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EDNA JACKSON

This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Liz Andrew of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of Edna Jackson and added to the site with her permission.

I was at school in Clitheroe and only ten years old when the war started . Several of us used to go in by train and I remember on one occasion we arrived and began walking through the town and there was nobody else about. We said to each other, “Wouldn’t it be fun if it was an Air Raid…and it was !!�

The Day the bomb fell on Chatburn was our school Speech Day . My mum didn’t arrive from Rimington and the man who came to present the prizes said he’d been delayed by Mr Hitler. It wasn’t till the end of the Presentation that my mother turned up.

I remember going to Liverpool to see relatives — there had been severe bombing there and you could smell the bombed buildings and the dead bodies they hadn’t been able to get out.

We raised money by holding concert parties in the village. We sang and acted. We had to walk everywhere and the performances were at the Village Hall which was a mile away. I remember it was so black one night that I grazed my head on a wall as I turned down the lane.

We lived at the Station House in Rimington and one day a train pulled into the sidings about a quarter of a mile away. My dad said it was an ammunition train. It was a bit scarey. It was winter and already dark and one of the wagons caught fire. It was always blamed on the local boys who’d lifted up the tarpaulin sheets to see what was underneath. It turned out to be lime not ammunition. By the time the Fire Brigade arrived it had all finished.

We kept hens and Father turned part of the field and a piece of land by the railway side into a garden and grew vegetables. Dad also kept angora rabbits — he applied for food for them but he couldn’t get it and they had to go in the end - we ate them.

We had two evacuees from Brighton. They said they did the washing up at home but my mother didn’t believe it because they just emptied everything into the washing up bowl. It was very odd! We got Christmas cards from them after they went home and I sent flowers but they kept coming back. There was some bombing in Brighton and we could never trace them.

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