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This story has been added to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Ernest Downing and has been put on the site with his permission…

I was 13 when war broke out and still at school. I had six older married sisters, so I was the baby of the bunch. They worked in munitions, helping to build aircraft and one of them was a WAAF.

As children we used to go looking for scrap, pieces of shrapnel, which we would take to the council dump, hopefully to be re-used for the war effort.

I had joined the boy scouts as I had heard they were runners for the ARP. It could be difficult to get through on the telephone at times and we runners would take messages, a job of some importance at the time.

Manchester was heavily bombed; however we were lucky and got away with broken windows. Our Anderson shelter was in the garden and if the sirens went after nine o’clock at night, school was postponed for the following day and we didn’t have to go. At on point the school was closed down for a while as they used it for a mortuary. We were given work to do at home.

Dad dug up the garden and planted row upon row of potatoes and we kept some chickens, so we did have our own eggs. Mum would buy 24 day old chicks and from them there would be about four or five left when they were big enough to lay.

Dad had served in the 1914/18 War and had been taken prisoner with a bullet in his leg. He spent some of the time in a Belgian hospital where there was a dreadful shortage of soap. Of course on his return he told this story to mum and it obviously affected her, forever after she would hoard soap, she filled a cupboard with long bars of it, in fact long after the war ended we still had some left.

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