Jean’s Story

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Jean lived in Caterham Street, Manchester, opposite the fire station and remembers the blitz. They had to stay at the fire station one night and the air raid shelter a second night. “I remember my mother kept shouting ‘Joe have you locked the front door, have you locked the front door’ ‘I’ve locked the damn front door’ I’d responded – ‘hurry up’ she replied…I was hanging on to my dad’s jacket, and my sister was in my mother’s arms. Everybody at different periods through the night kept coming in to tell us the news: ‘Piccadilly’s ablaze’.” She recalls coming home to rubble and her father had said they didn’t need to lock the front door because there wasn’t a front door left. All that remained were windows, but no front door and one of the beds was hanging out the ceiling. Jean remembers two neighbours who died that night. But she doesn’t remember feeling sad. “I was so young at the time. It didn’t register. I remember my Uncle Arthur died in the blitz. His name’s on the bronze tree memorial in Piccadilly. And that didn’t register with me but I remember my cousin came to stay with us” Jean was evacuated to Uttoxeter shortly after but it didn’t last long. Among the plastic bag of rations given to her she recalls the block of chocolate, corned beef and condensed milk. She stayed on a farm in Uttoxeter until her mother came one day to pick her up and take her home. “I don’t know where she got the train fare from, but she came to pick me up saying ‘I’m taking her home, because if we’re going to go – were all going to go together.’” Thinking back to VE day; Jean remembers hearing the announcement on the radio sat in the kitchen. There was talk of something different in the air and her mother cried listening to the announcement. “Everybody just seemed to congregate outside. The lady next door was crying, Mrs Turnbull. We built a bonfire. We had a lot of wood to burn from the bombed out houses. It felt like [that fire] burned for a month. The mothers conjured up a party from somewhere. Chairs arrived from nowhere, and the highlight was someone from somewhere found a tin of pineapple chunks. We must have had about two each. I’m still salivating thinking about them” There were fireworks, which Jean’s sister was convinced were for her birthday on 8 May: “She never had a party before as we were on rations back then, so she thought the celebrations were for her.” Jean greeted the troops coming back from Dunkirk, hanging from the lamppost near Piccadilly Approach. She didn’t know then but she may have met her husband coming back from the war years before they met. “He was 18 when he went in the army and he used to say that he must have passed me swinging on that lamppost all those years ago.” Image: Photograph of Jean’s family taken in 1945.