大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the Peoples War website by GMR Action Desk on behalf of Catherine Nolan and has been added to this site with her permission

I was born in 1935 in Wigan and one of the things I remember from the war was when the planes were over and they were bombing and I can remember my mother getting us up at night and taking us to the air raid shelter which was underground under St Patrick鈥檚 Girls School. There was a big black tunnel, very dark, dreary and damp- as a child I knew something wasn鈥檛 right- and some nights we could have to go there several times. Towards the end of the war me mother used to say- we鈥檙e not going, I鈥檇 rather die in me own house. I remember one night I could hear a whistling sound - I was in the kitchen stood on a stool playing with water and a jug - and I lifted up the blackout curtain- and then suddenly there was a loud explosion and it shook the windows- the bomb had hit a church at the top of Greenough St. I was shaking- and so was the house.
At school everything was sandbagged up and you always had to have your gasmask. If there was an attack that came without warning the nuns at the catholic school I attended would come round banging a tin tray and we鈥檇 have to get under the school benches- what good they would have done I don鈥檛 know- but there wasn鈥檛 time to get to the shelter.
My mum worked at Risley armaments factory and me dad was too old to serve but he worked in munitions in Chorley. One Christmas eve one was coming home from work and the other was going out- we didn鈥檛 even have a family Christmas together.
In those days there was no counselling for children - we just got on with it- you had to. We all knew when the telegram boy arrived down the street- another son missing or killed- I think it made us realise at an early age that people were dying - we had a childhood to a certain extent but there were no swings in the playground because the wrought iron was used for the war - and for us the war was at home not just somewhere else.
Despite the war ending, rationing continued for some time after- the shops were empty and I never saw a banana until a few years after the war.

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