大象传媒

My war began the day before, 2nd September 1939.
For some reason my parents decided not to send my two sisters and I to be evacuated with the other children, but sent us to friends of my father's sister who lived and worked in Wales.
We were put on a train from Liverpool; it was the first time we had travelled alone.

We stayed with a Mr and Mrs Jones.
Mr Jones was a postman so went out extremely early in the morning; Mrs Jones was a cook at the hotel where my aunt worked so she also went out early and we were left to our own devices in a strange house for most of the time.

Before we left home my sister who was 2 years younger than me, was in floods of tears, as was my mother. As the eldest sister, I felt I had to keep going, but I wasn't really too upset.
Kathleen continued to cry all the time we were away, night and day, very loudly.
She was good at this as it was her usual way of getting her own way, but not this time.
She wrote pathetic letters home; one which my father kept for years, asking that if she walked along the railway lines would it bring her home?
My other sister, 4, was very good and never complained.
We stayed in Wales until the following Friday when my father came and took us home.
The crying stopped.
So ended our first evacuation.

I should explain that we lived very close to the River Mersey, about 10 minutes' walk away and almost as close to the docks where the Atlantic convoys were based. We could trace their movements as there was nothing between the river and main road that ran alongside it apart from a field with AA guns and barrage balloons, so everyone knew exactly when the ships came in.

Life continued pretty much as normal until December 1940, when the Germans began a series of bombings, lasting for about 10 nights.
My father was an air raid warden so he was out all the time there was an air raid.
My mother, sisters and I spent most of those nights in a cupboard under the stairs. We didn't have an air raid shelter and my mother wouldn't go into the one outside in the street.
As we lived so close to the docks we were very close to the action and all our windows were blown out several times. It was quite terrifying.
I particularly remember one evening when my cousin and I were sitting in the kitchen. There was an iron kettle on the range and the blast from a bomb came down the chimney and blew the kettle off the fire. The hot water splashed over our legs and we were both scalded. (I still have the scar.) There was a lot of damage done by this bombing but we were lucky that our home was not hit.
From then until the following May it was fairly quiet, with only the odd raid, but in May 1941 it really began in earnest.

Early every night the planes would come up the river. They seemed to be going directly over our house, and then it would start.
Waves of planes followed one another and it seemed never-ending. We would hear crashes and bangs and wondered when we would be hit.
My mother was particularly nervous, so once again I had to be the strong one and keep up a brave front so the little ones weren't too scared, but I think they slept through most of it, fortunately.
Every morning when the 'All Clear' went, we would emerge into the daylight to see the havoc they had wrought. There would be great lumps of brick and roof slates in the street, glass everywhere and the sky, red with the glow from the fires.
People were completely demoralised and there were rumours of terrible happenings everywhere.
In other parts of Liverpool it was even worse. An air raid shelter was demolished and everyone in it killed.
One morning just as we had gone to bed and were trying to get to sleep a terrible explosion woke us.
An ammunition ship in one of the docks had blown up and not only was the ship destroyed but the whole dock had gone. It was one of the most terrifying things of my life. I can't remember how long this lasted but it was longer than the previous December attacks.
Eventually we had had enough, my mother decided we should spend the nights with her sister and family who lived a couple of miles further out so we would trudge along the river road before it got dark, along with hundreds of other people doing the same thing.
Some desperate people who had nowhere to go just stayed in the fields where they felt safe. There were no buses so we had to walk, carrying our nightclothes and blankets.

One day another aunt, who was heavily pregnant at the time, arrived at our house from about twenty miles away, and said she had come to take us back to her home with her.
It had taken ages for her to get on public transport and must have been a nightmare journey. My father borrowed a car and took us all to her home in relays.
There was my mother, my two sisters and I, my aunt, her sister and her two children. The house was just a small cottage with two bedrooms.
My aunt and uncle slept in one bedroom with their child, my mother, her sister and all five children slept in the other on the floor.
I think I must have been traumatised as I remember quite clearly that I couldn't speak for about 3 days after we got there.
I don't know how we survived, but we managed somehow.
My father and uncle used to cycle there each weekend to visit us and slept on the sofa in the living room.
We didn't know it then, but the bombing had ended the night before we moved.
We stayed there for some weeks until we were reasonably sure it had finished, and then went home to a house with all the windows boarded up.
It took some time for the emergency services to get round to replacing them but we didn't care, we were so glad to be home, in our own beds and living in comparative safety.

There was a Bryant and May match factory quite near us.
From the top of a bus you could see great piles of wood waiting to be turned into matches, providing lots of work for the local people.
One night there was a direct hit on it and the whole thing went up in flames.
At the time, my father was in the first aid section and he came home with his overalls all torn and covered in blood. They had been driving in an ambulance near and a body was blown against the windscreen by the blast.
You can imagine the inferno.

Although our school was in what was known as a 'safe' area, we still had the occasional air raid warning and we all trooped down to the shelters, which were long and narrow with seats on either side, like old-fashioned buses.
Our form mistresses went there with their respective classes and we used to sing all the latest songs to pass the time. She was a rather nice nun who taught geography and she quickly got to know all the songs. She had her favourites and asked us to sing them for her. I can't remember if she joined in but I certainly remember her lifting her skirts and dancing to them along the aisle.

Whilst we were staying with our aunt we heard of the arrival of Rudolph Hess in Scotland.
We never really heard why he came over, some said it was to negotiate peace with Churchill, others, to get away. Then one sunny morning we also heard that the Germans had invaded Russia, which would possibly explain why we had no further air raids. Later when the V-1's and the V-2's came, they only attacked the South of England, as their range only extended that far, but no doubt if the war had gone on longer we would have been attacked.
The rest of the war was quiet and although food was severely rationed my mother managed to feed us well enough and we never went hungry. She even made the occasional cake and, of course, there were the odd black market tins of fruit or meat, which mysteriously arrived now and again, known as 'knock-off'.
The one thing my mother missed was the pre-war bread. Wartime bread was dark and she missed white bread very much.
A friend in the navy was sent to the Far East and when the ship stopped in Gibraltar he met someone coming home so he sent us a big box of fruit, something we never saw. That was a real luxury.

There was an army barracks near us, the King's Lancashire Regiment and on Sunday mornings they would march to the local church with the band playing and their regimental mascot, a goat, leading the procession.
After America came into the war, there were American soldiers stationed there. I think they landed in Liverpool and stayed until being moved around the country.
It was a great novelty to see and hear them around; we thought they were all film stars!
At Christmas my parents got in touch with the barracks and we shared our Christmas with the soldiers. They would come round at other times too, I think on Sundays.
We had very little to offer them but I think they enjoyed being in a home again. My mother or father played the piano and we all joined in and sang all the latest songs.

I left school and started work.
I have a very vivid memory of going out one sunny summer morning to buy milk for the office and the people in the dairy telling me they had just heard on the radio that British and American troops had invaded France 'D Day' a turning point, the beginning of the end.
We didn't go out much at night because of the blackout so the radio was our lifeline. We had the news and all our entertainment came from there. Our family were all avid listeners to all sorts of programmes.
We listened to the dramas such as the Saturday night play, The Man in Black (we used to sit in the dark for that and it was very scary), all the comedy shows such as ITMA, Happidrome and others. There was only the 大象传媒 in those days and I don't know what we would have done without it. We used to play lots of games with pencil and paper such as Consequences and had lots of fun.

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