A German plane crashes

My Mother, Joan Quirk (nee Kenny), lived in Milton Avenue, Widnes, and often told us the story of a German bomber plane which crashed on playing fields near her home. A crowd gathered and found two of the crew dead and one injured. Some people wanted to kill him — this would be at the time of the Liverpool blitz, and feeling were running high — but an old woman said “no, he’s some Mother’s son”, so he was spared.

The two dead Airmen were buried in Widnes cemetery, and I remember their graves in a quiet corner by the wall — in the late fifties our school bus passed by the cemetery each day and we felt quite proprietorial about “our Germans” and were upset when they were moved to a military cemetery around 1960. What happened to the wounded man, we never knew.

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