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The confusion was everywhere, especially in my mind. Who were all these people?
Why had we come here on the train? Why was that woman pulling my ears forward
between finger and thumb, and remarking that "this one seems nice and clean?"
What was going on around me? Why was my brother crying?
"Everyone just follow me", said an overweight lady with heavy soled shoes,
pleated skirt and a mass of black hair tied into a bun at the back. I thought, "I've seen
her before but I don't know where or when". The ring of authority in her voice made
disobedience unthinkable so, with my brothers Bill and Alan, I dutifully followed her.
All the other children in the large group which was assembled with uson the railway
platform also lined up and followed.
St.Simon and St.Judes Parish Hall in Southport was some distance from the
station and I noticed that not only the children who had been on the train with us, but
also lots of people, mostly women also tagged along behind.
The children were being sorted into smaller groups. It didn't seem to worry
the adults that this meant separating families and I remember being upset at this
prospect. At five years of age I was already an emotional sort of person who had
never been apart from my brothers and sisters.
"I'll take this one". This came from a tall, thin, pale faced lady with an
appearance which filled me with fear. Her heavy tweed suit and large hat looked
strange to me. She lacked the kind and friendly appearance of the other women in my
life; my mother and my aunts. She was pointing to my older brother Bill, three years
my senior, "I'm not going anywhere without Alan and Frank", Bill said. "If they're
not going, I'm not going!". His tone was quiet yet determined and the gaunt faced
lady was taken aback. "I'm not taking a cheeky one", she said haughtily and instead
of Bill, she chose a girl of about my age. She then walked to a desk which was
situated in the hall to register the details of her selection with a man that I had seen on
the train with us. Watching him writing in the book somehow comforted me because
that's what I'd seen my teachers doing and I had had a good relationship with my
teachers since starting school a year and a half previously.
"What does it mean when they say that 'war has broken out, and why did that
mean that we had to go away from my Mam?", I thought. I knew that bad things
broke out. I remembered once breaking out in boils and that another time an
epidemic of measles and chicken pox had broken out at school and around my home
in Bootle, Liverpool. So I thought to myself that war must be bad, as only bad things
seemed to 'break out'. "War must only have broken out in Liverpool or why would
they send us to Southport?" I wondered. I couldn't have been expected to understand
that Liverpool would be a bombing target, whereas Southport wouldn't.
"Mrs.Unsworth, are you sure you can manage three of them?" The plump
middle aged Mrs.Unsworth said that we all looked like nice boys and that she was
sure that we would behave for her. My older brothers, realising that this was a way of
staying together, smiled at her and assured her that we wouldn't cause her any trouble.
A short time later we were all on the bus heading to our new home, a nice little
semi detached house close to the gasworks in Southport. The three of us shared the
same bedroom, two in one bed and one in another. There was a dressing table with a
mirror. A white three piece trinket set of white pottery with a floral emblem sat in
the centre of the dressing table, on top of a rectangular glass plate.
Now I will honestly never know whether the bugs were in the bed before we
got there, or whether we took them with us, although I can't remember having ever
seen them before. I well remember, however, the bites and the blood spots they
inflicted on us. Our method of retribution was to catch the bugs live and collect them
neatly in the little containers of the trinket set. This all worked admirably until one
day Mrs.Unsworth, in a well meaning attempt to keep us comfortable, decided to
clean the bedroom, including the trinket set. When she opened up the floral patterned
container and saw the bugs, some still alive, she screamed out a string of profanities
that would have done justice to a Liverpool dock worker. We were moved out of
there the following day.
We were separated. I went alone to an irritable woman with two young
children and a baby that I remember vomiting during every mealtime. As a child I
had a very sensitive stomach and the baby's constant vomiting made it impossible for
me to eat and I quickly lost weight. One of her children was a girl and I found it very
embarrassing that she bathed in the tin bath in front of the fire. My mother had
always been far more conservative and when girls were bathing, the boys were sent
out, and vice versa. Normally, when the girl had finished in the bath tub, I would
have to get in. One day, when I had got very dirty, the lady decided to wash my
hands while I was in the tub. She then dried one hand and told me to stand up.
Without thinking I placed my hand into the water to lift myself from the tub bottom.
She scolded my really sharply and told me that I was stupid for wetting my hand after
she had dried it. I believed her! I was very unhappy at this stage of my life and it
was an enormous relief to me when my mother called one day and, on seeing my
condition, decided to take me back home.
ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ was Orlando Street in Bootle, Liverpool, where I had been born in
1934. Its proximity to the Liverpool dockland placed it in constant danger from
German bombers targetting the ships, but that didn't matter to me as I was with the
people I loved again. At first we had no air raid shelter and when the sirens sounded
out their warning, my Mam would get us out of bed and we would all sit in the dark in
a small space under the staircase. Lights were not allowed because they would make
the bombers aware that they were over the target. We would play 'This is the house
that jack built', passing some object from hand to hand. "Take this". "What's this?"
"This is the house the Jack built". Next person would then answer that "This is the
malt that lay in the house that Jack built". We would then add a line at a time to the
question "What's this?" It then progressed through the rat that ate the malt, the cat
that killed the rat, the dog that chased the cat, etc.etc. All this time we could hear the
whistle of falling bombs and the subsequent explosive roar at they struck. We grew
to recognise the difference between the sound of bombs and the sound of anti aircraft
guns attacking the enemy. It was all quite exciting for us children but must have
caused great concern for our parents.
As soon as daylight broke we would be out collecting shrapnel and then
exchanging the bits with our peers, in just the same way that children now swap cards
and computer games. At school we would find out whether any of our friends had
been injured in the air raids of the previous night. We grew to be very accepting of
losing friends who had been killed or seriously injured and just took it as a natural
course of life.
My parents decided that things were now so dangerous that we needed our
own air raid shelter in the back yard. Consequently they had a brick structure built.
Inside were two sets of bunk beds.
Now, when people think about the blitzkriegs in England they seem to think
that London was the only place to suffer. This it totally untrue, Many places in
England had proportionately more bombs dropped on them than London.
Liverpool was the only English port to remain open throughout the whole
duration of the war. All the shipping convoys which had run the gauntlet of U-boats
in the Atlantic Ocean arrived there. All the returning empty ships left from there, as
did the ships heading towards the horrors of the Baltic Sea in an effort to keep the
Russian war effort going. Consequently the city received heavy Luftwaffe attention
particularly during the spring of 1941.
It was during the May blitz of that year that our house was bombed. We were
all secure in the air raid shelter, when an enormous, ear splitting roar went off. My
bunk jumped into the air and landed on top of me on the floor. The warm liquid
running down my chin, I realised, was blood. Fortunately it was only a nose bleed
caused by the sudden pressure changes caused by the explosion.
When the 'all clear' siren sounded, my mother cautiously opened the air raid
shelter door. She was greeted by loud musical whistling from our pet budgie. The
bird had been blown by the blast, through the huge hole that used to be our kitchen
window and it had landed, cage still intact, outside into the back yard. She was
completely unharmed and obviously very happy to see us again.
My mother packed the baby into her pram, and with my younger sister Olive
holding onto one side of the pram handle and me holding the other, we set off to my
aunt's home. Mam was very upset but the budgie whistling happily made us all
smile. On the way to my Aunt's place, we had to cross a road bridge over the
railway. A bomb had struck the bridge and we had to negotiate our way round a
gaping hole through which we could see the railway lines underneath. Looking
toward the dockyards it looked to me as if the whole world was on fire, with flames
shooting high into the sky.
I suppose my parents decided that Liverpool was too dangerous a place to live
and we now had no habitable home. With Mam and the other children we moved
back to Southport.
Dad was a firefighter and had to stay in Liverpool. Mam would worry herself
sick for his safety in what must surely have been one of the most dangerous jobs in the
war.

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