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Below are extracts from a diary I wrote for a primary school history project when I was ten. My grandparents and parents are now deceased. I wanted this to be a lasting memory of them, as well as a contribution to the history of how people in Britain lived during the 2nd World War.

In 1936 my grandma, Nellie, and her family, moved to London from Blackburn. She told me they moved to find work because the mills were closing in Blackburn. At first they lived in Richmond, then in Wimbledon. My granddad, Frank, found work in an aircraft factory and my grandma went into ‘service’. At one time she worked at Hampton Court and served tea to Queen Mary and a Lady-in-Waiting who had come to visit.

During the same year, my dad, Joe, started school in Blackburn. He was one of five boys. His mother, Mary, was a weaver, and his dad, John, was a grave digger. During the war, Mary worked in a gas mask factory and later made bullet cases. John joined the air force and worked on aerodromes as a builder, maintaining runways in Scotland.

Down in London my granddad began work at ‘Pickfords’, a removal company in Guildford, as a body builder, constructing furniture wagons or pantechnicons. In 1937 my uncle Jim was born and that summer he won second place in a ‘beautiful baby’ competition. That same year my grandma and her sister watched Crystal Palace burn down.

In 1939 my grandma, along with everyone else, remembered listening to war being declared on the ‘wireless’. Everyone was issued with a gas mask. In 1940 my mum, Sonia, was born. Although she was born in Surrey, she always said she was a true Londoner and maintained she was born within the sound of the Bow Bells.

However, it was the birth of the second baby that prompted a move back up to Blackburn as ‘evacuees’. The first ‘blackouts’ were being issued and air raid warnings. My family had a lucky escape. The flat at the end of their block, at the end of their street, was hit by a bomb and completely demolished. The bombing caused structural damage to the whole row. It was after this they decided to move.

Back in Blackburn, my grandma remembered once forgetting to put the ‘blackouts’ up and coming home one evening to be met by a crowd of people standing outside her house. A low fire she had left during the day had grown large in the dark. The warden was ready to give her a ‘summons’, but he let her off.

My grandma had to get used to food shortages. She remembered friends rushing round to knock on her door when there were oranges in the grocers shop so they could run and get them before they sold out. She remembered the food parcels that arrived from America with tins of salmon and corned beef inside. Grandma got some of her parcels from cousins in Canada too. Anyone who didn’t have children at home under school age had to do ‘war work’, including the women. In Blackburn and Lower Darwen this meant working at Mullards or the R.O.F. My granddad worked as a coachbuilder at an aircraft factory in Wharton, working on the inside of the aircraft using wood and canvas.

When the air raid sirens went, my grandma wouldn’t take her children to the shelters. She thought they were unhygienic and they were sometimes vandalised by vandals. Instead they sat in the cupboard under the stairs of their terraced house. My mum remembered having a Mickey Mouse gas mask.

My mum and her brother would save up their sweet coupons, which came once a month, then race to the shop!

One day my grandma saw Winston Churchill on a visit to the factories in Blackburn. He was coming down Accrington Road in a tank with the trademark cigar in his hand!

In 1944 my grandma heard a doodlebug overhead late at night. It made a screeching noise and then ‘clicked off’. She was terrified, thinking it was going to land on the house. She found out from people later it had landed in Manchester. The strange thing was, nothing was printed about it in the paper.

My grandma remembered a woman whose husband had been in a Japanese concentration camp. She thought he was alive for four years when he was dead. She had continued to send him Red Cross parcels all that time.

In 1945 my dad left school at the age of 13. He was allowed to leave because he would be 14 after the Christmas holidays. He started work straight away as an apprentice cabinet maker. His brother, Jack, (who had left school in 1941 at the age of 14), delivered newspapers during the war. He remembers reading the headlines the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The same year, my uncle was ‘called up’ to work in the pits.

By 1946 many ‘de-mobbed’ soldiers were returning home. My dad remembered people from South Africa, West India and Poland coming to work in Blackburn. Some of them didn’t want to live in the communist states that were being set up by the Soviet Union after the fall of the Nazis. My grandma also remembered that many Italians, who had been in a local British prisoner of war camp decided to stay on in Blackburn after the war too. She said it was because they’d settled here during the war as they’d been allowed some freedom to walk around the town. My grandma’s version of events was that they didn’t want to run away because they were being treated better than at home!

In 1946 my uncle Leonard was born. The following year a lorry driver left his lorry parked outside my grandma’s house, but forgot to put his breaks on. He went home and the lorry crashed into the front parlour of my grandma’s house. Once again, they had a lucky escape as no-one was harmed. It was on the front page of the Lancashire Evening Telegraph.

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