Nowhere to go

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSV Berkshire on behalf of Kenneth Banks and has been added to the site with his permission. Kenneth Banks fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
We were living in Salford, near Manchester, and I was eleven years old. One day the house was bombed. The neighbours rushed to help us out. One neighbours son was on leave from the army, and I remember him running around helping everybody. We were eventually taken by a neighbour into the public air-raid shelter on our street. I was feeling completely stunned and dazed- everything felt so surreal. Our uncle was still in the house and had the cast-iron fireplace collapse on him, so he couldn’t rush to the stairs to meet us as we escaped. Luckily we found out later that he was still alive and well.
In the morning, after we’d had the all clear, all of the other neighbours who’d been in the shelter that night left to go home. Yet my mum was very tearful. The lady of the house asked her why she was crying, and she replied “I have no home to go to.” She’d just discovered that the family house had been completely destroyed. The neighbour kindly replied — “You can stay with us for as long as you like.”

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