大象传媒

Audrey Manifold is the niece of my maternal grandmother, Ellen Sellers (nee Leech). Audrey grew up in the Mottram area of Cheshire, now part of Greater Manchester. These are her memories.

"My very first memory of the war was listening to the wireless. The then Prime Minister, Nevile Chamberlin, stating we were at war with Germany. It was September 1939 and I was 8 years old.
Gas masks and ration books were then issued. Food, clothing, meat and sweets were all on separate coupons. In school, gas mask drill was practised. It entailed having a lesson with the gas mask on. Needless to say, it was a failure. The plastic face mask soon steamed up, causing everyone to take it off to see clearly.
The citizens army was soon formed and was known as the Local Defense Voluteers (LDV). Soon, the wits were calling them Look, Duck and Vanish. Perhaps this was why the name was changed to the Home Guard.
Black out curtains were introduced also, together with masking tape, which was put on the windows to stop flying glass in case of an air raid.
Coming home from school one day, I noticed that the garden gate and the iron fencing on the wall was missing. It had gone for scrap metal to aid the war effort. Someone may have made a fortune out of it all.
Wartime food was pretty basic but healthy. How word got round so quickly that different shops were selling such things as margarine, sausages and other things such as cigarettes, God only knows, but it did. My mother would make jelly out of gelatine and orange juice, cornfloor was mixed with butter to make it go further.
The war was not very far on when the battle of Dunkirk took place, it was a miracle that so many thousands of men got away from there. Nightly bombing was taking place, although both sides were involved, it was mostly our cities that were getting hit.

Towards the ending of the war, the Germans started another blitz, this time with the V1 and V2 rockets. The V1 was known as the flying bomb, or doodle bug. One of these was launched from across the North Sea, flew over the Pennines, through valleys and fields and crashed into a farm house which stood alone in a field across from my Grandparents farm. It devastated the building and I think killed 10 people. People came from all around to look at it, why I don't know, as there wasn't much to see. By this time, I was 14 and had started work".

Note; The doodle bug referred to above, is also referred to in the memories of my father, Robert Nickson, which are also on this web site.

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