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This story has been submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Jenny Graham of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Brian Walker and added to the site with his permission.

I was five when war broke out and I will always remember listening to the reports on the radio. My mother and I would listen out for the news updates, especially on the days after the warning sirens had sounded.

The sirens were unbelievably loud, especially in the dead of night. They left us with an immense period of anxiety between the first warning signal and the second all clear. We could be waiting for anything up to two, sometimes three hours before it finally came.

We were living in Preston at that time and the council had built air raid shelters on the streets for people to hide in. They were on the level, made of red brick with a concrete roof and although large were extremely uncomfortable; they were damp and horrendously smelly. The shelters were controlled by Air Raid wardens who had control of the fire pump equipment. The Wardens also circulated the streets at night to ensure that there was no light escaping, or attracting any attention from people's houses through the gaps in between their curtains.

Not everyone would use these shelters during the raids. For those who chose to stay in their own homes, the safest place to hide was either under a heavy kitchen table or in the space or the cupboard under the stairs. Whole families would hide there until the all clear signal sounded. My mother, my brother and I would hide under the stairs, each of us wearing our gas masks; my brother was just a baby at the time had a special baby mask that he fitted into entirely, it covered his whole body. We carried our gas masks with us everywhere, in special boxes, just in case.

After the initial warning siren had sounded and we were safely hidden under the stairs all you could do was just sit and wait. Eventually you would hear the deep droning sounds of the bombers; they would seem to be coming for ever and ever, moving so slowly that the intensifying and encompassing sound would drone on and on. Wave after wave. It was terrifying. One or two bombs were actually dropped in Preston and they wiped out several streets at a time each. There was one at Lostock Hall near the tank factory at Leyland, three or four streets were destroyed and totally devastated. All we could do was wait under the stairs until the second siren sounded. Then it was back to bed and up for school in the morning.

On these nights I distinctly remember our neighbour, Belle, who lived across the road from us. Belle would always come over during the raids; she didn't want to be alone and said she felt safer in our house where we were. Although Belle couldn't actually manage to fit under the stairs, she was extremely overweight, she settled for sitting on the very bottom step of the staircase so that she still felt close to us. Sometimes she would be with us twice a week, sitting on the same creaking step where she could see the search lights through the curtains as they scanned the streets and skies. My mother said she would be glad when the war was over, so that she wouldn't have the threat of Belle falling through the stair case any longer.

My mother became a post-woman during the war. She was actually in the Lancashire Evening Post recently, in a photo of all the post women of Lancashire, it was in the "Looking Back" series. Many women became post women during these years as most of the men had been conscripted; she loved it. On one of her days off, we went for a walk into the countryside, we went to some fields at Fullwood, just North of Preston, to a popular picnic spot called the Hills and Hollows. As we were walking and chatting, we heard the low droning sound of what appeared to be an aircraft, but a very small aircraft. It was low flying, rising up above the hedge tops and trees and then lowering back down over the fields. As it got closer the droning became louder and louder and as it came into view we saw that it had no markings on it. We stood still and watched it fly by, out of sight. It wasn鈥檛 until later in the week, listening to the news reports that we found out that the plane had been a German spotter plane, presumably looking for Leyland tank factory or Preston Docks or perhaps Exton Royal Ordinance Factory where they produced shells, bombs and bullets. It had actually crashed further on from us and was identified as a German reconnaissance plane.

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