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When the war broke out, I was ten years old and living in the house where I’d been born, at 25 Corelli Street, Miles Platting. All the houses round there were called the ‘Tripe Colony’ because they belonged to the UCP tripe company.
I was evacuated, with my fellow pupils from Haig Street School, Newton Heath [Manchester 10] to Littleborough. I remember we were given three things to take with us on the train — a bar of chocolate, a tin of corned beef and a tin of condensed milk. The chocolate was York plain chocolate, not popular with us children, and the corned beef and the condensed milk were to give to the lady of the house you were going to, to help out with the first meal.
I remember the actual declaration of war when it came on the wireless. My parents were listening; they must have expected it because my mother said ‘Go out and play, there’s going to be bad news’. I didn’t go out, though, I hid behind the door.
I had a frightening experience at the first house I was sent to, because there was a blind lady there and she wanted to touch my face. I’d never known anyone blind before and I was absolutely terrified. They moved me on to the club house at the golf links, where I got into trouble for collecting golf balls.. . I was picking them up before they’d finished playing! But I had to come home before Christmas because my mother was very ill.

The war was an exciting time for children, though, because it was a break from routine. On the other hand, things that broke the routine for us before the war, like the Whit Walks, didn’t take place again till afterwards, when we were too old to participate. Someone took a photograph of me with my best friend Kathleen Blakeborough in the procession for St. Luke’s Church in the last Walks before the war.
Like other kids, I had a baccy [tobacco] tin to collect shrapnel from shells and bombs, which we then swopped. It was good if it had a number on it.
We used to borrow a pram to go down to the gasworks on Bradford Road to get coke for the fire. One day we’d turned on to Bradford Road from Hulme Hall Lane and there were a lot of police. We carried on regardless, to get the fuel but they turned us back. We could see a parachute wrapped round the chimneys of a terraced row of houses and the police said it was an unexploded landmine.
At Christmas time in 1940 we came out of the Morrison air raid shelter after the sirens had gone and I saw the Aurora Borealis — the Northern Lights - the most fantastic sight I’d ever seen. It was like the Belle Vue fireworks, but so much better. There were dancing lights in rainbow colours and it was apparently visible all over the northern hemisphere. You couldn’t see it like that now because the skyline is so different. I have seen it once since, though, in 1994 in Outer Mongolia. The temperature was 26 below freezing point and you could see all the stars because there were no lights, just like England in wartime.

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