大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from Radio Northampton Action Desk on behalf of Sheila Ribbans and has been added to the site with her permission. Sheila Ribbans fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

My parents were both young, in their twenties, and I was a small girl at the beginning of the war and when the air raids first began.

Father volunteered for the army in 1940 and left my mother to run a busy shop with Grandpa's help. Looking back it must have been a busy time for them and Grandpa doubled up with travelling over to Weedon Barracks as a security guard as well.

The Air Raid Warden and the local Policeman both checked most nights to make sure Mother and I were well and no chink of light was showing from our blacked out windows.

I had a tiny single bedroom over the shop and from my vantage point I watched the bus conductors clock in outside by daylight. The couples who waited at the bus stop to go into town gradually changed from wearing civilian clothes to young women proudly clutching the arm of young husbands in service uniforms who were at training camp or on embarkation leave and then the menfolk grew fewer. Gradually the gossip in the shop was of prisoners of war and occasionally worse.

But in my little room at night I often lay awake excited and praying for the unmistakable whine of the air raid siren. Immediately I was out of bed, reaching by the door where my favourite garment, my air raid suit, was hanging. One of my mother's old camel coats had been cut up and a clever friend has turned it into something very special for me, as all around the hood some old fur collar had been
used as trimming. In a flash I was all zipped up, plimsolls on and quickly hurrying down the stairs to join mother to gather up the torch and a 'midnight feast'.

I remember the criss-crossing of the searchlights as we made our way to the bottom of the garden where the Anderson shelter, with its guards of sandbags, had settled down into the lawn like a permanent feature, containing all we might need. We made sure no light was escaping and settled down to play cards or a board game. If the all clear sound did not come within an hour or so, I would be persuaded to lay down on one of the little bunks with a blanket but I don't think I often actually slept. It was all too stimulating to have my busy mother to myself and a captive, playing games and talking to me. Sometimes, I remember we would pop out and peer into the night sky in the direction of Coventry where the sky was bright with activity.
It must have been an anxious time for my mother as she had cousins living there but no hint of that was communicated to me.

Then the 'all clear' wailed across Abington and sometimes I was carried half asleep back, put into my bed to finish my night's rest. After all I had to be up next morning to dress, put my little gas mask in its case over my arm, and join the other children from the area going up the hill to the Headlands School (no accompanying adults or car lifts on the school run in those wartime days).

As well as my nights, my school days had also becoming more adventurous. There was now a sprinkling of evacuted children from London and other large cities with strange accents to liven up the classroom and accompany us in our crocodile down into the huge shelter in the school grounds on the rarer daytime raids.

The busy family business did not allow for an evacuee at home, which was a very sore point with me. My best friend, Barbara, had scooped the brightest and cheekiest Cockney boy, Bobby Barton, and I was full of envy and first love.

So when some time later the teacher introduced a little girl with a huge bow in her auburn hair to the class who had come from London, because her father had been moved with the Brook Dressmaking Factory to Northampton, and asked us to welcome her then my arm shot up. I promised to befriend her and look out for her and she and I are still the closest of friends.

My father came back safe and well at the end of the war but my mother's much loved brother, Cyril, was lost at sea in the Merchant Navy. For the grown-ups the war must have had much sadder times than we Northampton children who grew up in those wartime years.

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