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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancs. Home Guard on behalf of Evelyn Haslam and has been added to the site with her permission…

It was the third week in August and I was on holiday in the Isle of Man when they announced over the loud speakers that all holiday makers had to set sail for home by Friday.

I lived with my family in Salford and by the following Friday I had been evacuated along with a lot of other children to Lancaster, where we were billeted at various houses. I recall the lady who I was staying with was a Baptist and I was in the Baptist Church in Dalton Square with her on the Sunday morning war was officially declared. The minister stopped the service and made an announcement. When we came out of the chapel all the people in the congregation clustered around me, saying that now I would have to stay and hugging and kissing me. Oh how you hate to be hugged and kissed by strangers when you’re eleven years old.

I went to school part time, mornings one week, afternoons another and we were given a bottle of milk and two Horlicks tablets, you could either put the tablets in your milk or crunch them up and on Saturday morning we had to write a letter home.

As Christmas approached and nothing much seemed to be happening I persuaded my parents to let me come home for Christmas.

We lived at the head of the Manchester ship Canal and the German planes used to follow the water up to Liverpool. We had one or two skirmishes and the sirens would sound most nights between 6.45 and 7pm. Then down we would go to the shelter in the back yard. Father had put up a hammock for me and mother and him slept on a double mattress on the floor.

Then, Manchester suffered the blitz, two nights of concentrated bombing; all around us houses were flattened. Nearby there were fourteen houses and a shop in a row, seven of them and the shop went completely. Five houses at the front of us and three at the back were severely damaged. On the second night our house was also very badly damaged, all the doors were twisted, the windows blown out and a paving stone had been blown through the roof and landed on my parents bed. Had they not been in the shelter that night they would have been killed. As it was father had to hammer his way out of the shelter as the door was so badly twisted with the blast of the bombs.

Five days later I was evacuated back to Lancaster where I stayed until I was fourteen, coming home in 1942.

I went to work machining and just missed being called up, as I was seventeen when the war finished.

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