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My father was one of the few people in our locality (the moor side of Oldham in Lancashire) to believe in 1938 that war would really happen. Because he was the Incident Officer for the Oldham Police, he would have to report for duty as soon as the sirens went, so he felt he must make the family - my mother, my younger sister and myself - as safe as possible, first.
Consequently spare time in 1938 and ’39 was spent digging in our back garden, the pit lined with 1 foot cubed mill beams, topped with a mill boiler cut in halves to make a 2inch steel arch about eight feet long, the sides filled in with broken up boulders and finally a couple of feet of concrete. It was a pleasure for me to be able to help with the boulder-breaking and concrete mixing; my dad assuring me that I was ’the youngest concrete mixer in the country’ and probably the only girl to do it!
At the moment of the radio announcement of the beginning of the war, I was visiting a favourite aunt and realised that she wept because her first husband had been killed in WW1, whilst her second was always ill as he was badly affected by mustard gas in that same war. My father too, had been in the trenches when he was 17 in 1917, and had been wounded in the neck and hand by a shell in 1918.
So, whenever air raids were expected, or the sirens went, we three females would hurry into the shelter - well underground - and I found it a bonus that I could read during the nights by the light of the oil lamp. My mother would shake my arm and say 'Put down the book and listen to the war!' She and my sister were terrified, so I felt I had to be strong.
Often, days were spent under the playground at school where the shelters accommodated everyone. Since it was impossible to teach under those conditions, there was more reading!
About 1936, my father had brought home a 17 year old Air Force navigator when the plane had crashed on the moors and the crew had parachuted to safety. From then on, he had spent all his leaves with us, and after the blitz on Bristol he pleaded with my parents to accept his sister, who was 14, as an evacuee. So it was that we had later to break the news to her that her brother had been killed in a raid over Rotterdam.
In those six years there were too many incidents to recount, but one that stays in my mind was when, after a night raid, the police were informed that a very large mine had descended by parachute which had draped itself over two clothes-line posts at opposite sides of the narrow entry between the back yards of two rows of houses. This had pulled the mine to one side sufficiently to stop the ‘cap’ it was supposed to land on to explode the device, thereby saving many lives and much devastation. It was my dad’s job to organise the evacuation of the houses in both affected streets and for some distance, as it was not known if there was a timed explosive.
Just as the evacuation was completed as quietly as possible, my dad heard a loud knocking at one of the houses where the device lay. He ran round to find a milkman and when he explained why knocking there was not wise, the milkman tiptoed away trembling!
The mine was photographed and the most famous Unexploded Bomb expert - Sergeant Bob ? - (I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten his name ) came to de-activate it, and gave my dad the white silk parachute for his efforts. The parachute became blouses - off the clothing ration - for my mum, my sister and myself.
One of the very last wartime ’incidents’ my dad had to deal with, and which affected him for the rest of his life, was the after-effects of a direct hit on a local children’s orphanage.
At the end of the war, my dad was given a guitar - hand-made from scrap by a German prisoner-of-war at a near-by P.O.W. camp - as thanks for his regular visits to the camp to ensure that the rules of the Geneva Convention were being kept.
The war’s lasting effects on me apart from the memories of loss, of hunger, and
unforgettable horrors of war throughout the world and seen on the news at the cinema - life-long pacifism, insomnia and morbid fear of explosive noises!

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