大象传媒

On Sunday 3rd September 1939 I was living at 7 Kingsley Avenue, Moston, Manchester. I was visiting my friend Florence's home, and with her family we listened to the speech by Mr Chamberlain to say we were at war with Germany. At that time I attended Lily Lane Infants School, I was 10 Years old and had just learned that I had passed my 11+ to go to Harpurhey High School on Church Lane.

The Infants School was preparing to evacuate us, although we didn鈥檛 know where we were being sent. We were supplied with gas masks in cardboard boxes and our mother's were told to bring us to school at the usual time. When we arrived at school we saw lots of double-decker buses waiting to take us to the railway station. We had labels attached to our coats and were given a paper bag containing fruit and biscuits.

There was lots of excitement among the children but all the mothers were crying as their children were being taken away from them and they didn鈥檛 know where and when they would see them again. At the last moment my mother decided she wasn't letting me go and took me home. The next day she took me to Blackpool to stay with relatives, where I enrolled at Waterloo Road Primary, the local school. When I attended school the next day all my friends from Lily Lane School were there! It was nice being reunited with my friends. I stayed in Blackpool with my mother; my father was still in Manchester working in a munitions factory. We returned home in the early summer of that year. I then started at the high school at Harpurhey in Manchester; I loved being at that school.

On the night of October 9th 1940 my parents and I were in the Air Raid shelter as usual, the shelter was in our next door neighbours backyard and some of the neighbours shared it, so it was like a little club, quite cosy with bunks in it with a couple of easy chairs and a 'Valor' paraffin stove for heat. We heard the planes going overhead and we were playing the usual guessing game of 'are they ours or theirs'? We soon found out ........

At exactly 9pm a bomb hit the last five houses in the row and they collapsed onto our Air Raid shelter. I still remember that moment 64 years later, it seemed as though the paraffin lamp went out, although when we regained our equilibrium the lamp was still burning. We all said later that we felt that the Air Raid shelter had done a 360-degree circle in slow motion. We were buried under the rubble for a few hours, there were 8 of us, and I remember feeling that I was suffocating and I felt faint. Much later we heard people shouting faintly and the sound of bricks being moved. The A.R.P. were trying to find us. Eventually they dug us out and where the houses had been, was just a skeleton of 5 houses. We lost everything, furniture, clothes, food, in fact everything we possessed apart from what we were wearing at the time. A few weeks later my parents were given 拢15 in compensation for everything they'd lost.

The Chief A.R.P. Warden, Mr Bailey, sent us to his house, and he and his wife took care of us for a few weeks until we were given another house nearby in Oakdene Street, we were eternally grateful to them.

We moved into the house in November and we had to spend every night in our shelter. Then came the Christmas Blitz! I remember standing at the door of the shelter and seeing the whole of Manchester on fire. There were searchlights criss-crossing and anti aircraft guns firing up in to the sky, occasionally you could glimpse a German aircraft in the cross beams of the searchlights. The bombings went on all night, as soon as the all-clear went next day, my parents packed a few things and we caught a bus to go to Victoria Station, by this time my mother was having a breakdown and she needed to get away.

The bus could only get as far as Collyhurst on Rochdale Road and we had to get off as buildings had collapsed into the road, some were still smouldering. It was a scene of total devastation as far as the eye could see, we started to climb over the collapsed buildings and the firemen were there trying to put out fires that were still burning. Eventually we reached Victoria Station where we were told by a policeman that there was a train just leaving and it was the last one. He told us to run and we just managed to board it as it left. No one knew where this train was going and didn't care. I remember looking out of the window as we pulled out of the platform and saw the station roof burning and falling down. We found out the train was going to Blackpool!

We got off at South Shore Station, we walked up the steps and when we got to the top we saw that snow was falling in big white flakes and a Salvation Army Band was playing 'Silent Night'. We all sat down on the steps and broke down in tears, we had just left behind Hell and had arrived to peace, it is something I will always remember.

We stayed in Blackpool with relatives for a while and I attended the Collegiate Grammar School on Whitegate Drive. The rest of the war for me, on a personal basis, was fairly uneventful. Whenever the air raids decreased my mother would take me back to Manchester, but when they became frequent we again returned to Blackpool.
.............And the rest is history!

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