大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website site by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard, on behalf of Ena Barker and has been added to the site with her permission..

When I was six in 1938 I moved with my mother from Nelson to Liverpool. The war had not yet started, but it wasn鈥檛 long before the bombs were falling fast and thick on Liverpool. The Germans were after the docks, where the merchant ships came in bringing food and goods.

I remember going to school each morning carrying my gas mask on my back at all times, in case the Germans dropped gas onto us. We had to get home early and have our tea, as the sirens would sound most nights around 6 o鈥檆lock, then planes would come. We would go down into the cellar or under the stairs; we even went under the table sometimes. Mother didn鈥檛 like going into the air raid shelter as she always said she had a bad feeling about them.

One morning I went to school and when I got there it was just a pile of rubble. You never knew just what you would find after a raid, sometimes there were no houses left, just piles of stones and rubbish.

Our school was bombed and I remember we were not allowed to go home; we had to sit in what had been the school yard with our pencils and paper, until we were found another school to go to.

We had to keep moving houses as we kept getting bombed. I remember one night Lewis鈥檚 store being hit and watching from the door of our house as firemen climbed up long ladders trying to put out the enormous flames. One night we had a lucky escape when a shelter near us was bombed and everyone inside it was killed.
Each night in Liverpool the searchlights would light up the sky searching for the German bombers. There were silver coloured barrage balloons in front of King George鈥檚 Hall, huge on the ground, but when they let the ropes go and they went up into the sky they looked very small.

A lot of children were evacuated to the countryside, but my mother would not let me go and decided to move back to Nelson. She went working in the mill weaving. She would work there from early morning until teatime, then rush home and after tea go back to work on munitions until 10 pm.

I was in Victoria Park one day when the Army came and this sergeant said we could have a sail in a rubber dingy on the pond, but we had to have this book of saving stamps to do so. I had kept mine in my sock, but when I looked for it, it had gone, so I didn鈥檛 get my sail, I remember being very unhappy about this and my mother wasn鈥檛 very pleased either.

A funny thing happened years later though, I was talking to my father in law and he told me he had been one of the firemen who had been putting the fire out at Lewis鈥檚 the night I had been watching, of course he hadn鈥檛 known me then as I was only a little girl, but you can imagine my surprise, what a coincidence!

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