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May 3rd 1941 dawned. The air-raid sirens sounded later that night, thus avoiding our usual scramble to the cellar, or next door’s shelter, under the market Great Charlotte Street.
For some reason, we were a-roaming the house and leaning out of the windows, foolhardy, as children can be, watching Liverpool in ‘flames’!
Lewiss and Blacklers were blazing and we witnessed both stores being gutted. The gun barrage grew louder and the sky reddened, as the fires destroyed the city. Then it happened we saw Lewiss ‘Big Ben’ clocked engulfed in flames, and my sister Joan screamed ‘Daddy, daddy, my shoes are burning’. Her smart leather shoes were being repaired at Lewis’s.
Dad trudged the shelter and around the streets that night with buckets of soup and beer for the parched and overworked firemen whilst my brother Bernard carried trays of sandwiches. It was a miracle they were unharmed. The young barman, going home that night, picked up an unexploded incendiary bomb from atop our cellar, took it home and liked to tell the tale!
The 4th May dawned, fires still horning and the stark shells of buildings glared down from the fellow haze which overhung the city. Priests told their parishioners that Sunday morning ‘Liverpool is horning, if you know anybody there, go, get them out of the city!’
Our cousins ‘The Lambs’ from Prescot answered the call and took us to their home for two weeks. Dad had to stay on guard the hotel and whisky, especially from the ‘lady’ who always collapsed outside our door shouting ‘A drop of whisky will soon put me right!’
Driving out of Liverpool that afternoon, we passed the long queues of adults and children trudging just anywhere and nowhere, out of the city. Reminiscent of a scene from Dr Zchivago!
We met more nationalities in that shelter than many people meet in their lifetime. We made our own entertainment with lots of Sing-A-Longs.
This was the time ladies started to wear trousers. Many did so to hide the wound scars left from the shrapnel fragments so, a new fashion emerged, and a new ‘era’ was to begin.
At that time, T.B was raging through the city, fuelled by the overcrowded shelters. The week-end buses at Woodside destined for sanatorium were always packed.
Sadly, my own two sisters succumbed and Joan died at age seventeen, and Kathleen some years later on her twenty-fourth birthday, so it was not only the fighting forces that died as a result of the ‘war’, and here we are, sixty years on, and we are still fighting each other!

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