大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War website by Liz Dooner of Wigan Over 50's Forum on behalf of Muriel Church and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Where do I begin? September 1939 when my world collapsed. At the age of 11, my childhood centred around Weaste, Salford. All my family lived close by: Aunties, Uncles, Grandparents, and children all played together. Ages ranged from 4 to 13, but we had a great time playing games such as skipping, marbles, house, shop, school, football, cricket, whip and top. Holiday time was the best, when we could spend whole days at Seedley Park with our jam butty's and bottles of water.
Then came the war. Because we lived close to Salford Docks on the Manchester Ship Canal, it was decided the children in the area had to be evacuated. I had always gone to Seedley Council School but my sister, aged 6, had started at St Lukes Infant School, so I was transferred there to be with her. We were duly sent to Lancaster. I can remember being in a school hall where people came to choose who they wanted. My sister and I went to Mr and Mrs Dodds who had no children, but a nice terraced two up two down house. They both went out to work, so lunch time we had to ourselves.
I remember writing home telling my Mum it was great we did not have to pay for the pies for lunch, you just gave the shopkeeper a book. She went mad because this meant we were getting food on tick. I had never heard of it! Friday was bath night in a tin bath in front of the fire. Our neighbour also had 2 girls, so it was decided we would all bathe together. That didn't go down well with Mum either! It was decided that we would be brought home, my sister wasn't settling and I suspect my Mum was missing us. My Dad said Weaste was not on the map so we would be free from the bombing.
When we arrived home we had no schooling for a while, as all the teachers had been evacuated with us, but slowly more children and teachers came home and school got back to normality. If you could call it that! By this time the air raids had started with a vengeance, and each evening we went to sleep at the parish hall as they had a cellar which had been converted into an air raid shelter. We had to take our own bedding and sleep on the floor. At a later date they did get bunk beds. We had tried going into an air shelter built in our neighbour's back yard, but that was not a great success. In the meantime there was a larger shelter being built in our street, which we hoped would solve our problems (little did we know!)
The Christmas Blitz, 1940. A friend asked me to go with her to visit her sister who had just had a baby. She lived in Sandy Grove which was about a mile and a half from us. We arrived at about 2 o'clock, did some jobs for her and as we prepared to leave the sirens went. We had to stay while there was a bomb dropped on the houses at the back of us, which shattered all the windows of the house we were in and brought a load of soot down the chimney. We were terrified! The next thing, ARP men were shouting to us to get out of the building because it wasn't safe. Two schoolgirls, a mother and a baby had to move very quickly and we ran to Halton Bank School for safety. We stayed in the school until the 'all clear' siren went, which was around early morning. We then had to get the midwife to come and attend to mother and baby.
When we arrived home there was a great deal of relief from our parents, but things were not great with the houses. The windows had been blown in due to the blast from the bombing. We duly tried to help with the clearing up, as this was Christmas and things had to be spick and span. Six o'clock came and the dreaded sirens once more. What did we do now? My Dad and sister wanted to stay but Mum and I wanted to try the new shelter in the street. The bombing got worse and we decided we had better move fast. With lots of our neighbours already in there, we were quite happy for an hour laughing and joking. Even Dad joined in! And then a bomb struck our house which was just at the back of the shelter, and the shelter collapsed, trapping us. We had to wait until the ARP wardens came and told us to get down and crawl through a gap about 2 feet square. We managed to do it slowly and when we emerged we saw our house as a pile of rubbish. Three of our neighbours who were elderly and infirm died in their homes and one lady did not survive the shelter. We then had to make tracks very quickly to the Parish Hall as the bombing was still going on, it was just horrendous.
Next morning, we had to go back to what was left of the house but there was nothing worth digging for. We retrieved one dining room chair, one bottle of whiskey (how this survived we did not know)and a mantle clock made in Germany (which Dad wasn't too happy about). Our next venture was to get to my Auntie's house in Stretford - aprroximatley 8 miles away, which we managed by getting lifts on lorries and walking.

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