大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's war site by Carol Greenwood of Bradford libraries on behalf of Geoffrey Wilson and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was born in 1935 and so don't have any memories of the outbreak of the war but I can remember the night of the bombing of Bradford in August 1940.
We had just spent a week on a farm near York with a family that my father had met while stationed near their farm whilst in the Royal Artillery searchlight unit.
We had returned on the Saturday and were in bed when we heard the air-raid sirens. Dad didn't want to go to the air raid shelters at the end of our street (Newgate Street) but my mother insisted that we went. There were three shelters with about three steps down into them.
The shelter was damp. We sat on benches which were really only slats of wood. My sister was placed into a gas 'mask' like an incubator as she was only 18 months old. Air had to be pumped in by a foot pedal.
We stayed in the shelter all night and came out early morning, when it was light... to see that the street was devastated. The bomb had landed in the embankment right in front of our house. All the houses in the street were uninhabitable, unsafe. We were told that the ceiling had fallen in on my sister, Jean's cot so we were fortunate that we had gone to the air raid shelters. The door had been blown off, across the room and wrecked the radio. We went straight back to York to the farm, leaving my dad to sort things out.
A few weeks later on September 19th there was an article in the local newspaper 'The Yorkshire Observer' with an interview with my grandma, Mrs Annie Wilson, and a photograph of her holding my sister Jean and myself, sitting on the doorstep of her house
Eventually we came back and stayed with my grandma and grandad in a council house off Birksland Street for a few months until we managed to get our own council house in Bowling Back Lane. There we three families with me, my mum and sister plus an unmarried aunt and a married aunt with her husband who was in the auxilliary fire service and, of course my grandma and granddad.
When we got our own council house we had an air raid shelter put into the front room, right under the front window. It was used as a table, we just put a cloth on it. It was made of iron and big enough for my mother, sister and myself to get into it. There was gap in the middle to crawl in. I think it was organised by my uncle Jim who was in the AFS.
There was a big tank full of water, between our house and the road on some spare ground, probably for the fire service use in putting any fires out. The top was open there was no lid so could have been dangerous if children had climbed over the sides.

Newgate Street was later pulled down. I can remember the Home Guard practising around there.

I remember walking down Mount Street and seeing a hoarding advertising Fyffe's bananas with a picture of a bunch of bananas and asking my mum what they were!

I attended Bowling Back Lane Primary school and can remember being evacuated to Nelson, Lancashire, from school some time after. All of the children carried their gas masks with them in a cardboard box. We had to go by bus to the railway station and train to Nelson, then to a large church hall where we were given a small bottle of milk whilst we waited to be allocated to a family.
I was placed with an elderly couple who were very nice but my mother wanted me back home so I was only there one week.

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