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This story is submitted to the People’s War site by a member of Market Harborough Branch, Royal British Legion on behalf of Pat Midleton and has been added to the site with his permission. Mrs Middleton fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Under the Stairs
Memories of the War by Pat Middleton

I was 18 months old when the war started. My Dad was one of the first to be called up because he had been in the Territorial Army. We lived in Wallasey, just over the Mersey from the Liverpool Docks. My very first memory is of sitting on my Mum’s knee under the stairs listening to the bombs falling. My Mum was holding me and rocking me backwards and forwards and I had my eyes so tightly closed I could see coloured lights.

After Dunkirk my Dad ’s regiment was stationed for a short while on Lord Bingley’s Estate in a small village in Yorkshire called Bramham. Mum and I went to stay there and we had a room in one of the cottages. We were called evacuees. The village people did not like it when one of the evacuees won first prize at the whist drive. We kept going back to Wallasey when things ‘quietened down’.

My Grandad and Nanna lived close to us in Wallasey. Grandad’s first war had been the Boar War, he had medals and a letter of commendation from his Commanding Officer. Grandad was a Manager at ‘the mill’, Vernon’s Flour Mill down on the Wallasey docks. My Mum’s twin sister Lily, and her new husband Jim also lived close to us. Jim was not called up because of his job, he was a printer on the Liverpool Echo. On 21st December 1940 Lily and Jim were going dancing with some friends at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton, on the way there they popped in to see Grandad. Nanna had come up to Yorkshire to stay with Mum and I. While Lily and Jim were with Grandad the air raid siren started so they all went under the stairs until the raid was over.

That is where they were when the bomb hit the house. Grandad was 62 and Lily and Jim were both 27. Mum and Nanna had a telegram on Christmas Day to say they had all been killed, and we went straight back to Wallasey . The house was looted before we arrived so Nanna lost her engagement ring and her pearls as well. My Mother remembers the funeral, three coffins draped in the Union Flag, but the grave diggers were so busy they had opened the wrong grave, so the funeral procession had to wait until the right one had been opened. 422 civilians were killed on Merseyside during that one raid.

When the war ended Dad came home. During one of his battles he had lost an eye because of a bomb blast. However he went back to his old job in the Post Office. A few years later the sight in his other eye went and although he had several operations he was blind for the rest of his life and a St. Dunstaner.

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