大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Pam Riding of Kirklees Libraries on behalf of Mrs Bradley and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
The first thing we children knew about the war was when we sat round the radio-well it was wireless in those days, and listened on the morning when Mr Chamberlain said unfortunately that if he didn't get an answer by eleven o'clock war was declared. We were in the country at Washburndale where my father had a cottage-we had been there for all the holiday, so we never went back home again. The school we went to was evacuated to Lincoln and my mother said, "My family are not going to Lincoln there are too many airfields around it", but six months later the school went to Bolton Abbey and we lived in the Hall there and had great fun and forty years later we had a visit back again to see where we had been. So in one way we missed all the bombing-Leeds didn't have a lot of that. What we did have was the guns firing over the cottage from one valley to the other. Up the road from Bolton Abbey was a search light battery and the soldiers used to walk past and whistle going down to the village pub. We did have two bombs quite near the school because the big bend in the river; - the aeroplanes used it as a reference point. That was from age 13 to 16, and then we had to go back to Leeds. My father had supported the cellar with big timbers across it, with bunk beds in it. The family had to go downstairs into the cellar. We didn't have many actual bombings, but we had quite a lot of red alerts,(or air raid warnings). At Bolton Abbey Hall we had to sit under the marble table and we had siren suits to put on at night, like Winston Churchill wore with zips up the front. We had no electricity then, so it was all torches, candles, Aladdin lamps and then I came back to Leeds- it would have been '43 and they weren't doing much bombing it was more London getting it with the V1's.You still got an occasional alarm but nothing happened.I finished schooling, went to university to do pharmacy. I failed the first year because I had gone in on an Arts School certificate not on a Higher which was ridiculous. I served a two year apprenticeship. At the end of the war I went to night school, but I must say that the second year at university was much nicer because the forces were coming back. Whereas the others had all been teenage boys wanting to mess around, the men wanted to get on and we really learnt and I think that takes us to the end of the war. Oh, one happy thing the Adel Church Leeds Youth Fellowship had arranged a dance at Adel Memorial Hall, for charity, for the war and it happened to be VE day. The place was heaving and it was the most successful dance we had. We used to have the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders band come down from the Otley holding camp. They would drop them off and pick them up on the way back so it was good music.

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