大象传媒

I heard on the radio Chamberlain, our Prime Minister, had said there would be no war in our time. My mother was so happy and pleased, she said to my brother and myself "You can have anything you want" and we chose to have a whole bar of chocolate each and in what seemed a very short time war was declared.
We went through the process of being issued with gas masks and everyone in the neighbourhood was blacking out their windows.
In the early part of the war there were no air-raid shelters. Our house backed on to a yard with seven other houses and in the yard was a vegetable store which the men had strengthened with balks of timber, so the first night the sirens sounded we went to the vegetable store and sat on bags of potatoes etc with our gas masks at the ready. This was the first time I had felt any apprehension - fear! What reinforced this fear was that we had a young baby in the store with us and her parents were dousing a blanket with water in case there was a gas attack and the baby would have to be wrapped in the blanket.
Later there was also a move to strengthen the cellars in our yard and two were duly strengthened and these we shared with seven other families.
After these initial events people relaxed and nothing further happened for months.
This was the period when Home Service came in. There was such a shortage of teachers and the schools had no air raid facilities so one teacher would visit a home and teach a number of pupils in that home for one and half hours per day twice a week. Our education was sadly lacking.
At this time I became aware that people, for the first time, formed queues for food or entrance to any function. Before the war if, for instance, I went for fish and chips I might not be able to get served - I was so small, but now people formed orderly queues.
Part of our 'entertainment' was listening to Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce)on the radio (he was broadcasting propaganda from Germany) and he told us they would be bombing Sheffield and would be led the way by the trams, which had been lit up for the first time.
On that particular Thursday night, it was three minutes to seven and my brother and I were getting ready for bed when the air raid ciren sounded (It was a terrible sound) and we had to ajourn to one of our neighbour's reinforced cellar.
The bombing started and I particularly remember all the people went quiet. After about an hour our immediate neighbour came in and told us our house was on fire.
I recall that my father, who was the only adult male in the cellar, had to keep going out of the cellar to get milk, or water, for a newly born baby - of course there was no water - Electricity, water and all the other services had failed.
As the night proceeded other people in the neighbourhood who had had their houses bombed were coming down the cellar grating to join us. So by this time it was very crowded and of course people had to urinate on the pile of coal in the corner. I could hear my mother and father planning where to go if the house we were in got bombed.
After the all clear we went out into the yard and it was just an inferno!
All this left us with no posessions and nowhere to go,eventualy the following night we stayed at my grandmother's house.
There was no gas, electricity or toilets. To substitute for a toilet we put a sheet of newspaper on the floor, then we parcelled the excreta up and burned it on an open fire. Water carts came round during the day but for any clothes washing we collected pails of water from the river Sheaf at the bottom of the Moor. For food we visited a soup kitchen near to the central library.
Later my mother was invited to take a job as housekeeper and we were allowed to go and live with her at Bradway. This was when I decided that living at the bottom of the Moor was not for me!
Previously I had attended Springvale. When we moved to Bradway the school I attended was Greenhill village school which in time was evacuated to Abbey Lane School. After about four weeks one of the teachers from Springvale House Open Air School saw my mother and myself in town and told us she thought we had all been killed and now she would make arrangements for me to go back to my own school, which she did.

After about six months we were allocated a council house at Shiregreen.

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