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Memories of World War Two by John Carter
I now live in Retford, Nottinghamshire but I was actually born in Liverpool in 1929. I was ten years old when the war started and my
memories are vivid. It was a very frightening time, my father, was ex army warned us what could happen during the war to families i.e. bombs were going to fall and possible gas attacks and all the various things associated with war.
My first memories are of the government issuing instructions that everybody had to go to a centre to collect their gas masks and identity card. Everybody had to have a card and carry it with them wherever they went. When you collected your gas mask they gave you instructions on how to wear it, they were horrible, smelly rubbery things. They weren't very pleasant things to wear. But you had to practice wearing them because if there was a gas attack you would have to wear it. Everybody carried one in a little cardboard box which had a piece of string, which was the carrying handle. You carried it over your shoulder like a woman's handbag.
Next thing I can remember vividly is `them' coming round to bring us our air raid shelter, which was called an `Anderson Shelter' it was made out of corrugated iron. The instructions were with it and as we were a family of ten we got two shelters and we put them up end to end. To put them up you had to dig a hole in the garden, which had to be the length and width of the shelter, but also had to be four to five foot deep. So once the hole was ready you then had to erect the shelter. All the soil you had dug out had to be used to cover over the top of the shelter. This became part of the home and I can remember spending hours and hours in that shelter. It got to the state at one period during the war when the bombing was that bad that we just automatically went down to the shelter at night and stayed there until the morning. Liverpool was bombed extensively, as history shows, and was a very frightening time for a young boy of ten years old. It was frightening and exciting because lots of things were happening, everyday something was happening. Schools were closed so we never went to school; we had two hours a week at a teacher's house, when there wasn't an air raid to interfere with it. Hence we weren't very well educated, by the time our school days had finished, but anyway we managed.
Then I remember rationing started, rationing of food was terrible. You were only allowed, sort of one egg a week, one rasher of bacon and all rations were well documented, but how my mother managed to feed us all I just don't know. That was life and you had to put up with it.
Very often a neighbour would come by and say `Jinnie' (that was my mothers name) they have some flour at a certain shop and one of us had to go down to the shop and stand in a queue, the queue could be 100 yards long and that was just to get a bag of flour, because that bag of flour would mean we could have bread. Incidentally the flour wasn't white in them days, in them days bread was a dirty white off colour. It was half white and half black, but you ate it anyway, it was something to eat.
Then the bombs started to drop and of course when they started you all had to dash for the shelter and I can remember when we dashed for the shelter when an air raid had already started we'd all go in the pantry and pick up a pan, put it on our heads, hold it with one hand and run like hell down the bottom of the garden to the shelter and the idea was that if there was any bits falling out the sky the pan would protect us. When the guns used to shoot up in the sky at aeroplanes the shells used to burst and the bits of shell used to come back down again and we used to find them all over the place. As kids we used to collect the bits of shells and bombs.
I used to live on one side Whopshire Road, Norris Green and on the opposite side of the street the houses used to back on to the railway. This track went through to Broadway and was a viaduct and as soon as there was an air raid they used the guns on wagons to shoot up at the planes. Once the air raid siren gave the all clear they would push these wagons into the viaduct and hide them away. They used to cover them with nets and camouflage until the next night. So you had four or five heavy guns firing the other side of the street bang bang bang, and even when they weren't even dropping bombs on you we still got the noise and all this flack. It was realty frightening at times.
I remember one day they suddenly put galvanised dustbins diagonally on the street at the side of every lamppost and there was a notice went up to tell us to put any waste food in the bins. Not that there was much waste and everyday these bins were collected and taken away to the pig farm to feed the pigs to make us bacon. Everybody had to save like this. You never threw anything away, my Mum was very strict about this, no one ever threw a piece of bread on the fire `that was feeding the devil' she said, throw it out for the birds but you weren't allowed to throw it on the fire.
We couldn't get any clothes or shoes during the war of course. We had pillows on our beds and Mother or Father went down to the `Tate and Lyle' factory and got some sugar sacks and Mother bleached them to make pillow cases. We only had so many cups and plates and eventually as the cups got broken, I remember what Mother used. We had jam, probably one pot a week between the family or something like that and it used to come in a pot jam jar and once empty we would use that as a cup. There were no new cups and plates to be had, but after the war the Chinese flooded us with new ones and I remember my brother going down and standing in a queue to buy a dinner service.
We had a dog called `Prince' and before an air raid siren started he would always whine at the door to go out, but when he was let out he went straight into the shelter and Mum or Dad would say `there's going to be an air raid' and sure enough within about 10 mins the siren would go. We would all rush down to the shelter and the dog would be sat there wagging his tail, cos he knew. Lots of people who owned an animal used to say the animal knew when there was going to be a raid.
My brother, Jim, was on reserve occupation and worked at the ATM and suddenly he volunteered to go in the army, because even though being in a reserve occupation you could waive this right and go in if you wanted to. I only found out after the event that the reason he did this was because in the ATM he looked after a lot of women and one morning some of the woman didn't turn up for work and the reason was that the tram car they were traveling to work on had been hit and they had been killed. This upset him greatly and so off he went and joined the army to serve as a Royal Engineer, which he did for the duration of the war.
I distinctly remember people being killed all the time, houses were being bombed and people lost relatives and on one occasion the cellar of a local school was used as an air raid shelter and of course the boiler was warm and they thought it was a good place to be, but it took a direct hit by a German bomb and a lot of the people were either killed by the bomb or scalded by the water as the boiler burst. I used to hear a lot of these stories because my father was an undertaker.
About the only transport about at that time in Liverpool was tram cars and they run on lines with an overhead wire that picks up a current to the tram. As the tram went along the lines the lines would flash and as soon as a siren went the trams stopped running until the all clear was sounded. If you happened to be on a tram you had to get off and walk home, no question of carrying on a little longer because the Germans would have seen the flashing lights and bombed the trams.

Every night we used to listen to the radio and hear `Germany calling, Germany calling' this was a broadcast by the Germans to tell you what they were going to do, what they were going to bomb the next night or that day. It was a chap called `Lord Hor Hor' and I'll always remember him saying today I bombed so and so and he'd tell you what he was and wasn't going to bomb and some of my sisters worked at a place called `Co-op Laundry' and it had the biggest chimney in the area and I can remember him saying `You people in Norris Green no need to worry about the Co-op Laundry chimney because we need that land mark to go by. In them days they used landmarks and sight to see where they were.
One of the schools was used as a centre and one day a week you had to go and collect orange juice for the babies, which was like a concentrated orange juice in a medicine bottle. Every child had one, every so often, maybe every week or fortnight. We also had a big tin of dried milk (National Dried Milk) and that was what babies were fed on. Sometimes you may get some rusks for the babies to wean them onto solid food.
Night after night we used to spend in the air raid shelter and sometimes we would give it up as a bad job and just sleep there all night. It was cold and damp because there was no heating, of course and no lights, only little torch lights.
Everybody had a job to do and although my mother had 8 children she had to go and work in a munitions factory and of course when she worked the girls that were at home had to do the housework.
They also had dinner centres; it was like meals on wheels in a building, where you could buy your dinner for 6 pennies and 1 penny for your sweet. I remember the sweet was something like tapioca or semolina and sometimes rice pudding with a spoonful of jam. This was used to sweeten it, as sugar was in very short supply. There were lots of things that we didn't see for year's coconuts, grapes, bananas or oranges because of course they were used to make the orange juice for the babies. We only got fruit that was grown in this country.
My brother seemed to be away from home for years and my brother-in-law was in the NFS (National Fire Service) he was a lorry driver but he had to work on the fire service and then he was conscripted into the army and he left my sister Hilda pregnant with their first child. When he eventually came home they had a big family of ten children. My older sister, Flo became a nurse so we didn't see her for a very long time.
We used to have some laughs, but we used to have some tears too. Everybody bonded together in them days, everybody looked after one another.

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