly younger,whilst the lady next door had an old Scottish doctor,one of the old school.My mother's doctor treated her with the new M&B (May and Baker) tablets and she recovered but the lady next door didn't have them and she died.

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