大象传媒

I was eight when the Second World War broke out. I remember listening to my parent's radio while Chamberlain was declaring that we were at war with Germany. One of my brothers was called up and went into the army; he went to France and came back via the Dunkirk evacuation. He was involved in the huge build-up to D-Day, and learned how to repair tanks. After the landing in France, he went on to fight in Holland and Germany. He got married when stationed back in England. Another brother got wounded, with four bullets in one shoulder.
I was young, and the war didn't really mean an awful lot to me until my brothers went away. I remember coming home from school and having to go in the Anderson shelter. Most of my friends had fathers away, and some days people didn't turn up for school; we knew that it was bad news.
There was a PoW camp a couple of hundred yeards away. English soldiers came to stay with us but we weren't responsible for feeding them. There were between 1500 and 2000 Germans interned in the PoW camp which was located in an old mill. Six or seven months before the war ended, British soldiers left, and Americans took over the guarding of the camp.
We could see Manchester on fire, and it was pretty frightening as there was no way of knowing where the bombs would land; the Germans weren't supposed to bomb near PoW camps, so that made it feel a little more secure. Mum was worried as she had her older sons away, but we were lucky as they came home okay. Before school, we used to go and collect shrapnel from the bombs that had fallen and exploded.
An older brother was in the RAF working with radar, tracking doodlebugs, V1 rockets; there was no way of tracking the V2s as they were too fast, which is why Monty wanted the Allies to capture V2 sites so that the Germans couldn't launch any more V2s at us. I remember doodlebugs falling in Bury, wrecking a row of houses and killing seven people; the site is now a memorial garden.
After a raid, the army would bring any planes that had come down along the road; we used to watch them as we went to school, and we would say "boo" to the planes.

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