大象传媒

When I was five, at the start of the war, we were evacuated from Mount Carmel Infant School to a place called Bacup in Lancashire. It wasn't very far away, but to a five year old it could have been Australia!

My biggest concern was that I hadn't been given a "Mickey Mouse" gas mask ... instead, I was given an adult gas mask, and I was dead upset.

We were all piled on this bus with labels on us ... I had a 13 year old brother and mother had insisted that we were kept together when we were evacuated. My memory is that all the other children were taken in to houses, but my brother and I were paraded up and down the streets of Bacup, but nobody want a 13 year old boy. They would take me - a five year old girl - but my brother kept hold of me and said we had to stay together.

A lady in a uniform from the WVS took us up and down more streets and it was starting to get dark. Eventually, two next door neighbours agreed to take us in ... one to take me, and one to take my brother.

They were very nice, kind people. The man was a train driver and they had six grown-ups in the family. My brother was next door with a couple who had no children. And after a few months, they wrote to my mother as they wanted to adopt him. So my mother immediately came and took us back to Manchester - amongst the bombs!

My brother used to go with his friends collecting shrapnel and bits from any planes that came down. They used to have big boxes full of items and used to swap bits of shrapnel.

My older brother was a prisoner of war in Germany. We went to the POW meetings in Victoria Avenue School. We would send him parcels and I used to write letters to him. They were special letters ... "KriegsGefangenlager".

As a five year old, that word was wonderful. They were printed forms that we had to write our letters on. I used to swank around saying "kriegs effangenlager".

My brother had been shot down over Germany ... two of the crew made it back to England. It was all reported in the Sunday Pictorial Newspaper - they got back through the underground.

My brother - and two others from the plane - were captured and held in the POW camp. One of the parcels we sent had "prunes" in it and they tried to make a Christmas cake using prunes. When he came home, he told us how horrible it was.

My mother kept a tin of salmon, a tin of tinned tomatoes and a tin of peaches right at the top of a cupboard and they were kept for when my brother - Jack - came home from the war, we were going to have a party!

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