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My mum and dad sent me to my Aunt and Uncle on the outskirts of Barrow, which was a safer area. The reason why I was moved was because I lived near Vickers (which is now BAE Systems).
I was quite upset about going because I had to move schools and make new friends. My father was a policeman and my mother was on war work. She was a crane driver in Vickers and sometimes I never saw my parents for a couple of weeks of their shifts. At night I got upset when I went to bed because I worried about my parents. My Grandmother would say ‘never mind she’s doing it for England’ and I was living with 2 cousins my age.
My cousin’s names were Tom and Edna and we used to get up to a lot of mischief together. One day when we were on our own we heard on the wireless (which is a radio) that people fined for hoarding food so we hid all the food in the coal shed and we were punished with no pocket money for a week. Apart from not seeing my parents very often I was quite happy for the duration of the war.
During the air raids in Barrow, May 1940 we spent 10 nights in the air raid shelter. The shelters were built in the back street to accommodate four families. My Aunt always took a flask and sandwiches, as we were sometimes in the shelter ‘till the morning. On a bad raid the guns, which were situated in the park near the cenotaph firing to bring the German planes down.
One very warm night everything went quiet, we went out side for some fresh air. Suddenly a huge shadow seemed to cover us. It was a German bomber flying low over the rooftops. We could actually see the marking on the plane. Then the Spitfires flew over and the German plane quickly flew off over the Irish Sea.

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