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When the war broke out, we lived in an old pub in a tiny room, my husband was a soldier, there was only me and my girl and another old woman who lived in another room. I remember how the Mill Road Hospital got bombed, the nurses and doctors all got blown up, the babies, there was blood everywhere. It was terrible, all the ambulances coming down with the nurses. And yet in the next building there was the soldiers with diseases, it never touched them. The old lady we shared the pub with got hit.
Then I went to live in apartments, I went out to visit my Sister in Law, the bombs started, my little girl was asleep on the settee, we got the blast, but a curtain come down and covered my little girl saving her from being cut to pieces. Next thing, the warden called us out and we were taken to a shelter; the house opposite got hit; they were all killed. I was crying saying “I want my husband! I want my husband!” This soldier took hit coat off and put it around me. When the all clear went, we went to my grandmas, we went along Stanley Road at 5am, all the shops had been bombed, all the food was everywhere; all the docks were on fire. They were digging for bodies in all the streets as me and my little girl walked along; it was terrible. You could see clothes in the streets where they’d been blown off people and I remember one man got his head blown off.
I was bombed out three times altogether, Mill Road was the worst. There was that many bodies they covered them over in cement. My dad worked in Derwent Road where the soldiers where, they had to cement over all the bodies, they couldn’t get them all out. That’s all over Merseyside; there should be a memorial to them.

(After this interview Mrs Clarke stated that she felt elated to some extent, having suffered from haunting nightmares for the last sixty years)

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