大象传媒

Jean Winstanley has requested me to submit her story for her as she cannot do it herself.
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I was 7 years old in the August of 1940, four months before the Manchester blitz at the Christmas. My grandmother had taken me to Eccles Park to watch and listen to the Eccles Borough Band in the afternoon. All was going well until everybody heard the sound of an aeroplane. The sound came nearer and everybody flung themselves on to the grass as it was a German two-engined plane, it was so low you could see the pilot, the German cross, and nuts and bolts etc, it was only just above tree height. To me at that age it was very exciting to see an aeroplane so low, more still because it was a German plane and I could see the pilot so clearly and closely. No air raid siren had been given. He obviously didn't want to shoot us as he turned from the Park to where Manchester Ship Canal was, nearby where there was the Manchester Oil Refinery and the Shell Oil Refinery, also Trafford Park where the Rolls Royce factory was that made the aero engines and a lot of other factories that were making things for the war. He had come to take photographs of the oil refineries and the industrial Trafford Park. It was only a short time after we had all got up off the ground that the sirens went but the German plane got away. I remember that scene so vividly as if it were only a few years ago. Seeing that German plane has lived very clearly in my memory.

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