- Contributed by听
- bettyhale
- People in story:听
- Betty Hale
- Location of story:听
- Eccles, Lancashire
- Article ID:听
- A2062757
- Contributed on:听
- 19 November 2003
A month after our 20th birthday, the 22nd of December 1940 my twin sister and I reported for duty at the ARP post in Eccles. That night we were having a pre-Christmas celebration. The manager of the local grocers brought a whole ham and the slicing machine that he had " borrowed" from his shop. There were about seventeen people in the three storey house we were using with a brick shelter and a reinforced cellar.
The sirens went about 6 p.m. and shortly afterwards the building received a direct hit from a German bomber killing eleven people in the building and a family of five next door. My sister and I were sitting on the arms of an easy chair near the fire on either side of a young Irish woman. We were buried completely. The gas and water pipes burst drowning some including the boy scout messenger.
Fortunately a soldier coming homne on leave spotted my fingers sticking out of the rubble. I had pushed them through before I loist consciousness. He helped to dig me out and I was taken to the local hospital which was so full I was left on the floor. My sister had survived and been taken home but the young woman sharing our chair was killed, as was the grocer. We were injured and away from the post for 3 months convalescing in Lancaster.
On our first night back on duty we raced towards our new ARP post located under a school playground and to our horror saw the petrol storage tanks on the side of the Manchester Ship Canal take a direct hit. The whole place was lit up and as we rushed to the ARP entrance
a bomb was dropped flinging us both down the stairwell. This time we were only slightly hurt but my sister's jaw locked rendering her speechless. The men on the post thought we were jinxed and told us to go home and stay home!
It was a terrible night and some men refused to take the ambulance out and a young woman driver asked for helpers and we were volunteered on the grounds that we were indestructible. We went to several incidents which seemed to be getting closer and closer to our home in Boardman Street.
Postscript In 1944 I married and moved to East Anglia living on an aerodrome with my husband, the resident engineer. I was called up to work on the American officer's site at Wretham and saw thousands of bombers going over on DDay. My late husband helped build Lakenheath - for the next war, he said.
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