大象传媒

My first memories of the fear and upset of war came in Sept. 1939 when I was five years old. I was at the top of a flight of outside steps leading into the local clinic with a friend named Georgie when I heard it. That dreadful noise, the wailing of an air raid siren. My dad had told me exactly what to do. Run home, get under the bed and stay there. So that鈥檚 what I did! Unfortunately I locked the doors as well, shutting out not only the enemy but also my family. Years later my mum laughed at the memory of my grandma running down the street looking for me with her gas mask in her basket.

We lived in Seacombe, Wallasey, Cheshire, which was across the Mersey, by ferryboat, from Liverpool. We had the first radar in the country on the top of the Seacombe ferry building and it had picked up a group of unidentified aircraft, hence the air raid warning. The planes turned out to be French and the alarm on that occasion was false. At the onset of war we were all issued with gas masks, as the fear of gas attacks from Germany was very real. My greatest disappointment at that time was that I was too old for a Mickey Mouse mask. I really fancied looking like Mickey rather than a creature from outer space. My father must have had a premonition of danger because he sent my mother and I to the country. We were evacuated to a place called Ravonstonedale in Westmoreland (now Cumbria.) He stayed in Seacombe living at home and eating at my gran鈥檚 house round the corner. He worked on the ferryboats, a reserved occupation, taking workers across to Liverpool. His own family for sending us to safety branded him a coward.

Meanwhile we had arrived at the manor house at Coldbeck, where my mother was expected to be an unpaid skivvy to the ladies of the manor. The nearest railway station was at Newbiggin, two miles away and there were no buses. We did not stay at the manor for long needless to say. Within weeks my mother had rented a small cottage in Mill Lane and life settled down to some semblance of normality. My first school was St. Oswald鈥檚 C.E. and my memories of that were of outside steps leading up to the infant鈥檚 class, Beacon Readers and chalk! Chalk all over the back of my new gymslip. Someone had used me as a blackboard. The local children called us refugees, which I suppose we were, but it wasn鈥檛 all bad because I made friends with the village children. Leonard was my first boyfriend. I was six at the time and we played round the village green, which had a beck running through it next to the King鈥檚 Head Temperance pub! I remember one hot summer鈥檚 day, complete with swimming costume, teaching myself to swim in the water! An inch of water alive with worms and other river creatures. I arrived home in a sorry state. My mum took one look at me and dumped me in the long tin bath that was kept on the wall in the yard and poured water over me until all the offending creatures had gone.

Another time we had two glass bottles of pop in the churchyard and no means of opening them. I suggested that we bang the heads of the bottles together. Result- one badly cut wrist. I never did drink the pop! My mother had to drag and carry me five miles to Kirby Stephen to have a butterfly stitch put in at the doctors. On the way back we met an airman who, in exchange for a night鈥檚 lodging, carried me back home. My mother was the talk of the village because she often put up stranded servicemen for the night. She made friends with the Methodist minister and I went to the Methodist Sunday School. I remembered a great to-do because I went to the Methodist Christmas party and also to the C. of E. Christmas party. What a fuss! The season of goodwill was suspended for a time.

The war was a long way away and the only reminders we had were of lorry loads of soldiers coming over the bridge, waving to us and making the V for victory sign. We had a big map of Europe on the wall and a pile of red flags on pins, which we stuck in. It didn鈥檛 mean much to me but my mother was obviously following the progress of the war. She must have been very lonely. When we used to sit and listen to a record of Vera Lynn singing 鈥淲hen They Sound The Last All Clear鈥� on the old wind up gramophone she cried and when she cried -I cried! I remember happy times. Seeing my dad鈥檚 trilby on the old wind up gramophone and my having to search the house to find out where he was hiding. There were village socials where my dad I did 鈥淗ands knees and bumps a daisy鈥� and Halloween was always exciting with 鈥淒uck Apple鈥� and apples hanging on strings near the black leaded fireplace.

We had quite a lot of visitors, family mainly, who came from Blitz torn Liverpool and uncles on leave from their units. My gran used to visit with my auntie. They all used to catch a train to Newbiggin after changing at Tebay. My auntie used to invent silly dances to get me along the country lanes. I fancied myself as a ballerina in those days. I think my mum got a bit sick of the visitors. They ate our rations and left her to empty the primitive tippler toilet on her own. Ah! the toilet, I remember it well. Through the yard, up hundreds of steps, well so it seemed when you were in a hurry, and across a steep garden. My mum was frightened to death once when a big rat ran over her feet as she sat enthroned.

My mother had a re-occurrence of T.B. whilst we were there and I have memories of the district nurse and brown smelly stuff, which was used to pack her neck where abscesses had been lanced. Visitors kept coming and the final straw was when her mother-in-law was left to stay with us for three months and the family conveniently forgot about her. After six months I remember taking fat grandmamma who couldn鈥檛 or wouldn鈥檛 walk by train and taxi through the Mersey tunnel to her daughter鈥檚 house and making a rapid retreat after virtually dumping her on the doorstep. I think family relationships were strained after that!

My father鈥檚 fears were realised in the blitz on Liverpool when the house next door to ours received a direct hit and our house was blasted. My dad was at my Gran鈥檚 at the time. We had some of our furniture in Ravonstonedale so all was not lost. He used to tell us tales of the docks being on fire from end to end, of enemy planes being shot down and of fishing bodies out of the Mersey. The ferryboat, the Royal Daffodil was sunk and my father was in the team that raised her from the depths. He was always proud of that. My greatest disappointment was not being able to be a bridesmaid to my Auntie Eva in December 1940. She was marrying an airman called George Woolhouse in Wallasey and I was looking forward to being there, but because of night after night of continuous bombing, I was left in the countryside with friends, whilst my mother made the journey back home. When she returned she made a great joke of the fact that on the wedding night during heavy bombing they hadn鈥檛 had time to get to the air raid shelters so they had all dived under the table heads first. The vision of four bottoms sticking out was too much and we had a good laugh. My Auntie and Uncle now in their eighties recently gave me the facts about their marriage. On the night before the wedding my uncle on leave from the R.A.F. had arrived in Birkenhead in the middle of a heavy air raid. The Germans were dropping incendiary bombs and mines and the docks were ablaze. He and another man decided to risk walking the few miles to Wallasey, along the dock road after all the taxi drivers refused to leave the air raid shelters. By all accounts it was a horrendous journey with mines dropping in front of Uncle and singeing his eyebrows. In his own words 鈥淚 ran like hell鈥�

The wedding morning dawned. Thirty-two ships had been sunk in the Mersey and my granddad who worked on the tugboats was stranded on the river until 10.15 a.m. However at 10.30 the bridal party arrived at the church. One shell-shocked bridegroom with a stag night to remember. One tired bride who鈥檇 spent the night worrying in an air raid shelter. One maid of honour, my mum, in a dress borrowed from her mother and one best man, my dad, plus the bride鈥檚 parents. After the wedding the couple set off by train for Surrey where they were to live in lodgings. However Hitler hadn鈥檛 finished with them yet. The train travelled through an air raid at Chester and at Reading more bombs were falling so the engine was unhooked, their carriage door locked and there they stayed all night with no heating in the middle of a snowstorm. What a start to a marriage!

I have some very happy memories of haymaking on lovely summer days and riding my first horse, a great gentle shire that lumbered along at a sedate pace, which was just right for a six year old. My mother used to help the farmer and I went along literally for the ride. At the top end of the village before you came to Ravenstonedale Moor, where I first heard the pewit call, there were lots of gardens. They were full of redcurrant bushes and in one of them worked a man with a twisted nose. I can still remember mimicking his disability and my mother saying, 鈥淵our face will stick like that one of these days鈥�.

In 1942 my life changed drastically when my mother decided that it was time that she helped the war effort. Women were desperately needed in the munitions factories and she joined the A.I.D. (Aeronautical Inspection Department), which was responsible for inspecting engines before they were put into planes. My mother learnt trigonometry for the first time and competed with men on an equal footing. The war helped her and many other women to realise their potential which peacetime never had. She was in Coventry, Bristol and Preston working during the day and fire watching at night and surviving some horrendous bombing attacks.

What to do with a seven-year-old child must have been a problem. I remember my gran coming to look after me and friends Tommy and his wife taking over occasionally. In the long summer holiday I was sent care of the guard by train to Euston where Gt. Aunt Harriet met me and took me back to her bungalow in Hampshire for a lovely sun-filled holiday for seven weeks. I only heard the dreaded siren once and my auntie did her best to protect me. I awoke suddenly one morning to find myself under the bed and spent the rest of the day with a nasty headache. Well, you don鈥檛 expect to wake up under the bed do you?

In September I started at Hare Hills boarding school in Arnside. I still remember the excitement of being with all the other girls and left my mother quite happily to embark on this new adventure. A year later my mother was transferred to the Bristol Aircraft factory in Clayton-Le-Moors. My dad left the ferries and found a job at the Bristol and in 1943 I left boarding school and we made our home together in a flat roofed Bristol house in Warwick Avenue Accrington and resumed our life as a family.

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