大象传媒

This is one of the stories collected on the 25th October 2003 at the CSV's Make a Difference Day held at 大象传媒 Manchester. The story was typed and entered on to the site by a CSV volunteer with kind permission of John Millar.

The last bomber over Manchester.

It was the summer of 1942, I鈥檇 be 11 years old, I used to go helping out with a furniture removal firm. It was the school holidays and we used to meet outside the yard on Oldham Road, it was a beautiful summer morning about half past seven. We were stood on the road waiting for the yard to open, of course there wasn鈥檛 much traffic then on the road, we were all stood there, a feller was having a smoke, and I stood there with them. Suddenly we saw this plane come into view, it was just going along nice and steady towards Bradford, suddenly we saw three bombs released, we heard the explosions and that was all we knew about it.
We opened up the yard and went to work. I found out later that the three bombs had dropped on Illkirk Street, that鈥檚 in Beswick. It looked like they had been heading for Bradford Road gas works. I found out later on that it was the last bomber raid in Manchester. There were four people killed and quite a bit of damage.

During the war I was evacuated from the centre of Manchester to Bramhall, after about four weeks we didn鈥檛 like it so one night we ran away to make our way back to Manchester. The chap where we stayed had a car and came out and caught us and took us back to where we were staying, eventually after a couple of weeks we went home, in time for the blitz!

For a young boy they were very exciting times, there was never much sense of fear. Only when the sirens went, the noise of the guns was terrible and the drone of the bombers. You could tell when they were dropping them closer. We escaped lots of lessons, it didn鈥檛 do me any good because I never learned anything, but they were happy days for a young lad.

I had an uncle that came home from Dunkirk that came home to find his house had been bombed, he had five children, they were lucky, they all escaped. They lived on Ashton Old Road, there were quite a lot killed around there.

They were drab days, but you just put up with what鈥檚 in your time. I don鈥檛 think people could put up with it today, but I have enjoyed all my life. I left school at fourteen 1945, they were very hard days with a very hard winter, electricity strikes, working half days it was a very cold winter, very. I don鈥檛 things started getting nice 鈥榯ill about the late fifties.

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