Working Amongst the Bombs

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

During air raids you were terrified of being bombed especially as I was working under glass all the time. I used to refuse to stay, I’d say “I’m running out no matter if it’s a false alarm or not, because if that glass roof was to fall on me you wouldn’t keep my baby.” And they wouldn’t.
I remember when the war broke out — I fell down the flipping stairs from top to bottom! My mother didn’t put a light on or anything because we were in blackout and I came out of the bedroom, I was married to Jack Hull then and the stairs had a turn in them and I’d forgotten all about it. Down I went! Jack thought I had the baby in my arms, it was Beryl then not John. Luckily I didn’t but I never missed a stair! My mother came flying out of my bedroom shouting “The baby, Jack, the baby.” I said, “I haven’t got the baby.” I was black and blue! Well we were going to a wedding the next night, Jack and I, and I’d been sitting there for four hours before I took my coat off! Oh it was shocking. When I did take it off people would say, “Oh Kitty what have you been doing? Weren’t you lucky you didn’t have the baby in your arms.” Well that was the first night of the blackout but it never worried me. The war didn’t worry me, my mother used to say, “Nothing at all worries you.”
People took their kids to the stations, and they were all in the air raid shelters, some mothers had big families too. You’d see the kids carrying their clothes and their palliasses on their shoulders on Lime Street when you were coming home from work; they were making their way to the air raid shelters. Liverpool isn’t mentioned enough in the History of War, it was all Coventry, just because their cathedral got hit. We had piles of them, Lewis’s was hit, Blackers was hit, lovely pubs got hit and the docks got hit. There were piles of places hit here in Liverpool and people died. A school went and it was full of people because it was used as an air raid shelter. It was in Clint Road, Edge Hill and a crowd of people went in there. There was all of that but it was never mentioned, it was a terrible tragedy but you never hear of it. There’s a big place in Anfield Cemetery dedicated to the Clint Road disaster, an awful lot of people were killed in that.
Oh my baby was terrified, well I think all the young children were. It was being closed in, they had masks rubber things, and they had a Perspex front so you could see the baby’s face. At the side there was a pump for the oxygen so if any gas attack had come you would have to pump the air in. Oh they were horrible things, but the young children used to get Mickey Mouse masks and the wardens used to come round and teach them how to wear them. The others were ugly things, but they did their best I suppose, we had black gas masks. We had to carry them, but thank God nobody wore them. My father was gassed in the First World War when they were hit with mustard gas, my father got that three times.
You had to go to the various clinics to get the gas masks. They were in a box and you carried them over your shoulder like a handbag and you couldn’t go out without them. The blackouts would cost you a fortune in batteries for torches and things like that.

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