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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Liz Andrew of the Lancashire ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Guard on behalf of Peter Haworth and has been added to the site with his permission.

I was an apprentice fitter on Aircraft engines at Squires Gate in Blackpool. I worked on Cheetah 10s for Avro Hansens - before the Lancaster bomber period. We saw planes arriving in bits - but we'd patch them up and replace the engines and off they'd go again. They had to be right.

I met my wife during the War at the Blackpool Tower or the Winter Gardens - there was always dancing there and there were crowds of people. I remember the Joe Loss Big Band came. Blackpool was full of servicemen and the Yanks were posted here too - one of them, a flight engineer from Dallas, married my wife's sister.

RAF navigators were trained on flights in this area and after I became a flight engineer, I had to take chaps up for tests
to check they were going to be satisfactory for operational service. These chaps took chances - I was too young to worry but no doubt should have been scared. A lot of them got into trouble later in the war - some of them were shot down and never came home.

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