On the Day War Broke Out: A Child in Grimsby

On the 3rd.September 1939 I was 7 and 6 weeks old.Children place great importance on those extra weeks or months as we did also.
I recall my mother being in a hurry that day.She bundled me into my jacket,placed my brother (aged 1 year and almost 3 months)into his wheelchair,and raced away with us to my grandmother's house, a little further away from Grimsby fishdocks than was our own rented home.
Of that momentous day I remember only one fact,apart from the foregoing.I learned a new word - hostilities.It was a word much used over the next 6 years.I also remember how excited my pals and I were at the thought of witnessing action only previously recorded by the cinema news gatherers.
There was no thought of misery and bloodshed.Only the excitement and the expectation.The knowledge of what war could really do to our generation and that which grew up before us,would come relatively quickly.
Now,whilst my father was away with the fishing fleets, dodging enemy aircraft and armed shipping,my mother would fill the darkening evenings with stories of the 1st.World War (or Great War as it was more commonly known.
While my father and his fellow fishermen defended themselves with a Lewis gun mounted in the bows of their trawlers and later,when that weapon was removed to defend the evacuation fleets off Dunkirk,with a trench mortar,my mother would comfort herself with talk of her mother's fight for family survival after my grandfather's death in France in 1916.
But that was to come.This was the now we were later to wish might have lasted for ever.

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