大象传媒

In 1938, I was 11 陆 years old. I went on holiday to Cumberland and took a coach to the Glasgow exhibition, we had to take gas masks and they enrolled people for the army. Mum was training to be a nurse and our neighbour: Mrs Fox offered to take in Faye: a Jewish refugee. We took her into our gang and she was adopted by the family eventually. I remember the Anderson shelters; a hole with corrugated iron on the top. They were prone to being flooded and often had to be pumped out.
I remember in 1940, it was early summer, at St Luke鈥檚 church there was a special service, and on the last hymn the whole church shook, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. Outside there was noises and the whole sports field: Logos opposite was covered in incendiary bombs, they鈥檇 missed houses and were burning bright with colour. A man in the street got shrapnel in his shoulder, whilst the top of Hill Road was covered in land mines.
Mum sold our house and re-rented it, she was frightened and at the age of 14 陆 I became a fire watcher, I still attended school and I often used to take messages on my bike, into the city centre. Our team leader Mr White was a French master at grammar school and at night he used to make cocoa and fish paste sandwiches. I recall the clouds, noise, shadows, the landmines coming down; it made me feel sick. The main entrance to Broadgreen Hospital became an air raid shelter which housed 3-400 people. A landmine dropped by the barracks in School Lane, Queens Drive, though it didn鈥檛 go off and people were able to disarm it. However, in Abbeyfield Rd there was a massive crater where a bomb had gone off destroying houses. In Thingwall Rd, tennis courts were destroyed and trees went up in flames. In Daffodil Rd and Lodge Lane people were killed.

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