大象传媒

This story has been added to the People's War website by Pam Riding of Kirklees Libraries and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
What I do remember is when the air raid sirens used to go and we were all tucked up nice and warm in bed and my mother used to come flying in and say," Come on, get that siren suit on and down that yard" and before my dad went into the forces, he dug a big hole They came round with Anderson shelters-you had to build your own- dig a big hole and put this thing in. Then he built bunks and we had two plant pots -one stood on its face and the other one on top with a candle inside. That gave us light and a bit of warmth and we'd go down there and next door neighbour used to come in with pots of cocoa and we got tucked in and we went to sleep there. But occasionally there were bombers came over because up at the top of the fields where we were, there was an ack- ack station. Because down below on Kilner Bank where the McAlpine stadium is now, there was a chemical plant- a big thing it was, and I don't know what they were making, but they use to turn out orange fumes, gas, smoke. There was another one at the other side of the village-going into Long Lane-they were turning out some sort of chemical, we always thought it was mustard gas because when the two mixed it made a green fog. It was terrible, and they were after bombing those, but they were coming from Sheffield. There used to be an overflow from Sheffield, so they used to come over Rawthorpe to unload the bombs. The ack ack guns would be banging away. You could here these bombers going over and people used to say, "Oh, they're German ones" You could tell-it was a different kind of a throbbing and they did drop bombs in the fields. I remember going up there, the day after, we kids were looking for shrapnel. If we were to hear of this today we would say it's not safe. They didn't stop us from going, we were allowed to go round and dig and I got a lot of souvenirs. Looking back it was a novelty- an experience. Very frightening, but on the other hand we got lots of, sort of fun out of it afterwards. I was nine when the war started. My dad was called up before my tenth birthday. I remember once him coming home on leave. He was stationed on a Wellington bomber station in Norfolk and he used to get short leaves-weekends and one weekend he was coming home on Saturday morning and we were looking for him through the windows and I remember him coming round. He wasn't a very big man and he had his forest cap on. He had something slung over his shoulders and I could see this thing bobbing about as he came up the street. And it was a hare-they used to shoot hares round the bomber station and he brought it home, of course, to supplement the rations. There wasn't much meat and I can remember saying to my mother, "My dad's coming with something round his neck" and he had the legs slung over his shoulder and the head was banging on the floor as he came up and he said to mum "You can cook that, it'll make some meals" and she said, "I don鈥檛 know what to do with it". Anyway she did pluck up courage and she must have skinned it and she put this pan on the stove and the smell was absolutely vile. She boiled it for so long and then she said,鈥� I鈥檓 not having that in this house any longer鈥� and we went out and dug a big hole and we buried it. So we got no supplement to our ration that weekend. That鈥檚 one thing that I really do remember. You had gas masks at school. You had to take your gas mask to school every day. You had to carry an identity card, which now they grumble and say will never work. But it worked then and I can still remember my number JMGZ 83 P and I was the third one- I was the oldest one and I've still got my identity card. There was a flying bomb went off at Grange Moor- we could see it. You could see them bombing Sheffield. Where I lived at Rawthorpe you could see straight across and the sky was absolutely glowing red and yellow. You were so far away -they did a lot of bombings -one night after another. It was awful. We used to watch the sky light up and then it would fade, then it would start again. That was frightening.

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