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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 Doris Bird and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was 18 and living in a girls hostel in Manchester when war broke out. I was learning Pitman’s shorthand and typing. There was a barrage balloon directly above the hostel and I think that was what the German planes were aiming at. For 10 nights we were blitzed and I remember having to go into the cellar, where you sat if you were lucky or just stood around. In those days everyone went to bed with curlers in their hair, flat metal ones, I think they were called ‘Dinky curlers’ and we all must have looked very funny in them. Even though we had been up all night we still had to work the following day, however tired you felt.

Shortly after this my mother fell ill, my brother had joined the commandos, underage, he had lied about it and the upset and worry of this made my mother quite poorly, necessitating my return home to Trawden.

Nothing much happened in Trawden, we did have one bomb fall on Tum Hill but it didn’t cause much damage.

A couple of other memories I have is one of my mother mixing the 2ozs of butter we were each allowed with margarine and the top of the milk to make it go further. Mind you it did taste like butter. We had an uncle who was a farmer so we were OK for eggs. But my grandad who had a sweet tooth used to pinch our sweet ration, which wasn’t very nice of him at all.

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