大象传媒

My parents were married on Easter Saturday, 1939, at the parish church of Sutton in Holderness, in the County of York. Known as Paddy to her friends, Miss Jessie Connerton, aged twenty-four, became Mrs Sidney Greaves. Sid was just a year older.
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The following is an extract from my mother鈥檚 memoirs, recalling the small but valuable part she played during the War, as well as some of her experiences during the bombing of Hull. My mother鈥檚 eldest brother, Raymond, lived in Kings Lynn at this time and would tell of how they could see the great glow in the sky that was Hull burning. Her other brother, Fred, lived near the docks and was a ship鈥檚 engineer. Much of his work during the war was secret, but away from the ships he was a Fire Warden for the streets where he lived; the memories of those terrible scenes scarred him for life. Although there is no mention in her written words, my mother and her sister, Miriam, used to tell me of the difficulties of trying to find their way to work through the flattened streets, when all familiar landmarks had gone.

鈥淕radually all Sid鈥檚 staff were being called up for War Service so, anticipating the time when he too would be called up, Sid took me into his business, which was in the old city of Hull, and trained me to take over. Soon I did just that and was everything from Office Boy to Manager, from Custom鈥檚 Clerk to Transport Manager and everything in between. We were known in the trade as 鈥淪hipping and Forwarding Agents鈥�, renting warehouses in Hull, Leeds and Halifax (and there was a cold store further north for perishable foodstuffs). We handled tons of steel tubes for the British Iron and Steel Corporation, foodstuffs for the Ministry of Food, consignments of seeds for the Ministry of Agriculture and, once, a large consignment of drugs for the British Red Cross. I needed all the help I could get from the Dock Staff, the Customs Officers and the Transport companies and they gave it, willingly.

One afternoon, when Sid was home on leave from the RAF, and when all work for the day was done, we went to visit his parents who lived in East Hull. We expected to leave there in good time before the nightly visitation of the Luftwaffe, but we didn鈥檛 make it. The air-raid started early that night - a bad sign. Apparently Hull was marked down as 鈥淭arget for Tonight鈥� and we got everything they could throw at us. High explosives, land mines (one dropped in the park a few yards from us) and incendiary bombs rained down and soon the city was an inferno.The noise was horrendous - there was the roar of wave after wave of German war planes as they flew over, the scream of thousands of bombs as they fell and the subsequent noise of the explosions; there was the incessant gunfire of the Ack-ack batteries and then there was the wail of the ambulances and fire-engines as they tried to get through to casualties and fires. That night the numbers of dead and injured were high.

Hours later, as the All Clear sounded, we went from the shelter back into the house and found a layer of soot covering everything, including the parrot. She was bereft of most of her feathers and was commiserating with herself and saying 鈥淧oor Polly. Poor, poor Polly.鈥� We ventured into the street to assess the damage. The only sound in the deep, shocked silence was the tinkle of glass as it was being swept up. Not a window was left intact. All the main services were off - gas, water, electricity. In the early hours of the next morning Sid and I walked home to the other side of the city, but before we had quite reached the house the air-raid warning sirens sounded again and we had a repeat performance, just as severe. (After those blitz nights, the raids continued to a greater or lesser degree until the war in Europe was ended.)

Sid came home on Embarkation Leave. Obviously he was being sent to the Far East as he had been issued with tropical kit. Our leavetaking was made all the more poignant because, soon, very soon, our little one would be here and he would not see his child before he left. We knew too, that it was quite possible that he would never again come home.鈥濃�︹��..

鈥︹��.Despite pleas for compassionate leave, my father sailed from Liverpool on 18th July, 1944, aboard a troopship bound for Bombay and then travelled overland to to join his unit in Burma. I was born two weeks after he sailed. My mother, back at work a few days after my birth, and having had a telephone installed, moved her office from the old city to the bedroom of their home in Strathcona Avenue. She continued to run the business for the next eighteen months, the two of us often sleeping in the air-raid shelter during the bombings, until Sid finally came home from the Far East in January 1946. She had not only played a small part in keeping the country supplied with essential commodities but had kept her husband鈥檚 job and home ready for his return and looked after their baby. I am very proud of her War Effort.

Paddy died in Hull on the 16th December, 2002, aged 87.

Link. My father鈥檚 story see 鈥淭roopship to Bombay鈥�

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