Liverpool May Blitz and some miracles, 1941

I had just turned 18 in the summer of 1940 and was working as a junior Civil Servant in the Public Trustee Office in London, when I was transferred to a Dept. of the War Office dealing with casualties to Army Officers.

After a period of training I was informed that the Dept. was re-locating to Liverpool and I would be based in the Blue Coat School in Wavertree, the children having been evacuated to a safer place.

We were to be billeted in private houses nearby and duly arrived in about mid-August, to find that the School had been adapted to the needs of a busy office and was all in readiness.

I was taken by the billeting officer to meet my new landlady - a Mrs Eadie Grayson. She and her husband, Bob, were a middle-aged childless couple with aa spare bedroom and so were 'pressed' into taking a Civil Servant as a lodger. They were very kind to me and we got on well together. My new address was Daffodil Road, Wavertree, L15.

Eadie received from the Govt. an allowance type of book and was paid 25/- a week in return for my bed, breakfast and evening meal. She told me later that some of the "press ganged" landladies (and there were many locally) would sometimes mutter as they collected their 25/- at the Post Office that the Civil Servants had a cushy life being kept by the Govt. She was quite surprised when I told her that her 25/- was deducted from my pay of 32/6d a week and that I was 'hard up' most of the time!

Going to Liverpool was the first time I had left my home in Croydon. I had been at school until the summer before. The 'times' were dangerous and my mother was worried about me. As a keepsake she gave me one of her most treasured possessions - a thin gold-plated bracelet given to her by my father on her wedding day. Taking it with her, she had gone with him to India on two separate tours of duty and sadly he had died there 9 years before. So it was indeed a precious gift she gave into my care, the day I left home.

I never did dare to wear the bracelet, but kept it in it's box in a drawer of the dressing table in my front bedroom at Daffodil Road.

Air raids were frequent and heavy all through the winter of 1940 and the Liverpudlians felt quite hard done by and felt their sufferings were minimised by the Press in comparison to the publicity given to cities like London, Coventry ect. The name of the city of Liverpool was never mentioned, but raids were just reported as having taken place on a "North West" port.

I think it turned out that it was a deliberate strategy for intelligence purposes.

Nothing prepared the city though for the German onslaught of the first week of May 1941 when they made a determined effort to put this vital port out of action. It was our life line for food and supplies from the U.S.A. and for troopships to and from the Middle East. It was a long and weary week sitting in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden for hours on end and then stumbling out at dawn to wash and change and go to the office.

On the night of 7th-8th May 1941 when the siren went, I decided that I had had enough, could take no more and would sleep through this one.

However, Eadie kept calling me to get up. She said Bob was on Fire Watching duties and she would be alone. At her insistence I got up, pulled a jumper and some trousers over my pyjamas and went downstairs.

It was bright moonlight as Eadie walked down the garden path carrying the budgie in it's cage. I followed and remarked that it was what folk called "a bombers moon". She reached the sheler, opened the door and began to walk down the steps into it, well below ground. I was following her, when suddenly I was blown in on top of her, the shelter door was blown off it's hinges and hit me in the back. It turned out that quite a few neighbours had also come into the shelter and there was also a little boy there.

Panic and pandemonium broke out in the cramped darkness and after what seemed an age, we heard voices and saw dimmed torches and we were all helped out by Air Raid Wardens, one by one. As we stood on the grass in the moonlight, a policeman came and took a roll call. Bob Grayson came rushing up, to see how we all were. It soon became evident that although he was some distance from the explosion he had been made totally deaf. He took out his cigarette case and offered one to the policeman, who took one. It turned out to be a perfect paper tube, there was no tobacco in it, or any trace of the case. The policeman said he would keep it as a souvenir.

Some while elapsed before the extent of the blast damage dawned on the stunned people of Daffodil Road. The air was filled with strange smells of plaster, brick and dust and explosive etc. It seems a parachute mine had landed in the centre of the road outside our house. The houses must have taken the full force of the blast and we were spared at the back. I learned after, that about 11 houses were demolished. Neighbours were killed and colleagues also from the office, living opposite, were killed in bed.

Various officials came and went as we stood around waiting - some to help, some at rather a loss as to what to do. One girl with vague memories of her First Aid lectures said "shouldn't we be tearing up sheets or something?" A swift reply from a neighbour soon scotched that idea. He said in his lovely scouse accent "Tear oop sheets, ain't there been enuff bloody destruction?" In any case there probably weren't any sheets.

Eventually we had all been assigned to various Rest Centres and walking still in bright moonlight, I followed a Warden till we reached this Church hall. I was given a cup of tea, and was shown a spot on the floor where I could lie down. 'Bombed out' people were all around me, wide-eyed and sleepless with shock. I too lay sleepless, thinking of my family and how upset they would have been had they known of my plight.

I left the Rest Centre at about 6 a.m. and made my way back to Daffodil Road. Something drew me to it, and I had nowhere else to go at that hour. The bombed part of the raod was roped off with a notice to "KEEP OUT". I slipped under the rope and located the rubble that had been Eadie's and Bob's house. Climbing over some bricks I disturbed some which moved with a clatter. The noise brought a policeman as if from nowhere. He asked me what I was doing there and hadn't I seen the notice. I explained that I had lived there and I wondered if I would find anything of mine. I wasn't thinking of anything in particular, though I did recognise parts of my bed!

We began to talk about the night before, and emboldened by my presence, some other people also slipped under the rope and began to poke about. The policeman lost patience and jumping up on a mound of bricks be called everyone over and said it was dangerous to be there and they must go away at once.

With that, he hent down and picked something out of the rubble. He held it up and said "does this belong to anyone here?" I looked ant couldn't believe my eyes - it was my mother's bracelet. I couldn't get the words out quickly enough "Oh it's mine, it's mine" I shouted.

He handed it to me, not knowing what a miracle it seemed to me - the much travelled bracelet had survived a parachute mine with just one small dent.

Then a second miracle happened. As I turned to go away, I saw a Postman standing by the roped off section, with his bag and a bundle of letters in his hand. I said to him "have you anything for Miss Hickie?", he replied "you are in luck, you have a letter from America". It was from my brother in Tennessee - a card for my 19th Birthday.

I sat down on a pile of bricks and opened it, and pondered on the fact that my letter had been safely brought across the submarine infested Atlantic, had been sorted in a city under siege from the air for seven solid nights and had been delivered to a house demolished by enemy action.

Most of all I was struck by the sheer coincidence of events, that I was there, when I could so easily have missed both the bracelet and the letter.

I got up and made my way to the office where I was able to wash and borrow some clothes from friends. I was taken to a doctor who gave me a sick certificate for a month off work. He wrote on it "Shell-Shocked". I then collected a travel warrant to my home station and to home I went, owning nothing but the bracelet and the birthday card.

I had nothing to put in a case, so travelled light. There was no one to counsel me, no one to give me a lift, so I got a tram from Penny Lane to the Pier Head and walked to Lime Street Station and so to Euston and my home in Croydon (where I was just in time for the heavy Air RAid over Croydon and London of May 10th).

The Office had contacted my Mother through 'Official Channels' so she was expecting me.

I returned to Liverpool after the month at home fully 'kitted-out' by my mother and was billed this time in Mosspits Lane, where I stayed until 1943 before being transferred back to London.

Having been sent to different Rest Centres, I was separated from Eadie and Bob that night. I never did find them again and never knew what happened to them.

By the grace of God and Eadie I survived to live a long a fulfilling life, and I would like to have thanked for even as she was urging me to get up, the mine must have been floating down in our direction.

It has always puzzled me why I have no recollection of ever hearing the explosion, yet I was so near to it.

I went back to Daffodil Road some years ago. The house had long since been re-built and the quiet air of suburbia was there again, as it was when first I saw it. Newcomers to the road would need a huge leap of imagination to appreciate the horrors of that night so long ago.

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