大象传媒

1942: At the back of our houses were allotment gardens and all the tenants in the old March Terrace were given Andersen steel shelters, which we put in these gardens. When there was an alert which sounded quite near to us, we all took off into the shelters to be safe. One of my neighbours, my friend Grace, a nice looking woman with lovely long dark hair, decided she had a lot of grey hairs which she was going to get rid of. Having bought some hair dye, a powder, she mixed it in a basin and applied the muddy-looking gunge to the grey hairs. Her husband, who had quite a luxuriant moustache, mud-coloured, she thought could do with a lift too, so she applied the same paste to his upper lip.

Right on cue, the air raid warning siren went off and we all had to depart into our air raid shelters, poor Grace and her husband sitting there dripping this stuff from her hair and her husband from his moustache, thinking it might not be long 鈥� but guess what, we were stuck there for three hours.

When we were eventually let out, Grace and her husband went straight to the tap in the back lane to rinse off this dye (which was supposed to be left on for about five or ten minutes). When it was removed, the tips of Grace鈥檚 hair and her husband鈥檚 moustache were bright red, which lasted for quite some time, but they just had to grin and bear it. It gave us all quite a few laughs.

It was incidents like this that really brightened our lives a little, like the time I heard my neighbour鈥檚 Westminster clock chiming and thought we were being invaded! I could actually hear German tanks coming up Blaydon Bank, I was so frightened. Later, when we did have a nasty stick of bombs in my area which killed quite a few people, a landmine landed in an allotment garden not very far from me, with the result that all our windows blew in and our front door finished up at the bottom of the stairs. The rest of our war was spent in a dark kitchen with blackout cloths stuck over the window frames and an old gas light on, because we didn鈥檛 have electricity in the house at the time 鈥� even our old radio was battery-driven, so that we could hear 鈥淒ick Barton 鈥� Special Agent鈥� and 鈥淲orkers鈥� Playtime鈥�, the highlights of the day.

Another time, there was this cinema in Blaydon, which used to show films on a continuous loop, and me and my daughter were standing at the top of the bank looking for my son 鈥� the warning had gone off and there was no sign of him coming back from the pictures. We waited for ages, worried sick about what might have happened to him, and eventually, he appeared. I asked him why he hadn鈥檛 come and he said, 鈥淢am, I hadn鈥檛 seen all the film and I didn鈥檛 want to miss anything!鈥�

As told to Karen Hannah, Gateshead Central Library, on Friday 21st May 2004.

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