Crewe in Wartime - A Child's Picture

'This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Gwilym Scourfield of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Allison Fincham and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

Crewe in Wartime — A Child’s Picture
I was two and a half when the war started. We lived in Crewe. We had a garden where my dad kept geese and chickens. My first memory is sitting in the pram with my younger sister. I had the ‘handles end’. Crewe was a railway town and mum couldn’t get around with the pram on the pavement to get to the chemists shop. There were hundreds of soldiers sleeping there on the pavement. They had been rescued from Dunkirk..

The bombers were cheeky. They followed the railway lines. No doubt they were looking to bomb Rolls Royce, where they were making Spitfires. It was well camouflaged, made up to look like an ordinary row of houses. But they did hit it many times. Mum’s stepbrother, a young boy apprentice, Cyril, was on fire watch the night the Germans hit Rolls Royce. Cyril was Mrs Nunnerley’s only son; lovely lad. At first they couldn’t find him. Then they discovered a body that had been blown up on to the roof by the blast. ‘Nunny’ had a fit of hysterics. She couldn’t identify her son. My mum volunteered to identify him in the end. She recognised him by his bitten finger nails.

There were stick bombs landing in the park. Huge numbers of houses got demolished. Dad was given deferred occupation from the armed forces. He ran the Royal Victoria Laundry. It was a big factory — about 200 people worked there. Everyone used the laundry in those days. It was quite near the theatre and many famous people have sent their clothes there as well as the residents of the Crewe Arms Hotel. We had our own Anderson shelter (God, I hated the stench of that; so dark and dank!), but, if we were near dad’s factory, we used their huge shelter. I can remember the planes overhead and the smoke bombs in our streets billowing out dense clouds of acrid smoke to camouflage us. There was an EWS tank (Emergency Water Storage Tank) on our street. It was huge. There was only just enough space to get a lorry past.

We sometimes went to Bolton on the train to visit our other relations. Bolton was bombed, too.

Grandma lived in a run down part of Crewe. She loved her little home, though. She was well appreciated. She used to make hand cream with yellow basilica and white precipitate. I think it had a lanolin base. Such toiletry treasures were like gold dust in those war years.

We had an aunt Muriel and cousins Ted and Jean move up from Plymouth with their family. Plymouth was really hammered with all the bombing. Uncle Fred cycled to Liverpool and joined the navy. He was lost at sea when the Triumph went down in the Mediterranean in 1940. I was in the room when the telegram arrived to say he ‘was missing, believed dead. My poor aunt waited for him for five years, hoping he’d come back. He never saw his baby son. Once on leave he had come back from the China Seas with a silk kimono that would pass through a wedding ring. He brought back silk underwear, too and wore those like a scarf around his neck to escape the customs!

I used to get ‘loaned out’ to a friend of my mum who had lost her baby in a tragic cot death incident. Her mum had a two bed cottage on a farm on the escarpment at Betley, out towards Hanley, about seven miles away. We used to go there for holidays. It was way out in the country to us ‘townies’. I saw aircraft there and Liverpool on fire in the distance.

We had lodgers from Coventry, Mr and Mrs McNab. They had the middle bedroom. I remember they bought me a dressing gown. We must have been pretty crowded in that little house, but I don’t remember it being anything out of the ordinary.

On VE Day I remember the parade and then the big party outside with all the neighbours in the square. I danced with my dad. I was so small he told me to stand on his feet. There were some special treats. Aunty had a pre-fab with a fridge! We had frozen custards and ice lollies. There were mothers’ races in the park. My piano teacher won one of the races.

“We won the war — in Nineteen Forty-Four!” we sang.
I don’t ever remember being frightened, despite all the dangers. Somehow we just accepted it as our world — warts and all.

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