大象传媒

This story was submitted to the site by Alison Tebbutt, Derby CSV Action Desk on behalf of Betty Mannion. The author has given her permission, and fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

It was a sunday afternoon on September 3rd 1939. I was six years old, my Mum, Dad, older sister and I were in our front room and the first thing I can remember was Mr Clay, who was the Air Raid Warden walking around the Avenue ringing a bell and shouting the War had broken out and I looked at my Mum and asked does that mean we are all going to die? Mum replied not to be siily. When we went to school we had to carry a gas mask which was in a cardboard box that had a string attached for hanging on my shoulder. Every day at school we had to go into the air-raid shelter with our gas masks on as a practice in case the enemy tried to gas us. After we had sat for a while we went back to the classroom. One day there was an air-raid and we were sent home from Gayton Avenue School. I remember seeing a German plane in the sky and I kept as close to the hedges as much as I could so that the pilot couldn't see me. I was scared.
We lived opposite an Army Camp and could see the soldiers marching to the Ordnance Depot in Sinfin. There was also an Amry Band which would march over Goodsmoor bridge. The leader would throw the mace up in the air on one side of the bridge and catch it at the other end before it hit the ground. As children we thought that was very clever. One day an Army Officer came to our door to see how many people lived in our house. There was four of us, Mum, Dad, my sister and me. We had one bed spare so the Officer said that we must have a soldier billeted with us for a while.
A number of nights we had air-raids and mum got us out of bed. We couldn't go to our air-raid shelter that Dad had built in the garden because it was always full of rain water. So mum made a bed under the stairs or close to the piano with our heads under the piano keyboard for shelter in case we were bombed. We didn't realise then that if we had been bombed and the piano had fallen we would possibly have had our heads chopped off.
We lived with a railway line at the bottom of the garden and lots of times long goods trains were stopped for days. The goods trains had ammunition stored in the wagons. Mum would take the train drivers sandwidges and drinks to help them during their long waits. One night a German bomber followed a train from Burton-on-Trent, looking for Rolls-Royce but bombed the Army Camp and a farm close by. Most days the soldiers had their tents in the middle of the field but on this day they had their tents along all four edges of the field and not one bomb hit any of the tents. My mum went to the farm and brought the family that lived there to our house to sleep because at least two of the bombs had landed near to their house.
My Dad was an electrician and worked for the Derby Corporation. He was in the Home Guard, looking after the power station in Full Street. He was on duty guarding the power station at least three times a week. The funny thing was, when he came home after his duty finished, Mum had to meet him off the bus because he didn't like walking home in the dark. On the way home they passed the Ordnance gateway and there was always a soldier with a gun at the gate, he used to shout 'WHO GOES THERE?' he made my mum jump one night and she leapt out of her shoes and landed in a puddle.
My Grandma, (Dad's Mum) lived in Wolfa Street in Derby. We used to visit Grandma and stay a few days, because there was a cellar (underground room) and Mum and Dad thought it was safer for us to be there if we had an air-raid. I had a doll bought for me to take my mind off the air-raids. The doll had eyes that opened and closed. After a time the doll's eyes stopped working and Dad kept repairing them so he stuffed the doll's head with newspaper which kept the eyes open all the time.
Food and clothing was rationed as were sweets. If we wanted sweets we would have a small bag of suagr and a stick of rhubarb to dip in the sugar. One of my favourites was a bag of cocoa and sugar. I licked my finger and dipped it into the cocoa. The first time we had bananas we had to queue for hours at Marks & Spencers, we didn't know how to eat them at first and tried to eat them with their skins on, but we soon found out that you had to peel them first.
To keep us safe we had Barrage Balloons which were very large silver balloons filled with Hydrogen and they floated in the sky fastened to long steel cables. The balloons were to stop German planes flying low to search for targets to bomb. One day when the balloons were flying we had a thunderstorm and the lightening exploded the balloons, which ignited the hydrogen and all the cables came crashing down across the roof's of the houses and cracking the roof tiles.
We also had smoke screens which looked a little like Daleks out of Doctor Who. The smoke screens were full of old oil. If we had an air-raid, usually at night, the air-raid wardens would walk around the streets setting fire to the Daleks causing thick yellow smoke to fill the air to create a fog to stop the pilots seeing the targets. The smoke smelt horrible.
Windows were blacked out with black curtains. We had buckets of water and sand at the front door just in case of fires. We had a brick wall built in front of the front door which was called a blast wall, in case we were bombed. On Stenson Road we had a large anti-aircraft gun called Big Berther which we often heard being fired. It would make the house shake. A cousin, Kenrick, was evacuated from London to live with us. He didn't stay with us for long because he preferred to be in London, not in the country.
Towards the end of the war we had German prisoners of war billeted in the camp near to us. They worked at the Ordinance Depot and would march over the bridge with soldiers with guns guarding them.
When the war ended in May 1945, everyone in the area was invited to a party at the Army Camp. All I can remember of the party was the large bonfires.

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