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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by a volunteer from Lincolnshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of John Chappell and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Chappell fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

On one uneasily spent night, as my two sisters and I sat quietly along with our grandparents in the house neighbouring our own, my Grandfather led the three of us out of doors to look at searchlights wavering about in a dark sky, I an attempt to pick out the German bombers whose engines we were able to hear up there. The droning sounds of these alien aircraft were quite eerie to our ears, and my young sister, Molly, I remember, covered up her ears with her gloved hands so that she might not hear them. The air-raid siren had wailed its cold rising-falling warning of the air-raid, and because of the compulsory blackout restrictions in force, there was a thickened darkness across the sky except of course for the powerful beams of light now searching that black sky of Great Leeds. Here, to the alarm of my sisters and I, my Grandfather very suddenly shone a forbidden beam of a torchlight into the same sky, switching off the light only at the repeated requests of my sister Jean who was rapidly becoming more mature as the experience of war grew on her. Our little party at last cam indoors to the warped sounds of machine-gunfire in the sky to discover my Grandmother Chappell crocheting serenely in her rocking chair and watching a mouse polishing its whiskers. As my sister Molly ran towards her Grandmother, the mouse of course left off its studied ablutions and fled back into its small hole and into the safety of its house-wall home. Despite this small distraction, my sister Jean’s alarm grew. Our parents just happened to be visiting relatives in Tingley, a part of greater Morley, and were to arrive back home very late on that Saturday evening. As it turned out, they had been detained by air-raid wardens and had been directed into a large communal air-raid shelter at Tingley crossroads:

AIR RAID

War’s sirens wail: now nears the night’s air-raid.
House curtains drawn, families sit by hearths,
Striving to hear. The Germans flies no mirths
To merry here, yet his engine-throbbings fade.

His target’s beyond here. Leeds’ railway yards?
It’s Vickers or Thorpe Arch? Whole hours knit by,
And moonlight earns no praise. Some babies cry.
Tired patients in the General shuffle cards

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