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

I was 10 when the war started and I remember going to primary school, the headmaster there had been a Captain in the army in World War One and he drilled us children like the troops. We had to practice marching down to the playing field near the school which was surrounded on all sides by bushes. When he gave the signal we all had to dive under the bushes for shelter. We didn’t have an air raid shelter at this school, so I suppose the bushes would have had to suffice had there been a raid.

However when I went to Grammar School, that was a different story. I had to travel by train and bus to the other side of Wigan and we had very large air raid shelters there dug into the ground with earth and grass on the top of them. Different classes in the school had a shelter allotted to them and in ours I recall that we had a Welsh teacher with us who she use to organize us all to sing.

The air raid sirens went often in Appley Bridge as the German Bombers flew over in the direction of Liverpool. At night we could see the searchlights and the flash of the bombs dropping there and hear the dull boom, boom of them exploding.

There was only three of us in our family and we had a large house, but at first mother wasn’t well enough to take in any refugees. However later in the war that changed and we had a family of five from Liverpool staying with us. It was a grandma, a mother, two daughters and a son. It was a large family there were three other sons, the eldest was in the Merchant Navy and was later killed, the next son was in a prisoner of war camp and the third in the Royal Navy. The ship he was on was sunk and he ended up in the same POW camp as his brother was in. they stayed with us at least two years. After them we had other families to stay and often we would be crowded and they would have to sleep on the floor, but we managed.

I suppose as a young girl I was quite blasé about the war and rather excited by it all, I remember avidly reading all the literature that we used to get about the war and I probably didn’t realize until later how terrible war was.

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