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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Jenny Graham of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Keith Warren and has been added to the site with his permission.

It was1939 and I was eight when war was declared. All the children from my street went down to the barracks in Flixton and followed a procession of army trucks carrying the soldiers to war, we ran behind them for two miles watching them all the way out of sight.

It was January or February of 1941 and I would be about 10 years old when I was evacuated to Blackpool. My father was a billeting officer in Salford, which was bombed heavily during the Manchester Blitz. It was bombed almost every night and a family, a large family - the Henshaws - were bombed out of their home. My father re-located them to our family home, a farm house in Flixton and I was sent to a farm at Squires gate in Blackpool.

I remember when my mother took me to the train station, the Exchange station and all I carried with me was a bag, my gas mask and my budgie in his cage! As we walked through Deansgate you could feel the heat from the fires and see them all burning from that night's bombing, hose pipes to extinguish the fires were lining the streets. We stepped over the pipes and I could see where people had had to evacuate their houses fast. As we walked to the station and I boarded the train I was frightened, especially to be leaving my friends and family behind but actually, it was to be the start of a lifetime's experience and adventure.

The Thompsons, the family I was to live with, were to meet me at the station in St. Anne's; they were a farming family, I didn't know them but he was a work colleague of my father's. I boarded the train and found it full of soldiers on their way to the RAF base in Blackpool. The soldiers looked after me because I was young and on my own, they made a fuss of me and my budgie and gave me apples and pears and plenty of sweets! It was fun and exciting, some of them were teenagers, some of them grown men, I was in awe of them and the journey passed very quickly. When we arrived, the Thompsons met me as arranged and took me out to their farm which was near what is now Blackpool airport. We had to go through security gates to get to it and it was full of RAF personnel and Land Army Girls. As an only child and a young maturing boy it was a very exciting time.

I quickly became a messenger for the RAF boys and Land Army girls, running love letters between them in exchange for sweet coupons. This was, I think, where I developed my Entrepreneurial skills. I would buy Buzz Bars, delicious sweets with a yellow wrapper that I haven't seen since the war and sell them to the other children at school. Of course, I had had to change schools when I moved to the country but there were many others in the same boat; because of the level of evacuees we actually had to alternate the times that we went to school. Sometimes we would go in the morning only and sometimes in the afternoon only. Although the Thompsons had only one child, a grown up daughter who was in the Armed forces, I made new friends at school and enjoyed my time there very much.

I remember when the Air Raid sirens sounded. The RAF personnel that weren't on duty would often take me and another boy, a Welsh boy out to watch the bombers as they passed by. Sometimes we would sit for two to three hours a night just watching them fly overhead. It was such an experience, the noise and the anticipation. The RAF boys could always tell us what planes they were and where they were heading for; Barrow, Liverpool, Manchester or Preston. Of course the German bombers were looking for specific targets in the cities, factories and so on.

I think I had been living on the farm for about 18 months when my mother came to stay with us. The bombing in Manchester had worsened and the city had deteriorated so rapidly that my father felt it wasn't safe for my mother. She moved to the farm and he stayed and continued working in Salford, although he would come and visit us occasionally. The Henshaws were still living in our house too at this point and it wasn't until 1944 that my mother and I moved back to Manchester.

I hated going back. I had got used to the rural and coastal country life and had made new friends in Blackpool, I had made a new life. City life was so different and as my old friends in Manchester had stayed during the war, their lives had moved on without me. I struggled to settle back into school and I found it so difficult that I ended up having to repeat the year, again everyone moved on without me. I found it impossible to readjust and was unhappy there for a lot of years.

This experience stayed with me right through until my early twenties. After the war, my father became an education officer in Salford but I didn’t do at all well at school. I had many jobs after I left. I was a ‘roamer’ and found it difficult to settle anywhere. I felt that I was a disappointment to my father because I didn’t do well at school and it took a long time for me to find my own path and go to university.

I am a people person and was always drawn to the caring aspects of social services. So, at 34 I went to study for a degree in social work and have remained in this field all my life. I am sure that these years shaped a lifetime for me.

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