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This is a story that my wife knew from her mother and father, Nellie and Bertie Sykes, long before I met her. Herbert ("Bertie"), born in 1902, was just young enough to be called up, and he spent the rest of the war as a member of R.A.F. ground crew repairing and servicing aircraft. He was from Slaithwaite, near Huddersfield, but was stationed at various times at Wappenham and at Desborough, both in Northamptonshire.
Accidents happened as the repair crews hurried to do their jobs, and he was the victim of one. He was stepping from the top step of a ladder into the fuselage of an aeroplane when the ladder slipped, and he fell, breaking his back. He was put in plaster and kept for some weeks in Northampton General Hospital. When he was fit enough to begin convalescing, he was sent to Blackpool, not so much because it was closer to home as because it was a place where lots of hotels had been taken over to act as convalescent homes for wounded servicemen.
Their son (my wife’s brother) was only about a year old, and it was not possible, even if the family could have afforded it, for Nellie to visit her husband in hospital in Northampton. When he moved to Blackpool, however, it became feasible, not only financially but also probably psychologically, since Blackpool was somewhere people from Huddersfield had actually been to in the years before the war.
None the less, she had to get permission. Once that was secured, she had to find somewhere to stay in Blackpool. The pressure on accommodation was intense, and the only lodgings she could find were in a boarding house where the only place the little boy could sleep was in the bath. So that’s what they did. It was the only time my wife’s mother travelled outside the Slaithwaite-Huddersfield area during the whole of the war.

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