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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of John Whittaker, the story is in his own words…

When war was declared in 1939 I was 4 years old. My dad Thomas Whittaker worked for Joseph Lucas in Burnley. During his time at Lucas he designed something, which was really secret and he was asked to go to Lucas at Birmingham to the Kings Norton factory.

On the day we all had to go my brother Bernard and my mother Ellen (my dad had all ready gone, because of the project) were taken by cart to Bank Top Station to catch the train to Birmingham Station, which is now known as New Street. We stopped twice because I can remember asking my mum. ‘Why has it gone dark?’ we were in the first of two tunnels, hiding from German planes and we were there for about half an hour, as a child it seemed forever.

When we got to the station in Birmingham we somehow finished up in the Bull Ring and I can remember seeing and hearing a clock striking and at the last chime the statue cut someone’s head off.

We went to stay with my Aunt’s mother in law in Resovor Road, Selly Oak and when Cadbury’s were making the chocolate the smell used to blow across where we lived and it was awful. It was a sign it was going to rain and it always did.

We only spent a few months in Selly Oak before moving to Kings Norton on Persia Road. One day when my brother and I were walking to school down Persia Road, we heard a rat-tat t-at behind us. The next thing we were pushed into a garden by a man behind us, he knew that it was a German fighter plane shooting at the road.
So we could have been killed if the man had not pushed us into that garden.

We had to go into the air raid shelter night after night and sometimes we would be there all night, so we would have to miss school the next day.

During the time we were in Birmingham we couldn’t find a house, so mum and dad had to rent one. One night early on, it was still light, because at the time we were on double British summertime, we went into the shelter and stayed day and night for five days. We would go to the door of the shelter, we could see the German bombers, you could see the pilot and when they dropped the bombs the light in the cockpit would go out and the engines would stop. Shortly after that when the V1 and V2’s were coming over you could go to the door of the shelter and see the flames coming out of the back of them, when the droning sound stopped the flames went out, then they would drop and then the Bang!

We were in the shelter again for four nights, watching the V2’s come over and seeing the city glowing in the night sky. When we got the all clear we walked to our house and it had been hit by a V2.. My mother said. ‘This is it, we are going back to Burnley.’ So we came back in February in the snow on the back of a horse and cart, with a sideboard and a bedding box. We had to rent a house for five shillings and sixpence a week, but we had to clean it first.

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