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This story has been submitted to the People’s War Website by Anne Waring of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Thelma Westell and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was eleven when war broke out and living with my mum, dad and brother who was six year younger than me. We lived not far from a railway line near to Hartley’s Village, Aintree. Not being far from Liverpool we were constantly being bombed and spent most nights in the Anderson shelter in the garden and I still I remember how cold, damp and claustrophobic it was down there. The following day my little brother would go around collecting pieces of shrapnel, which they did a fair trade in at school, swopping, two or three smaller pieces for a larger one.

My father was a policeman and he worked on the gates at Liverpool docks, often he would be out all day then all night as well. Although the docks were heavily bombed, he did come through the war relatively unscathed, although he ended up with emphysema, due most likely to all the dreadful working conditions he’d had to endure.

Mum was a housewife, but was always busy as our house was always full of people staying, mostly relatives whose homes had been bombed out.

We were evacuated in 1942 to Stormy Corner in Skelmersdale where we stayed with an Aunt. Landmines dropped quite close by and once Aunt’s house was bombed and the blast blew the hall hat stand up the stairs and a bowler hat was still on it, when it came to rest at the top of the stairs.

Of course with the food rationing we always seemed to be hungry and we were growing children, I can remember there being two plates of bread on the table, one buttered and the other plain, we could choose which we wanted, if we chose the plain slice we could have a smear of jam on it, but if we chose the buttered one, we couldn’t have jam on that piece. We used to go into the farmer’s fields nearby and eat his peas and ground nuts. I always seemed to go to bed with an empty tummy, no milk and biscuits before bed for us.

At 14 I went to work in a haberdashery shop in Waterloo and I can still picture the barrage balloons and remember how I could tell by the different sound of the aeroplane engines whether they were ours or Germans.

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