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I was fourteen at the start of the war and lived with my parents, my brother and my step brothers and sisters in Norris Green. The two youngest children were aged nine and ten years old and the five older ones were all in their teens. To ease the sleeping arrangements at home, I often used to go by bus to my Grandmother’s home after school to stay with her. This turned out to be an ideal situation when the war started, as my Uncle Ted (Gran’s son) was an auxiliary during the war. This meant that he did fire watch duties most nights once the air raids had started. Gran’s eyesight was getting very poor, so I was good company for her during the air raids.

When the raids got heavy, Gran and I used to sleep in the cellar in the Windsor Castle Pub, just across the road. Mr and Mrs Clarke, the licensee’s, were friends of the family and Uncle Ted often helped out on the bar. During the raids the men often used to go up into the turret on the roof, to look at the fires raging at the docks, and other surrounding areas which were only a few miles away. There was a young naval officer billeted with the Clarke family. His wife and son lived in Somerset, and he worried about them constantly.

During the May blitz, a land mine dropped on the corner of Chapel Avenue and the Walton Vale, destroying the Windsor Castle pub, my Grandmother’s house and other houses and shops, a bank and the undertakers. It had missed its target, the railway at Orrel Lane, by just a few yards. Some people were killed, but the Clarke family were rescued from the cellar. They were only bruised but shaken. The body of a young officer was never found, probably blown to bits. He had been up in the turret watching the city burn as usual.

We would have been in the cellar with them but for the fact that our house had been badly damaged in the previous night’s raid. I had gone home to my Mother’s, and Gran didn’t want to leave her house so went with her son to the shelter. It was at Jones’ cooked meat factory at the bottom of Chapel Avenue, where Uncle Ted worked and did his fire watch duties. Had she stayed in the Pub cellar that night, I don’t think she would have survived the ordeal of being buried under the debris for hours. She was a tiny, frail little woman but managed to survive the years of war.

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