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This story was submitted to the People's War website by Sharon Lambert of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of Bill Stockdale and added to the site with his permission.

I was born in 1923 at Preston Patrick in Westmorland. I was six months old when we moved up to Shap and I was there till I was seven, then we came to Lancaster, back to where my dad came from. He worked for W & J Pye in the mills. I had two brothers and three sisters and my cousin from Shap: his mother died, so my mother brought him back and looked after him. We lived on Briery Street when we moved to Lancaster in 1930. There was always plenty to do there when I was a lad. At nights in summertime, me and my mate Albert Barber, we used to go in a little flat boat down on the river and come back with the tide. We were nine or ten year old then. A lot of people used to go out on boats on the Lune. The Prestons, who lived on Briery Street, they had boats on the river.

My dad started using the front room at Briery Street as a dairy. In a morning he used to walk to Aldcliffe and milk cows for a bloke, then he’d come back and get his breakfast and go to work at Pye’s. He started getting milk off this bloke and I used to deliver 70 gallon a day for him, all round the Marsh and Sibsey Street. And it was all tipping it out then, no bottles. I used to have a truck, a bogey, on wheels and I used to pour milk from the big churn into smaller cans and I’d get the milk out of these with measures. My dad had about 40 hens and ducks up near Furness Street and I used to take eggs on my rounds as well and my mother used to make butter and cream and I had to sell it. We used to go to the cricket field on a Sunday, to the tennis players, and take milk for them and cream for the strawberries and cream. When I was finishing school my dad said that I could have the milk round but I said I didn’t want it! He had an allotment as well that he used to go down to when he’d finished work at night. He used to grow all his own vegetables.

I spent some hours up around the castle as a boy. They used to have guns up there. We used to go up West Road and turn into the castle at the top of Long Marsh Lane. There was some grass on the left hand side and then there was a big place, paved off with chains round, where there were Howitzers and different types of guns. There were about eight guns in there that they’d used in the First World War. When the war started they just cleared the lot out, anything that was metal had to go like.

My dad was a Sergeant Major in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard during the war. He spent most of his time guarding Carlisle Bridge and Ashton Hall. Of a Sunday, they used to go out in wagons up Quernmore and they used to have drills, throwing live hand grenades in trenches. They used to have regular army officers there making sure they were doing the right thing, so there was no accidents. But most of their time was spent on doing guard duties.

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