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AIR RAIDS
[Ronald Eric Gould, born 12/7/1928, was a pupil Les Vauxbelets College, Guernsey, from 1935 — 1942 and was evacuated with the school in June 1940. At the time of this edited extract from a typescript he prepared in 2005 he was billeted in the house of Mr Yearsley in Hale]

About this time [1941] the air raids started and we would be sound asleep when I the sirens went and Miss Yearsley would come and wake us and we would all go downstairs and shelter under the stairs. We, Graham and I, were not frightened at that time, only annoyed because we had been woken up, but very shortly it was a nightly occurrence as Trafford Park, the industrial area of Manchester suffered the attention of Hitler's bombers and we were forced to seek shelter in a proper shelter across the road at the home of Mr Roy Chadwick. He was an aircraft designer at "Avro" and in fact he designed the famous Lancaster Bomber. All these raids went on for a number of weeks, we were told that the German planes came in over the North Sea, did very little to Yorkshire but really went for Manchester and also Liverpool and if they had any bombs left they dropped them around our way before making for home as quickly as possible.

At this time our school was still at "Burnside" and it was decided that if the sirens went off before midnight we started school at 10.00 am but after midnight we went in at 11.00 am. You can guess which we wanted, it gave us more time to hunt for shrapnel which had fallen out of the skies from the anti-aircraft guns.

Later in the year the raids got less and less in our area as they switched to civilian targets like Coventry and London.

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