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I was eight years old when war broke out and remember the whole time quite well.

When the sirens sounded during the night my mother got me and my sister up out of bed and brought everyone downstairs. We didn’t have air-raid shelters and I could never understand why we had to get up. Our next door neighbour always came round and we sat up and listened to the gossip from the local mill.

Evacuees came to our local school and lived with families in the area, their lives were so much better in our small country market town than they had been in the cities they came from. One of the evacuees from Manchester had never had an underslip before moving to the Fylde.

We lived in a farming area and weren’t short of eggs or chickens. The milkman delivered twice a day and ladled milk from his container straight into a jug on our kitchen table. If we ran out of milk in between deliveries we took the jug to the farm for extra. Farmers weren’t supposed to kill their own pigs, but they did, therefore we did have pork and bacon.

My father worked at the shipyard in Fleetwood and so we always had plenty of fish, though very few oranges or bananas. If the message came that there were some in the local shop, then my friends and I all ran there to queue up for as many as we could get.

My mother always baked on a Wednesday and we had malt loaf with no fat.

I remember there being a gas mask box for the baby in our street, and having frosted glass to replace any broken windows in houses or greenhouses. We didn’t get too many bombs, though, because we were in a rural area. The planes dropped any odd bombs left over from the bombing raids of Manchester and Liverpool near us, to lighten their load before returning to Germany.

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