Three Times Bombed: Birkenhead, Greenock and Devonport

I was, I think, 5 1/2 when the first bomb got us. A landmine outside the house we were lodging in, in Birkenhead - mother had decided we must be near father, who was on destroyers. The local cub reporter put me in the paper. "Sidney Barnes" she called me, having got Sidi Barani (a N African battle) into her head - I have head a healthy mistrust of the media ever since. The bomb brought down the ceiling of the room where I was sleeping. Father (covered in soot which had come down the living room chimney) rescued me from the brass bedstead which had propped up the ceiling: so he was black, I was white with plaster. He decided we should go to Greenock, where his ship was to sail from next (on the Russian Convoys). It was, he said, out of range of the German bombers. He was out of port when we arrived; when he returned three weeks later we had been rehoused, the digs we were living in having been destroyed in the first German raid on the Clyde. When we got back home to Devonport, my school had disappeared - and with it most of our possessions, looted from the home we rented there after the windows had been blown out. Somehow, the war seemed a little personal...

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