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I was a little girl when the war started; I was just going on for ten years of age. We were bombed and lost two houses, the first house we lost was during the December Blitz in Akenside Street in Bootle. That wasn’t far from the docks, and of course Gerry made that one of his main targets. When it happened there were an awful lot of people killed in the street. When I went out in the morning there was big heaps of rubble and houses missing, which we weren’t aware of because we were safe in our little back yard shelter, which was made of bricks with a concrete top. My mum and I were together, I was lying on a little bed and mother went into the entrance of the shelter, stood there, looked up and all the bombs were dropping and the guns were going, ships guns and various guns, it was very noisy. I was half awake and half asleep, lying on this bed, then my mother looked out and saw this plane coming over and they were lowering a green parachute which a land mine was attached to. My mother saw it coming down and she flung herself on top of me, mother was quite a weight, I nearly died of suffocation.
The second house we lost, mother had taken a mad fit, we always stayed in the house and slept under the stairs. We were an end house, and Mother decided one night that we would go to one of the public shelters in the nearby park. Well, we were running up the main road, the raid had already begun, and Mother was all excited. My Father thought everything was a big joke, and we were two terrified little girls running along, and Mother was saying ‘Oh Charlie, Charlie’ The next morning we went to our house and the end wall was blown away, and the stairs were still hanging on, and had we been there we would have been blown away with the wall, and killed. So that was the second house we lost. I would like to say that my education was disrupted a lot, because I attended 7 different schools. What happened was, because one school would get damaged, maybe the roof with incendiaries, maybe the windows would be blown out and we would find that when we got to school we would be directed to another school. This went on till the end of the war.
I was evacuated to Southport, which isn’t far away, but was judged to be much safer than where we lived. We weren’t very comfortable, there were four of us in this house, and we slept on a mattress on the floor. We were not happy at all. I was a little street Arab used to playing out in the street, under the light of the lamps, skipping and having a great time. All of a sudden we were in bed every night at 6 o’clock. We were not allowed out, we weren’t taken out. I was so unhappy I wrote my mum a letter, and I put loads of kisses on this letter, and I said ‘Mum, these kisses are all for you if you will only bring me home’. Auntie Nellie said ‘Go and get her right away Harriet’, so Harriet did.

‘This story was submitted to the People’s War site by ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Merseyside’s People’s War team on behalf of the author and has been added to the site with his/ her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.’

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