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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 Margaret Elliott and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was 16 when the war started and living in Liverpool. I was working in an office as cashier and book- keeper in a factory that made overalls for the workers. My mother was a tailoress by trade and father was a male nurse, he was also an ARP warden and had the responsibility of checking that no lights were shining through black out curtains or open doorways, also alerting people when there was a raid and it was his job to unlock the air raid shelters.

I seem to remember I was 17 when the bombs started in earnest and they continued to bomb Liverpool and Bootle for the next six years.

There was a park across from where we lived where there were five air raid shelters
in a row; it was these shelter that my father had to open and try and make sure people went into them. Inside the shelters there were wooden forms to sit on, we would sit in there talking and singing and one of my three brothers would come in there with us, dress up and act silly and make us all laugh. In fact if he wasn’t in there with us people missed him and would ask where he was, they enjoyed his performances so much. Of my other two brothers one was in the RAF and the other serving in India.

At the bottom of the park ran a railway line and it was on that line one night that a train was bombed, it was carrying ammunition, an awful lot of damage was done and people killed and injured including two of our neighbours. Houses near by us got hit and I can remember how agitated my mother would get when we heard the German bombers flying over, you could tell by the sound of them that they weren’t ours, we used to do our best to try and keep her calm. Sometimes we would go under the stairs when the siren went and I remember we had a parrot in a cage that was blown across the hallway with one blast. All the windows had criss cross tape on them and often they would break.

I met my husband to be one day when I was walking home from church, I spotted this handsome man in the uniform of the Royal Marines and fell for him immediately; we married after the war.

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