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When the war started my grandmother, mother, uncle and I were living in Rochdale, in south-east Lancashire, on the northern outskirts of the Manchester conurbation. I went to Brimrod school, a junior mixed school in which the playground was divided into two by tall railings — boys in one half, girls in the other, although the classes were mixed.
At the height of the air-raids on Manchester, two bombs fell near our house, just far enough away to leave us the last house not to have a broken window. One bomb fell across the road from the girls' playground at Brimrod, landing on to the next-to-end house in a row of houses. My uncle Brian, then in the Home Guard, was called to the scene. By all accounts a young woman in the end house had gone upstairs to collect her baby from its cot and had it in her arms at the top of the stairs when the bomb fell next door, killing the elderly lady who lived there. The young woman's whole house disintegrated and collapsed sideways. As she fell through the air, clutching her child, an armchair was simultaneously blown sideways out of the downstairs front room, and she and the baby had a soft landing and emerged unscathed.
The other bomb dropped on the front doorstep of a nearby house on Manchester Road. In an upstairs room there were three sisters, children of the family, asleep in one big iron-framed bedstead adorned with brass knobs. One of the girls, Bernice Whitelegg, was in my class, and later she told us what happened. As the bomb went off, the whole house went up before it began to fall in a heap of rubble. As the bed, with all three girls in it, fell amongst the tumbling rubble, one of the roof joists fell onto it. The joist bridged across from the head to the foot of the bedstead, and held up all the slates of the roof and the bricks of the chimney stack which fell on top of them. The girls took some digging out, but all three were unscathed. Bernice had a couple of days off while the family sorted out which relatives they would go to live with, then returned to school a little white-faced, but otherwise back on form. She was always top of the class.

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