“The sirens used to go in the day and we all had to go into these shelters, we had little candles hung up in wire cages. This was at Mellor school. We had these Anderson type shelters covered up with soil...
“An anti aircraft shell landed in the meadow next to the house. My dad was at home when it happened...When they found it, it was fourteen feet down and it had never gone off...I’ll bet it was five feet long...It made, like a burrow. It went in about twenty yards from where it actually finished up... “It was a Sunday night when my dad went. We were all out in the fields playing. When we got back for our tea...‘Where’s my dad?’ My mum burst into tears, she said ‘He’s gone’. I cried my eyes out...I felt so deprived...he was doing it for the best, as he thought, but if you think about it from our point of view, had he got killed or something...I couldn’t come to terms with that... “We realised my dad wasn’t on the front, he wasn’t an infantry man. Still, you’ve got the worry just the same...We used to make little things, like Christmas cards, make them ourselves, draw them and colour them in. He still had them in his wallet, I’m not sure he didn’t have one in when he died... “We’d been hay making, it was a hot summer’s night. About seven o’clock aeroplanes started coming over Mellor church. I don’t mean one, I mean hundreds. Lancasters, Halifax, all sorts of planes...they were going over for a good couple of hours... “This particular night I was woken by this sort of droning noise. I listened and it got nearer. ‘Grandad listen’. ‘Go back to sleep, you’re dreaming’. Anyway just then the sirens went. We got up and we went down into the morning room. All of a sudden there was this mighty blast, ‘bang’. All the doors and windows rattled...I remember the time, it was ten to three...Evidently it was this V1 doodlebug that had dropped in Adswood, near Aunty Jessie’s house...” |