Nightworker

I could make out the house from across the green & all I wanted to do was climb into bed & sleep.

This morning we had to wait an hour or two for the 'all-clear' to sound. I was beyond being 'tired', dead on my feet was more like it. I was more asleep than awake & didn't know what I was doing. Last week I'd walked head down straight into a tree & smashed my glasses.

I was a night worker at Ferranti's, my job was to collect paperwork from here & deliver it there. All I was told was that we were working for the Navy, & sometimes I had to go in areas permanently policed where only a pass would get you through. I remember seeing a screen which was hissing & crackling, with wavy lines going all over it. We'd call it a television now, or a monitor, & it's only a guess but I think on reflection it must have had something to do with radar.

It seemed liked I'd never seen proper daylight in years. I used to dream about walking in the sunshine through The Clough with my friends. I could see the lake from my bedroom window but it seemed like a different world. Before they put him in a factory, too, my dad had been the Park Keeper in Debdale Park, Newton Heath. Parks, with their greens, bushes, trees & lakes meant a lot to my family.

I've always loved trees, not that I could ever tell you what name it was labelled with, but their strength & elegance always touched me. My favourite was in The Clough. For me, it stood alone in more ways than one.

The day the bomb fell I was on my own in the house. When I heard the wistle I froze & thought - 'this is it', & when it stopped for those few terryfying seconds, I tensed, expecting the worst.The huge crash came & shook the floor but I was still alive. I looked out of the window & saw the smoke. It looked like it was coming from The Clough. I found out later that 'my' tree had taken a direct hit.

It would have been no consolation to know that that six or seven years later my two boys would play in that crater, sometimes, & pretend it was all happening again.

I'll never forget the night my dad died. The news came to me in the factory that he was ill & I begged the foreman to be allowed to go to him but they wouldn't let me. I was told afterwards that he had asking for me & that made it worse.

Sixty years later I hate that war now more than ever. I didn't know then, that I was going to meet Frank. Frank had been captured in Singapore along with the whole army & sent by the Japs to Burma. For more than four years they'd put him to work on the Death Railway, that Bridge on the River Kwai, too, & when it was finished and most of his mates were dead, they threw what were left into Changi, to rot for all they cared.

We married in 1946. Frank was a wonderful man and we had two sons, Frank jnr in 1947, & Michael in 1948.

Post war Manchester was almost as hard as it had been in the war. Rations for everything & precious little money to buy it with. Coming home to 'the land fit for heroes' we were allocated a two bedroomed 'prefab' in Wythenshaw.

We decided to start a new life in New Zealand, lots of ex servicemen & their families were. We had to go for two or three medicals each & passed them all. Things were looking up.

A week later Frank was dead.

The war did that to us as well. He was carrying illnesses like malaria, dysentery & cholera, he was still having injections but we thought he was over it. He had cirhosis of the liver, too, courtesy of the handful of rice a day that had sustained his brave spirit in captivity. He'd never say a word about the war to me, he knew I was too sensitive, but he told my mother everything. There was so much I never knew until it was too late, too late to tell him how terribly sorry I was for the suffering he was put through.

The day the bomb fell on The Clough, they'd been looking for us again, I suppose. They were always trying to get us. Avro's was just down the road a bit. They were making bits for planes, I'd been told, but they never quite managed to get either of us. I expect the camouflage helped.

They were good at killing nurses though. It was terrible when the news came, thirty of them slaughtered just down the road as they were leaving the hospital after their shift.

I could make out the house from across the green & all I wanted to do was climb into bed & sleep.

There it was, Charlestown Road, just across the green. How I longed for my bed. I don't remember hearing or thinking about anything, I was too tired.

It came as a shock when I heard the Warden swearing at me!

"Get back you idiot! Get down, get down!"

Too late. The engine of the plane was screaming. How could I have not heard it? It seemed to be right above me. It was right above me! The guns started hammering and turf flew everywhere. Now it was my turn to scream.

I fell down on the grass & thought the bomb had saved me for this. I was going to die. And then, until the next time, it was over again.

"What the **** do you think you're playing at, miss? Didn't you hear me telling you to wait? There's an air raid on, you idiot!"

He looked me up up & down as though I were some unidentified species, then the anger turned to concern as I started crying.

"Are you all right, miss?" he asked, feeling a little bit sorry for me. "There, there, come on now, let's get you home".

Later that day, the news came that the American Gun Battery on Broadhurst Field had shot down a fighter early that morning.

I remember looking out of my bedroom window, at the lake in the Clough. I thought what a horrible war this was without knowing the half of it.

I didn't know Frank, then.

As I was being shot at, he'd have been slaving in Burma, feeling the butt of the Japs rifle in his ribs as they swore at him to 'speedo!', sweating with the heat & malaria, watching helpless as another dead friend was pushed off a cliff or thrown in the undergrowth.

At least, when someone swore at me that day, they did it because they cared.

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