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CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

By Barbara Applin

St Helens (then Lancashire, now Merseyside): “invasion”, air raid shelters, incendiaries

I was born in 1936 and when I was about 4 my sister used to take me to my aunts’ for Sunday dinner, a ten-minute or so walk through streets of terraced houses. We had to cross a few quiet roads, and at one we were stopped by a man and told to wait. I could see a group of men in the road, running about and one of them throwing something to another. Somehow this frightened me — because I couldn’t think what they were doing and I didn’t know whether we were going to be able to get past or what would happen if we tried.

There were other people waiting too, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying about what was going on. What I do remember is hearing the word “invasion”. I had no idea what it meant, but something about this big word, or maybe the way it was said, made me feel it was dangerous, terrifying, and I began to cry and had to be taken back home.

So “invasion” to me meant this frightening game, and it was only years later that someone explained to me that England had been preparing for the Germans to come and take over the country, to “invade”. I imagine the “game” was being played by the ��ѿ��ý Guard and they were practising dealing with a grenade or something.

I remember the effect of the black-out too, how even going down the yard to our outside toilet we couldn’t use a torch, and used to look out for searchlights overhead and listen out for planes — were they ours or “Jerries”?

I often used to wear a siren suit when going to bed, and could be picked up by my father in the night and carried to the air-raid shelter in the school across the road, where we lay on mattresses and everyone sang songs like “Roll out the Barrel” and I wondered how they could remember all the words. One of my friends down the road was about to go out with her family to the same air-raid shelter when an incendiary bomb bounced on their roof and landed outside the front door. They were about to go out of the back door when another landed there! Neither went off. The theory was that pilots aiming for Liverpool either thought St Helens was part of it or had bombs left over and just dropped them here. A lot of unexploded bombs were found for years after the war.

We often had practice for air raids at school, with a shelter in the playground. I was told that one class upstairs had made so much noise moving their chairs at the end of a lesson that the class below had thought it was an air raid and gone to the shelter. My sister was in a school near the church and I was jealous because their shelter was in the crypt.

There were several concrete road blocks on roads around St Helens, and it was years before they were removed.

Our church and the cemetery had iron gates and railings which were removed “for the war effort” — and I later heard that this was all wasted.

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