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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Antionette Haworth and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was born in May 1939 and lived with my parents, Hazel and Newton Syms and my young brother Michael. We lived in a flat above a bicycle shop in New Ferry, Wirral.

My first experience of the war was being hustled out of our home in the middle of the night, as a bomb had dropped in the road in front of us, luckily for us it didn’t explode and in common with many people who were ‘bombed out’ we went to live with relatives. We moved in with my mother’s parents Kate and Robert Adamson, who lived in a village called Bromborough Pool in the Wirral.

I can still feel the fear brought on by the sound of the sirens and air craft; our village was on the edge of the River Mersey, so we constantly suffered blasts and noise of bombs dropping on nearby Birkenhead and Liverpool Docks.

I remember my Nanny coming in the house with her hair and eyebrows singed from a bomb blast. The windows of the house were constantly being shattered. Young as I was I knew to hurry everyone down to the garden shelter as soon as the air raid warning sounded.

A vivid memory I have is standing on the kitchen table twirling around in a new ‘real’ kilt. Showing off delightedly to uncle Graham, home on leave from his Highland Regiment. ‘I’ve got a kilt like yours Uncle Graham,’ I chanted, I never saw him again as he returned to active duty the next day and was killed during fighting in Sicily.

My father had been lamed by polio as a young boy, so was unfit for active duty, but he could drive an ambulance. Shortly after Uncle Graham was killed my father’s job took him to North Wales and we moved there where my awful nightmares faded as I spent sunny days playing in fields of buttercups, or so it seemed.

Towards the end of the war we returned to live in Bromborough Pool with a new baby sister. The River Mersey was full of American warships, the sailors would climb over the fence at the bottom of the village green and fraternise with the local girls. We kids earned ourselves strips of gum delivering love notes! Sweets were a rarity, the nearest we got was sugar and cocoa mixed, that you ate off your wet finger.

VE Day was an amazing event for a small child, all the village trimmed up in red, white and blue. We had a fancy dress parade through the streets. I was dressed as a gypsy, with cocoa to brown my face and arms and my mother was Nell Gwynn. I thought she looked beautiful, but I didn’t like the man dressed as a wounded soldier, as he kept chasing my mother! We had a wonderful party, all the tins saved from before the war, were used. There was an enormous bonfire on the village green, with an effigy of Hitler on top, how we cheered when he began to burn. Such joy, but sadness too as two of my uncles failed to return after the war, both died on active service.

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