大象传媒

The day war broke out, as a nine-year-old in Liverpool, I became an evacuee along with my brother and sister. We all had our gas-masks and our little labels around our necks and were all lined up on the platform at Lime Street station. Neither we, nor our parents had any idea where we were going. In my case, I ended up at a place called Holywell, which is in Flintshire. My sister was just down the road in Connah's Quay - my brother and the rest of his school were evacuated to Shrewsbury School.
Everyone at the place where I was billeted was doing war work - at the plastic factories in North Wales. I know that things were a bit rough in Liverpool but my mother came out to rescue me and take me back home. I remember, I never went to bed for those three years and all our education was in the front rooms of various houses because all the schools were closed.
In those days we used to get up at the crack of dawn. If there had been an air-raid we'd run along the street picking up the shrapnel. It'd still be red hot and we'd use it to barter with.
I remember being taken into the city centre by my parents to see two captured German aircraft 鈥� I think they were Dorniers or Heinkels. They had fabric fuselages and me and my brother ripped off a piece of the material. It was impregnated with dubbin and smelt awful. When we got home our mother made us throw it away because it smelt the whole house out. We got a proper beating for that.
My sister and my mother went to a wedding in the Wirral but there was a heavy air-raid and they spent most of the evening in the basement of one of the ferries over in Birkenhead 鈥� the ferries were used as shelters. With the first ferry in the morning, my mother and sister came across the Mersey to Pier Head. The trams in those days didn鈥檛 come all the way down to the front; you had to walk a little bit up from the river to catch them. We lived at a place called Wavertree, out at Sefton Park 鈥� and this was a Saturday morning and as my sister and mother walked up Church Street, they looked at the building where my father worked and it wasn鈥檛 there. It had been razed to the ground.
My mother arrived home and said to my father: 鈥淒on鈥檛 bother going in to work on Monday morning, George 鈥� there isn鈥檛 any.鈥�
Our house was near the main railway line into Lime Street and it used to have military trains and anti-aircraft guns 鈥� and there was one we called Big Bertha 鈥� that was a huge one 鈥� and when that went off it shattered everything. Not far away at Edge Hill there鈥檚 a huge railway marshalling yard and they never had a bomb drop on that. The whole area was circled with these anti-aircraft guns.
But I do remember a place in Liverpool, right down in the centre, off Church Street. There was a clock on this building and in the middle of the dial there was a flying bomb 鈥� one of these ariel torpedoes 鈥� sticking out of the clock-face.

[This story was submitted to the People's War site by Wolverhampton Libraries on behalf of Bob Preece and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions]

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