大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website personally by Susie Evans nee Howe and added to the site with her permission.

My first memory of the war is of my neighbours, Mr and Mrs Hough, inviting us into their house to listen to the radio to hear that war had been declared. Being only eight years of age, I was not aware of the seriousness of this but, somehow knew that this was a very important occasion.
I remember early in 1940, being evacuated to Marple in Cheshire. All the children were lined up on the platform at the railway station clutching cardboard suitcases, with gas masks in boxes over our shoulders and big labels on our coats to say who we were and our destination. When we arrived in Marple, we went into a large hall where we were given brown paper carrier bags. The only thing I can remember being in the bag was a bar of chocolate. Other things must not have been important to me. We were then taken in cars to different houses to see who were willing to take us in. I ended up in a bungalow along with a boy from my class at school. The thing I didn鈥檛 like was having to share a bed with him (this wouldn鈥檛 be allowed today). I had a two year old sister called Mavis. Mothers with babies and toddlers could also be evacuated, so my mother decided to come to Marple as well. They came a couple of days after the older children and when she arrived no one could tell her where I was, so she set off with Mavis in her pram to look for me. As it happened that day, I had seated myself on the kerb at the end of the street I was staying, which was off the main road near Rose Hill station, and it was on the junction of the road that I was seated. Of course I was delighted to see her, I jumped up and ran to her. We were both crying and hugging each other and it turned out she was only a short distance away, so we saw a lot of each other for the short time she stayed. (all of a fortnight). The Sunday after she went home, my Dad came to see me and immediately I saw him, I wanted to go home and, as they could not persuade me otherwise, the lady of the house packed my case and my Dad took me home. I don鈥檛 know if that was the shortest stay of an evacuee. I forgot to add whilst I was there, the evacuees went to school in the mornings and the local children in the afternoons. I don鈥檛 know if this continued throughout the war.
When the war first started we lived in West Gorton, Manchester and, when the sirens went we would go into brick built shelters where most people congregated and we used to have a good old sing song and many a laugh.
A couple of years after the start of the war we moved to Beswick, another district of Manchester, and there, a shelter was built in the roadway of the street, as it was a play street and the only traffic that was allowed was doctors鈥� cars, ambulances, coal lorries, milk wagons and dustbin collectors. My mother would not allow us to use this shelter as all the local cats and dogs used it and the smell was dreadful. We had a cellar which we went down when the sirens went and we played board games. One morning, it must have been either a weekend or school holidays as I was allowed to stay in bed longer, the sirens went and my mother shouted up the stairs to say we had to get up and go down the cellar right away. I remember coming down the stairs, grunting about the 鈥渂linking Germans getting me up鈥�, we had to go through the kitchen to get to the cellar and as I got in the kitchen I was thrown across the room to the sound of a massive explosion. As I looked out of the window I could see that the row of houses across the market place had been bombed. One lady was killed and people were saying afterwards that she had been deaf and hadn鈥檛 heard the sirens, therefore, she hadn鈥檛 gone to a place of safety.
The Christmas Eve blitz on Manchester was a very noisy and frightening night as you can imagine, and on Christmas Day, someone came to my house to tell my mother that the street her brother lived in had been bombed. So she went next door where her sister lived and across the road to my Grandma and Grandads house and we all went to see if my uncle and his family were alright, but the row of houses next to theirs had been flattened. There was amongst all the rubble a lot of broken toys which must have been the children鈥檚 Christmas presents. I don鈥檛 know if anyone was killed or injured as the children were never told of this. I suppose the adults were protecting us from as many sad details as they could.

I remember going to the butchers for the meat rations for our family of four and each person was allowed one shilling and two penny worth of meat a week. So ours came to four shillings and eight pence. For this you could either have dearer meat and less of it, or cheaper meat and more of it. My mother used to have a small joint for Sunday and shin beef for Monday, with which she used to make what we called tater ash (potato hash). Everything was put into a big pan, brought to the boil and left to cook itself while she did the washing. (a full day鈥檚 job in those days).
We was allowed a quarter pound of sweets a week on ration but, one of my many cousins called John Ambery, always gave his to me. He didn鈥檛 like sweets and as we were very close friends, I was the cousin he gave them to. When he started work, he always paid for them as well but I had to share them with my sister. Sadly, he died at the age of 21 years, after only nine months of marriage.

The day the war ended, the parents in our street lit a big bonfire at the top end of the street, where they got the wood from I have no idea but, there was singing and dancing in the street. What a night!

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