大象传媒

Hannah Millington was my grandmother. She was 28 when the war started and her husband Jack worked in the mills as a 'muler'. She had met him there, working in the carding shed. Jack's mules spun thread needed for the war effort, so he was not called up for the war effort, but he did join the home guard. In the first part of the war, they built their Anderson Shelter in their back garden of their concil house on Gloucester Street. Once done, Jack over turned all of the turf and planted vegetables to help spread out the rations. My Grandma was a woman who missed nothing! Her brother Teddy had a pub in the town and he used to cash the US Airmen;s cheques through the week for them, but what used to horrify Hannah were the antics of the local women whose husbands were away fighting,with these yanks in the pub itself. "I used to close my eyes and see nothing!" she would tell me dissapprovingly. But she would say that these women always had nylons, ciggy's and chocolate! Such dissapproval was also meted out to the woman who ran the shop at the end of Gloucester Street. Hannah was not averse to going beedy eyed and mealy mouthed, reminding the shop keeper that she knew all about the market market stock she kept under the counter! And she was always disgusted by the high proces the woman used to charge! That didn't mean Hannah had no black market stuff of her own. Being close to an important railway line, which was bombed by the Luftwaffe from time to time, they suffered quite a few air raids. Now Hannah hated her Anderson shelter because it was damp and sometimes flooded. One air raid saw her sheltering in the pantry, a small, slim room with a tiny window under the stairs. She had 12 fresh eggs (black market of course) in a ceramic mixing bowl on a shelf. The house shook, ther shelves shook and all of the pans on the shelves rattled and fell off. But the eggs stayed still and not one broke! On other air raids, she would shelter in the Anderson shelter of her neighbour as more often than not, Jack was on duty or on the night shift. But she also had a habit of sleeping in the living room! We were horrified when she told us how the house was affected by the blasts of the bombs. The huge landmines hit the railway half a mile away and she said how the window glass would bend inwards as the air was sucked from the house, only then to be pushed outwards as the blast wave came out. She never lost a pane of glass though. They went on holiday though, to Blackpool, but even the Luftwaffe found her there, with them both being on holiday the one time it was bombed, but the closest the bombs came to her was when a bomb hit the fish and chip shop at the other end of the road. This made her unhappy, as fish and chips were her Friday treat, along with all the other girls in carding shed.

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