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Wartime memories of Failsworth and Blackburn, Lancashire — evacuated from London to Lancashire.

Part two of an oral history interview with Mrs. Audrey Middlemas conducted by Jenny Ford on behalf of Bedford Museum.

“I went to the school in Failsworth. I don’t remember much about that except that I was called ‘Audrey Odd Socks’. Apparently I went to school one day with odd socks on and it stuck as it does with kids. My Aunt Mary was lovely. She had diabetes. Quite a few of them in family did through poor diets and stuff like that. Because that’s another thing going back to my mum, when there were 11 of them, their father was at sea, there was no money. And my grandmother used to go out cleaning and she’d be given the stale bread and she’d take it home, soak it in hot water and salt and pepper and that would be their breakfast. As they got older they had stomach problems or diabetes.

One night, it must have been late, I was home from school my Uncle Jack was on nights, he was at home so … ‘Come and look at this, come and look at this!’ We said, ‘What on earth!’ and this thing on the end of a parachute was coming down and our garden backed onto another garden, it was dead opposite our garden and it came down, we had no fear, we didn’t know what it was. It hit the outhouse in the garden opposite us and it slid down the side and rested sort of like that, the detonator was at the bottom, it hadn’t touch the detonator it sort of slip down like that on the parachute. Then the run around, ‘get out, get out’ the Wardens came round, the Police with them with megaphones to ‘move out, move out, move out’. I ran around picking things up, Aunt Mary said, ‘It doesn’t matter about that Audrey, it doesn’t matter about that, let’s just go!’ until they came and dismantled it. But it was exciting!

Then my mum got a house in Blackburn and then my brother, my younger brother, he went to stay with another Aunt and I think my older brother went there as well. My grandmother, my father’s mother lived there as well in Shaw in Oldham.

But when that torpedo bomb dropped in Mitcham I can remember lying there under the table. My brother Harold never even woke up, my brother Norman, the bomb you could hear it burrowing, I could really hear it. I can hear it to this day burrowing under the ground and went off and they said when they came round in the morning that our house moved three inches in the ground. The explosion apparently according to doctors banged my young brother’s lungs together like that and I think that’s when we came up North, that’s when my mother said, ‘I’ve had enough!’

My brother Norman, he stayed with my Aunt Alice in Shaw in Oldham. I did stay there at one time as well, I can remember having to black lead their hearth. And I remember also going out with the milkman with a gill of milk and putting in people’s jugs at their doorstep, vaguely remember that, but I couldn’t have been there for very long. But Norman was there (and I don’t know where Harold was) and he got sick while he was there. My Aunt Alice, tight as a tick, because she’d have to pay for it she wouldn’t send for a doctor. My mum is in Blackburn and my dad. So my mum then struggles from Blackburn through Manchester Railway Station that was being incendiary bombed, oh, I don’t know how she did it, bless her, to see my brother. It was a very old house that they lived in and they had a bed downstairs for Norman and if he needed to go to the loo he had to get up and walk on these stone flag floors. When my mum got there he was so ill and she called the doctor and immediately he was put into the hospital. He had to go into an isolation ward because his heart wasn’t all that strong, I’ll never for that. I’d fought his battles all his life and I just wanted to go in there and sort of thump everybody. They had to cut an inch of his ribs away to put a tube in to drain the fluid off his lungs and they had to do it with practically no anaesthetic because of his heart condition. Apparently, he had a heart murmur they said. But anyway he got better. My mother then took him and she by then had got a house, 3 Randall Street, a terraced house and some furniture that people had given her. They were very good, people did rally round you know and help one another. And he came home and I came home. And Harold came home, by this time he would probably be 15 or 16. But l never had much time to sort of get to know him really during the teenage years because when he was 17 when he went into the Canadian Army. He joined the Canadian Army in this country. He went over on ‘D-Day’ 4. My brother Harold went over on ‘D-Day’ 4 and came back shell shocked and then the German war finished.

I enjoyed myself. I used to go out to all the dances. All the Army guys, the Americans would come over and I used to have a great time. My mum and dad working at Philips, and I worked at Philips as well. I’d left school at 13, just before my 14th birthday actually. I left school at the end of the year term and I would be 14 in the November. Yes, I went in as Progress Chaser in this big factory at Philips. I can remember when I won the Radio Queen when I was 17 or 18, after the war, we had a balcony - I used to be a Progress Chaser sitting on the floor where they made all the dials and the things for the radios and I can remember looking up and these girls, you know what girls are, leaning over ‘Oh, is that her?’ What has she got?’

The Canadian boys used to come over as well and people came over, they came to visit my mum. I could come out of the factory gates with 15,000 other women, not one fellow between them and I’d have two, I used to love it!

I wouldn’t have been allowed to go at 15, there was discipline in those days. Maybe I was 17. I was about 12 when it started, six years, I’d be 17 or so. I know I had to go out with my friend next door. We weren’t allowed to wear lipstick so we both of us used to have to go out and sneak around the corner if we wanted to put lipstick on.

My mother used to make me my dresses and I can remember she made me one it was a red with a white spot. It was when we had the big wide flared skirts, the flared skirts, when you danced, you twisted around and your skirt went out like a fan. I loved that dress. We didn’t have a new dress every time you went out you wore the same dress because that’s all there was. We painted our legs! Oh, yes it was very difficult and if it rained! I think we gave up trying to put a seam up the back of the leg, tried to do that. But my Canadian guys that were over here they would get me silk stockings. They used to bring me silk stockings that I used to look after and treasure. Dorothy my friend and I we would go out together and have a good time.

I was always tall so I was inhibited by the short Lancashire boys but once the American guys came over, especially the coloured boys they were nearly always tall. They had a great sense of rhythm, learnt a lot from them I did. Although at that time a lot of girls, ‘oh, I wouldn’t dance with them’ but no it didn’t bother me one little bit. They could dance, they were great dancers, they were polite and any boy that walked across the floor and asked me to dance, I never refused them.

We danced to Sylvester orchestra. I had a date to go out with a drummer once but I got warned off. Yes, Victor Sylvester’s orchestra - danced to him, Harry Davidson’s orchestra, the big band orchestra. Oh, yes we didn’t have things like discos we had orchestras and dancing. It was ballroom dancing and it was lovely it really was. The nearest we got to rock and roll was a bit of jive which the Americans brought over and a little jive and rock and roll because when they came over they educated us there on that. But I had fun. I had a lot of fun.

We used to start at 7 o’clock in the morning at Philips, I think. My dad was the Commissionaire there and by golly if I was late! Didn’t I get it? He wasn’t having any of that nonsense from me. You walked and you got special buses that took you there. I used to finish about 4.30pm or something like that … Well, I never did shift work but other people might have done, I can never remember doing shift work because I was what they called ‘Office Staff’ even if I was on the ground floor. Philips, they were very good to their workers and we had, we ran a Pantomime every year. I was in the Pantomime, Robinson Crusoe and it was great fun. It the lightened the war, the dreary business of the war, the unhappiness and we had fun. Painting and browning your legs up and all this, that and the other. I was a chorus girl, I had to walk on to the stage and say, ‘Ah, here comes Robinson Crusoe.’ And I think I was so shy, you could hear, I can never forget the twitter that went round the audience and my awkwardly walking on. Oh, yes I loved it, I loved it. It was when Janette McDonald and Nelson Eddie were singing and we had one girl in our factory, can’t remember her name now, but she sang just like Janette McDonald, she had a beautiful voice. They did that, Philips and then they had this big fete. The war might have ended I don’t know I can’t remember because Ronald was back from India then, looking like a ghost. He’d got dysentery and God knows what else. But I wasn’t even engaged to him, he was just my boyfriend. I’d met Ronald (my future husband) in Blackpool because I had an Aunt there so I used to go there to Blackpool.

They had a fete, the big Philips fete. It was the first one they’d ever had, the first one they ever had and Delia, she was the singer, she was a judge and this was a competition. I remember I wore a green dress with a bow here and I had to sort of pin it up because the bow was falling off at one end and I ‘won it!’ Gift of the gab I think. They asked you questions, I can’t remember what they were. I was very shy, I might have been tall and slim and I was very shy. Yes and I won it! I can also remember Ronald coming up and the first thing he said was ‘Where’s the money?’ I won a guinea, which was 21 shillings at the time, a guinea and I had a crown. I had a picture of that Delia crowning me. I was the first ‘Philips Radio Queen’ and of course my dad was so proud because he was the Commissionaire. Then I left after the war ended.�

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