大象传媒

My first story is about the day broke out. We were living in a village called Hutton Roof in Westmoreland, as it was then, and whichever way you went, you had to up to it as it was on a crag at the top. We didn't have a wireless but my grandad, who lived with my aunt, did. We knew the announcement was going to be made on the wireless, so we all went round to his cottage and sat in the front room and waited, and we heard Mr. Chamberlain say that we were now at war with Germany. I was nearly 5 years old then. I remember everyone was very solemn but the concept of war didn't mean much to me then. The concept came later because there was a cartoon in May 1940 and it was a steamroller with Hitler and Goering on it, and it was running over the countries they had just done, Belgium and Holland and into France, and underneath it were all these people squashed with their feet sticking out. From then on, I had a recurring nightmare that I was sitting by the side of the road and this steamroller came and ran over my feet. So that was my wartime memory for then.

Then in May 1941 there was the day they bombed Barrow-in-Furness. We lived in a village called Cark which is on Morecombe Bay, and there was a big dockyard at Barrow where they built all the ships and submarines, Vickers Engineering it was, and there was a big fight. The Germans had hardly bombed the North West at all because they had been doing the South, but they came over one night. We were living with several aunts in an old mill house which was built on a hill, and our kitchen had a big wooden cupboard in it, built into the ground. In the war, until this night, we three little girls - I was the eldest and had two little sisters - slept on shelves in it. We had little beds made up and I was on the top with the two little ones underneath. We heard the planes coming - on May 4th, I think it was - and obviously they were bombing as we could hear the noise, so we actually went into the cellar which was one level below and was full of coal. My mother said, "Oh,look, here's a sack. We can let the children sit on this sack." So we all sat down on this sack and waited, and there was the most enormous ground-shaking explosion. My mother went upstairs to see what had happened but there was nothing in sight, nothing was bombed. Apparently a plane had come down. We never knew whose it was because of course you were never told in the newspapers in those days what had happened, so it was possibly one of ours. Then she came downstairs into the cellar again and said," We're not staying here! We're not staying here! We're going to move." So, on May 8th, which was my birthday, we moved. We only went about 15 miles inland to a couple of rented rooms in a shared house, but she felt safer there. My father was away in London at the time. He was too old for the war and so he was working in London where we joined him later on in 1943. We stayed in North Finchley and found We returned to Westmoreland in February 1944 but re-joined him in London just prior to VE Day.

The day the war ended, VE Day, May 8th, 1945, was my 10th birthday and it was a very special day. Everything was still rationed and my mother had saved up to make a birthday cake - you had to save the sugar, the butter, the fruit. She made this birthday cake and it was officially going to have 'Happy Birthday' in cochineal pink, but because it was the end of the war, she drew a Union Jack. She hadn't got any blue dye so she used blue ink and then when we ate it, we all had blue tongues and she thought she had poisoned us all! We'd seen her doing the 'Happy Birthday' and the Union Jack so we knew about the ink, but although it was blue tongues all round, it didn't seem to harm us at all!

Going back to the day Barrow was bombed and my mother had found what she thought was a sack which we had been sitting on it all night on the coal in the cellar - when we came out in the morning, it turned out to be my Auntie Molly's new, wool camelhair coat that she'd taken downstairs and dropped on the way. We'd all sat on it all night and it was absolutely ruined. My mother was not popular! Auntie Molly was the youngest sister and she was only quite young herself. She was terribly upset because it was very difficult to get anything like that. I don't remember when clothes rationing started but there was a big shortage of things by then and it was very difficult to get new clothes.

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