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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Michael Alec Higham and is in his own words…

I was about seven years old and living in Accrington when the Manchester Blitz was taking place. I remember one night my dad who was C.O. of the local Home Guard, took me up onto the flat roof of our house to see the red glow in the sky of the fires in Manchester, some 25 miles away. It made a deep impression on my mind.

Sometime later, possibly 1943 a doodlebug flew over the house sounding like a motor bike. It exploded some two miles away. For many years I kept a piece of that bomb as a souvenir.

For the latter part of the war muy parents rented a small house in Bowness-on- Windermere. I was sent as a day boy to a school at Fallbarrow just off Bowness Bay (it is now a large caravan site).

I was thrilled at the sight of several Clevis Craft speed boats with Vickers machine guns mounted on the bows charging up and down the lake. I wondered what they were really doing! And of course the Sunderland flying boats would take off and land from their base further up the lake.

Another vivid memory in my first banana since before the war — didn’t it taste good! That was probably 1945.

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