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I was 7 or 8 years old, on Christmas day when in Oldham we had the first flying bomb dropped in Abbeyhills Rd. I am sad to say that I lost 2 cousins.

I have a horrible memory of being woken at about 5am in the morning by a knock on the door. It was my uncle who had come to tell my mother that they had been killed. That was a terrible Christmas day.

One cousin was older than me and the other cousin was 2 or 3 years younger than me.

So since 1944 Christmas days haven't really been quite the same.

The houses were rebuilt and my aunty and uncle lived to quite an elderly age.

My uncle was an ARP Warden for that area. He had the unenviable task of going through the rubble to find his 2 children dead.

My grandma lived on the same row but she had a relation who lived in Blackpool and was spending Christmas there so had a lucky escape, though her house was demolished.

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