大象传媒

Kath Parkin now works for the Barnsley Chronicle - this is her personal story from WW2

THE STEAM train wearily drew its last gasp as it pulled into Barnsley railway station.
It was the end of a gruelling nine-hour journey for us: that is my mother, my sisters and myself.
The journey had been interrupted several times. Wearily, we had been forced to alight from the train due to bombing raids on towns through which the train had travelled on its way from London.
We got out of the train in Barnsley to a scene of pitch blackness and grime 鈥� and what on earth were people talking about?
To us, from the South in 1942, three years before the declaration of peace in Europe, it could have been the moon on which we had landed.
Everyone was speaking a foreign language, or so it seemed.
And we didn't like what we saw. We thought we were going to a better place than we had left. Joyfully, when we became acclimatised to our new environment we realised we had.
To begin with we couldn't come to terms with the quietness. No sound of throbbing aircraft. No sound of falling buildings and the breaking of glass.
No craters in the ground and demolished houses, shops and churches.
If only we could understand what people were saying to us, we would have known we were still in England. But, as far as we were concerned, we were utterly bemused evacuees.
My mother, who had left her home town of Barnsley to work in London at 16, had decided to bring her young daughters back to her roots to escape the incessant bombing raids on Clapham Junction where we had been forced to move when our nice little house in Feltham had been "requisitioned" by the RAF.
She had been told on many occasions her children should be evacuated with other youngsters to Wales or some other quieter part of the country which the Germans didn't know about. But she had adamantly refused.
鈥淲here they go, I go as well鈥� she said."
After things got very bad, and we had spent many days hived up in an air-raid shelter in the back garden knee-deep in slimy flood water after violent thunderstorms, she decided "enough was enough". Next day, we packed our few possessions and set off.
Back in 1942 London to Barnsley seemed a very long way and it must have taken her a great deal of courage to make the journey with her young children.
Eventually, after living in cramped conditions in one room, we got our own house in Barnsley and we never returned to London.
Even though I was only a child, I will never forget the war years in London.
Spending the night in the air-raid shelter and returning to find all our windows blown out.
The wailing sirens of ambulances and fire engines, the dreadful misery and deprivation.
Barnsley was our saviour and we shall always be thankful for that. And for the fact we were still alive and well to celebrate VE Day here.

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