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On Friday, September 1st 1939, my mother collected me from school. She had been crying. She spoke to my teacher for quite some time and then we walked home together. On the way home mother informed me that I could not have my 6th birthday party which had been promised for me on my birthday which was the next day. I too became very upset I had looked forward to this party for ages.

When we got home mother gave me a special tea and I did not have to go to bed at 7pm which was very odd. It was quite dark when my uncle collected me and drove me to his home in the country.

On Sunday morning my aunt and my cousin went to church but I was left at home with Uncle. Uncle put the wireless on and we heard a man declaring that we were now at war. I was too young to understand what it meant on that day but it was only a few weeks later that it began to have meaning for me. One of my new school friends was a German refugee and one of the senior boys was from Poland and he wept on the day that Warsaw fell to the Germans.

And so began my war.

I was sent to live with different relatives who were supposed to live in safe places until I was eventually officially evacuated to Lancaster. I enjoyed my life in Lancaster. The school we evacuees attended was a converted warehouse near to the dockside and almost daily we saw large rats in the school or in the yard just outside the school where we played at break times. There were three teachers in the school and there were three classes – infants, juniors and seniors. I was young enough to be in the infant class but after a few days I was promoted to the junior class. The infant’s teacher was billeted in a house only a few doors from where I was so she used to take me to and from school each day.

One day two (smallish) boats were moored up in the dock and the sailors manning them wore hats with red, white and blue pompoms on the top - this was part of the Free French Navy. They stayed for several weeks.

In 1942 my grandfather died and I returned to Manchester where my grandmother was able to care for me while my mother went to work.

One of my Uncles was in the Merchant Navy so my cousin and I used to save ‘ship halfpennies’ (post 1937 halfpennies had a galleon on the reverse) for the Seamen’s Comfort Fund. There were far more ‘Britannia’ than ‘ship’ halfpennies in circulation. We used to play cards with the family on Friday nights. The game we favoured was Newmarket. My cousin and I used halfpennies out of the ship halfpenny jar but our relatives had to get money out of their pockets. My cousin and I would separate the Britannia halfpennies from our winnings and use the ship ones as far as possible whenever we were betting. At the end of play all the ship halfpennies on the table had to go in the jar but my cousin and I had our pocket money for the week by keeping our Britannia halfpennies.

My cousin and I were in the British Red Cross and took part in annual parades such as ‘Wings for Victory’. These parades were very long and usually there were three bands, which was very confusing when the parade did a U-turn round a war memorial so that we would hear two bands at the same time playing different tunes.

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