大象传媒

During the war I lived in Manchester. My dad worked at the Town Hall and whether it was his job or he was too old to go in the services I don't know.
I can remember us waiting for the air raid siren to go and my dad would wrap me in a blanket and take me down to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden where we would stay until the 'all clear'. The raids got so frequent that my mum would put me to bed in a bunk down there when my dad went off on his bike in the blackout to do ARP work. Sometimes our neighbours would join us and they played cards or the ladies did their knitting. We had paraffin lamps and the smell of it still reminds me of those nights in the shelter.
We lived opposite a tram depot and after one bad raid I can remember my mum taking me to school that morning and all the trams had been in a line waiting to go into the depot when they had been hit. Some were stood up on end, others on their sides in all the rubble on the road and the lines were all twisted and rearing up.
We were lucky that night, all our windows were out and ornaments and crockery were smashed all to pieces with pieces of shrapnel all over, but we were alive and our house was still standing.
As we made our way through the rubble I can remember seeing houses flattened to the ground. You would think that we didn't have to go to school after that, but we did. When we got to the school I can remember half the roof being missing. They just cordoned that half off and we had our lessons at the other end. Looking back now it was madness, all the lot could have fallen on us.
In 1943 my mum was expecting my sister and my grandparents lived in Huddersfield. After a bomb had dropped at Holmfirth they decided to come to us in Manchester. They were stuck in the Standedge Tunnel on a steam train for five hours with only the light of their torches.
Grandma would never go in the shelter, she just went into a cubby hole under the stairs. She was stone deaf from working in the mill so she never heard all the explosions and noise from the raids.
Grandma and Grandad stayed until after my sister was born. I can remember going to visit my mum and the new baby in a Nursing Home with my dad.We had to walk there in the blackout with our torches. It was in a big park with grey barrage balloons floating overhead, I thought they looked like elephants with big ears. The Nursing Home was very dark and dreary. When my sister was 50 we went back and now its an Insurance Company.
The raids were getting so bad it was decided that mum and I and the new baby would evacuate to Crossens, a village just outside Southport where they had friends. I loved it there and went to school and made lots of new friends who were not so lucky as me, they had to leave their parents back in Liverpool or Manchester. I remember we all wore boys grey caps with a red badge. My dad used to come at weekends.
My sister's husband Jim has just had his 65th birthday. He lived in Liverpool in 1940 and was 2 years old at the time. They found him after 3 days buried in rubble under his mother who was dead. He still has a big scar where there was a deep hole cut in his arm. He was separated from his dad and sisters and went to sea at 16. It was another 20 years before he traced his sisters and was able to see his mothers grave.
Another little story I remember is that during the rationing my mum used to uptip wooden orange boxes and put a curtain over the front and use them as shelves. She would hoard tinned stuff. One day when a decorator was painting the bedroom the temptation was too much and he left with the lot. Needless to say he never sent a bill for the painting.

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