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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the |Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Tom Norris and has been added to the site with his permission…

I was 4 years old when the war started.and we all sat around the radio listening to Chamberlain’s broadcast.

Next door to us related by marriage were a family called the Glasgows and shortly after the broadcast there came a message to report to the Territorial Army Units. Gordon the youngest in the family next door was in the T.A. and he ran off across the road to catch the bus to go and we all waved him goodbye. This was to be the last time I saw him as he was taken prisoner in the desert, and interned into a Prisoner of War Camp. His mother Mrs. Glasgow received a telegram that he was missing in action and it was only months later that she got confirmation as to where he was.

Mum was a weaver and worked long hours, I went to be looked after by a family called the Holmes’, their children became like brothers and sisters to me and their father who I called Uncle Ernie was the local ARP warden, checking the houses for chinks of light every night. Funnily enough he was the only one in the village to be done for showing a light.

The eldest in the Holmes family was Frank and he was in the Royal Navy, he hadn’t been home on leave and they hadn’t had a letter or heard from him for ages. On this particular day I set off to walk down the ash path or pad as we called it, down to Rosegrove engine shed. I stopped and leaned on a farm gate. A sailor was walking towards me the other way and I thought I recognized him as our Frank. He told me to run home and tell his mum that I had just seen someone who looked like Frank walking up the ash pad. When I got home and told her this, she gave me a clip around the ear, just as Frank walked through the front door. We were all very happy to see him, but he would never talk about the war.

Dad was a coal miner and volunteered to go in the RAF, as a way to escape the pit. He went for a trade test as a mechanic and passed, also passing the medical. He reported the following day and we all said goodbye to him. But a few days later early in the morning there was a knock on the door and dad was stood there with a policeman, he had been arrested. Somehow they had found out that he was a miner, something he had of course omitted to tell them. They took him to the pit for the night shift and also escorted him back home afterwards.

The pit in those days had no pit- head baths, so he would have to bathe in front of the fire in a tin bath; his body was covered in coal scars. He had to join the Home Guard, which he resented after having tried to join the RAF. I remember one particular night when he came home, mum had cooked us dried eggs, to be eaten with the dark coloured, rough bread which was all you could get in the war.. He picked up his plate and threw it across the room and the eggs slid down the wall. He said. ‘How can you expect men to get coal off this rubbish?.’ He left the room and us kids, looked at mum then dashed over to pick the eggs up off the floor and eat them. Well, there was a war on!

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