大象传媒

I was born in 1942 so this story is mainly the story of my parents and aunt who lived through the Liverpool blitz. Because of the docks Liverpool was bombed nightly. (My husband was a child in belfast which was also badly bombed; maybe at a sub-conscious level we had a similar early childhood). My father was in the fire service. He was scared of heights (so am I). The stress of the fires and having to climb up tall ladders set off a thyroid condition, he was seriously ill soon after I was born, invalided out, my mother was given a pittance to keep us on while he was ill,(a neighbour paid the mortgage).My father never fully recovered although he did manage to hold down a job. I never asked why he went into the fire service maybe he didn't know then he was afraid of heights, maybe he didn't realise it would be so bad. He very rarely talked about it but once years later he talked about how people used to loot bombed shops. I've never seen that mentioned anywhere else,the authorities didn't want it known after the war.

My mother was a nurse and she talked of walking back home for 3 miles after being on duty with bombs falling and a policeman telling her off for being out in those conditions. When the bombs fell they hid under the stairs or went out to the air-raid shelter in the garden. If you earned less than 拢250 a year you got it for free (so ours was free), if you earned more you had to pay for it. So people could work out which of their neighbours were well-off! Once, when they had had nights of continuous bombing and couldn't stand it any longer they went to my mother's parents home in North Wales for a few nights but my grandparents had a very large family and didn't encourage them to stay.

My only recollection of the war is planes driving along the road. I was never clear if this was a dream or real. My mother said it did actually happen but not on the road I remember. The planes had arrived by sea at the docks and were driven very slowly along Brodie Avenue to Liverpool airport.

My aunt was in the armed forces, I think the army. She was stationed down on the south coast in the run-up to D-Day and her American fiancee was killed in the Normandy landings.

My parents and aunt are now dead, its a shame there wasn't a scheme like this a few years ago while they were still around to tell their own stories.

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