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My name is, well was Marjorie Morris, it’s now McMahon.

I was in the March blitz in Wallasey near Liverpool.

One night we were running to the air raid shelter when my Dad heard this whistling noise and grabbed me back and I had the baby in my arms (one of my Mum’s babies) and then just as he pulled me away a big piece of shrapnel buried itself in the pipe by the grid. He dug it out the next morning — and kept it for years, but he said if that had gone through you it would have killed you! No doubt about it.

I’ve got some other scary recollections of when they were bombing in Wallasey before we were evacuated— it was really hair-raising! I remember getting up one morning and there’d been landmines and things and our walls had moved — there were big holes in the corners! There were cockroaches coming from all over! When we looked through the back there was a huge landmine in the road down the back of us — unexploded! (Funnily enough when they rebuilt it all, that’s where my Mum went to live at the end of the war— just where the landmine had been.)

Anyway, we were going to school that morning and the road at the top hadn’t been cleared and there were arms and legs everywhere! The police were trying to shift the children so we couldn’t see, but we still could. It was horrific, and it all stuck in my mind! I suppose it got so many people because it was night-time and they would have all been in bed. Perhaps the siren hadn’t gone off as sometimes they were there before the sirens went off. It was awful living through that.

During this time my brother had gone to Oswestry (Pant Glas) — he’d been evacuated and the March blitz was the final thing that made my Mum decide that I should go too. My brother was fretting as he was on his own and he wanted to me to come and be with him, so that’s how I came to be in Oswestry. I met Muriel then and we’ve been friends over 60 years now.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Mrs Marjorie McMahon and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Marjorie's stories:

• Frank thoroughly enjoyed it here
• I jumped a five-barred gate without touching it
• It’s alright, it’s only their nerves

See also Muriel Edwards’s stories:

• ‘Evacuees’ What are they?
• General De Gaulle was down the road
• They taught us and we taught them

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