"Everyone must have been terrified as I could see them from our back bedroom window, all running across the fields in their night-clothes and hiding under the hedges at the far end."
I am married and enjoying retirement. I live in North Shropshire and feel lucky to live there as it is so beautiful. I enjoy swimming lessons and hope to swim a breadth soon. I am writing my first novel and lead a walking group every week.
I decided to tell my story as it was a true funny happening and must represent all the funny and sad happenings that occurred on the home front during the 1939- 1944 war.
Inside Lives was very interesting and stimulating. I have a craving for new knowledge and experiences. Inside Lives fitted the bill!
It was Sunday 3rd September 1939 and I'd cried all day.
It wasn't because we'd just declared was on Germany, but because they wouldn't let me have a Mickey Mouse gas mask.Late that night as we waited for my father to come home from work, the air raid siren went off at the mill across the road. Everyone must have been terrified as I could see them from our back bedroom window, all running across the fields in their night-clothes and hiding under the hedges at the far end. Mother was busy filling the bath with cold water. She told me to tell my grandmother to get up and go down and sit under the stairs. I went into my grandmother and she was sat up in bed with her black rubber gas mask on. She wouldn't go down under the stairs because she said 'nay, don't bother wi me, I've 'ad my day, thi mun look after Thisens'. I was just getting better from whooping cough and now that mother had got the bath brimming with cold water, she took me in her arms and she carried me into the bathroom. Just then my father came in and said 'what are you doing with that child?' She said, 'I'm putting her in the cold water. They can't be gassed if they're in cold water.' Where on earth she'd got that from, I don't know, but dad said she'll catch Pneumonia instead! Put her back in bed.' So that's what she did. And that's how my father saved me from being the first British Casualty in Hitler's war.
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