“War started in September...I was still at school...(in) Atherton...I can remember...the day war was declared I was in chapel that morning... A lady who lived across the way from the chapel came in, came up to the steps and obviously gave him (the minister) the word that war had been declared. He stopped the service and made the congregation stand and sing the National Anthem!...That Sunday afternoon I was out somewhere in the town, I can’t remember where, but the sirens went...
“When I reached the age of sixteen I left school...I joined the Air Training Corps then, I left school in ’41...Where we lived, my father and I used to stand at the door of a night, watching the air-raids. It was early in ’41 when I lost my home. It was one Saturday night and my father was working. Mother and I went to bed...in the early hours of the morning, I woke up to my mother shouting ‘We’ve been bombed’. I tried to get up but the ceiling was on top of my bed. It was a land-mine, it had dropped just by us...more or less on top of a gas lamp. All the windows had been blown out and if my father had been in bed that night he’d have been dead because a huge chunk of the road came straight through the ceiling and broke the bed. My mother was injured, her forehead had been splattered with glass and she was taken off to hospital... ...“I walked about half a mile to an aunt and uncle of mine and my uncle came back down to the house with me. We went into the bedroom where mother had been and the fireplace had been blown out. We heard ‘tick, tick, tick, tick’ at the back of the fireplace...my uncle went to look, it was the alarm clock still going, ticking away. He looked at the clock and said ‘Bloody hell, made in Germany’... “In March ’43, I was seventeen and a quarter and I went to Manchester...to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. I was accepted for flying duties then sent home and told I couldn’t go until I was eighteen... ...“It was April ’44...I got home home, there was a letter from the Air Ministry saying that if I went into the Air Force I would possibly not get what I wanted, but if I so desired I could transfer to the Army, the Navy or the coal mines. Well at that particular time I’d read in the press...glider pilots were needed. I thought I would go into the Army and go for a glider pilot. I was called up in June ’44... “...I did my Army training...while I was there it came on a bulletin that volunteers were wanted for for glider pilots...I got through the practical tests but I was turned down on medical grounds. Apparently I had some infection in my ear...I came back to my unit again. The following morning I was sent in front of my unit Medical Officer. He looked at me and said ‘Do you feel fit Hatton?’ I said ‘Yes Sir’...so I was sent on embarkation leave. When I came back there were two big drafts. One was for Europe. They were troops of under the age of nineteen and over thirty five. Those of us in the middle were on draft to the Far East. Eventually I set sail from Liverpool...on the 3rd May ’45, just days before the war finished with Germany, but we heard some of the lads that had been drafted into Europe were dead. “We got to India for about the end of May...we were on the water for a good three or four weeks...As the war with Japan finished everybody was enjoying themselves but we were in quarantine, about thirty of us down with diphtheria. One lad died...” |