´óÏó´«Ã½

Johns story.
We were all poverty stricken but we did feel like we were because everyone was the same.
I was born in 1938 sweet were on ration until 1953 when I was 15years.
My dad died when I was 2years with heart problems. My mother had to go out to work, cleaning at first and then the cotton mill.
I was looked after by neighbours during the war we had a brick and concrete shelter in the back yard. I used to sleep on a wire fire guard in there. I can remember the black out we used to go to my aunties every Sunday night or they would come to our house. We would walk back through the back out it was pitch black. There was a pub we called ‘the leaches’ and if the door opened the light would stream out onto the pavement.
The best story my uncle told me was about the First World War, he was an air raid warden in both wars.
He went down one street and saw a large gap under the door with light spilling out into the pavement. He knocked at the door and told the fella who lived there about the light and the man looked at the door and said to my uncle wilf ‘nay, they’re not flying under bloody doors now are they’.

My sister Winifred was called up and worked on a lathe in munitions in engineering.
There was a ‘mass observation’ done by Cambridge university in 1935 and a man called Humphrey Spender came to Bolton and took photographs of every day life in Bolton, Political meeting, pubs, Burnden Park. The photographs were published in a book and the styles (fashions) etc of the street scenes were just as I remembered them in the 1940 because nothing had changed in all that time.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.