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This story appears courtesy of and with thanks to The Liverpool Diocesan Care and Repair Association and James Taylor

My husband was on a wartime job. He was working on a thing called ‘George’ a pilot they’d made for the Air Force. He used to be up night after night doing lots of testing on this thing. It was an auto-pilot which they used on the planes. In the meantime he was an air-raid warden.
In fact my son was born in an air-raid. It was the early days of air raids but they were quite something. It was August 1940, I started labour and we managed to get a taxi down to Oxford Street, we were stopped at the barricades in Picton Road by the railway, by the army. As soon as the driver said “Oxford Street,” they got very nervous and let us go on. Anyway, Bill was born the night after. At that time there had been no arrangements for patients but later they were taken to Southport, but as soon as the raid sirens went, the babies were put under the bed, the visitors were put down the air-raid shelter in the cellars and the mothers pot luck. Of a morning, the nurses would shove up the windows and point out the various places that had been hit. When I went home I was more scared than ever. I was frightened. The reason I opted against evacuation was because I was too frightened to go away from people I knew, especially my husband. I stayed at home with this baby which was considered not really the right thing to do, but I did and all went well as far as we were concerned.
I remember the night he was born, my husband Bill spent the night putting out incendiary bombs. Instead of dousing the bedrooms of the houses with showers of water as was the practice, he simply opened the windows and shovelled the bombs out into the street. He developed this technique.

By Claire Gould

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