Interview with Jack and Jean Howes

Interview with Jack and Jean Howes

Jack Howes was born in 1933 in Nottingham. His father was a machine engineer and by the start of the war they were living in Lincoln where he worked for Ruston-Bucyrus. His father was then transferred to Grantham and had to live there during the week. His mother also worked full time at a printing works in Lincoln. Jack recites various experiences of what it was like to be a child in wartime Lincoln. On one Friday evening, when he and other boys were going across South Common, an aircraft flew over very low, skimming the treetops. The boys dived to the ground, onto their backs to watch it. They saw a man in the nose manning a set of two guns and they identified it as a German aircraft. It then flew off towards Canwick Hill. On another day, Jack was out fishing when six Spitfires flew over low and proceeded to carry out various aerobatic manoeuvres. At night he could hear the bombers circling overhead as they gathered together to set off on bombing operations. He also talks about rationing, the lack of sweets, chewing liquorice wood, and aircraft spotting posters in his bedroom. Jean Howes was born in in 1935 and lived in Derbyshire at the start of the war. Her part of the interview starts at 26:04. She recalls her school where they had to carry their gas masks, and each child had an emergency kit in an old tobacco tin. If the air raid siren went she had to walk home until the all-clear sounded. Though her father had dug a shelter in the garden, they tended to shelter in a cupboard under the stairs in the house. The family’s food ration was supplemented by produce grown in their large allotment.

2018-06-11

00:37:12 audio recording

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

AHowesJ-J180611

CB: This interview is being conducted for the International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive. The people being interviewed are Jack and Jean Howes. The interviewer is myself, Cathy Brearley. The date is Monday the 11th of June 2018 and the interview is taking place in Jack and Jean’s home in Lincoln. So, I’ll start with you then, Jack.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: How old were you when war broke out and whereabouts were you living?
JH1: Can I give you my date of birth because I’m no good with dates?
CB: Yes.
JH1: Yeah. 25th of April. Now, that were —
JH2: 1933.
JH1: 1933. That’s right.
JH2: You were born.
JH1: 25th of April.
CB: Right.
JH2: And the war started in 1945.
CB: So, you were really quite young then weren’t you?
JH1: I would think I were about ten years old.
JH2: No. Younger than that.
JH1: At a guess. Oh. Younger.
CB: Ten when the war ended.
JH1: Well, it would be. Well, it definitely weren’t ended then.
JH2: 1945 you were —
CB: So, whereabouts were you living? You were in, grew up in Lincoln.
JH1: St Andrews Street, Lincoln.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Which is not far from where it all happened.
CB: Yeah. So, tell me about what you heard and saw.
JH1: Well, the big aircraft coming from our right hand side. We were used to big aircraft. But this one was skimming the tops of the trees and there was a man sat in the front of it holding two guns. And as he went by he looked at us.
CB: And you realised the aircraft was not a British one.
JH1: Well, what we did, like we did every time you know you were out on the Common. That’s where we were. That if a big aeroplane came low you dived on the thing and shouted, ‘It’s a German.’ And when I rolled over [pause] as, as we laid on our, laid on our backs shouting ‘It’s a German,’ it slowly passed by. And then as we rolled over on to our backs to have another look I realised it was a German aircraft.
CB: And then it headed off.
JH1: No. It continued across the Common missing the trees on Canwick Hill by a very small amount and then carried on to where would be Washingborough, Branston. Not Branston. Where? Towards Bardney.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: It would cross. I thought it was following. Retrospectively —
CB: Yeah.
JH1: I thought it was following the Witham.
CB: Very possible.
JH1: You know.
CB: Very possible.
JH1: Heading to the coast. And it was flying so low that it wouldn’t be observed. But what my question retrospectively was what happened to it? What happened to the pilot? Or the bloke with the guns.
CB: And it was the only aircraft in the sky at the time.
JH1: Oh. There was nothing. No. It was about 6 o’clock on a Friday if I remember rightly and, you know it was dead quiet. And it sort of looked, heard the engines coming, we were used to that. And then it got bigger and we thought, well I thought, well it’s flying very, very low. And then as it came parallel with us more or less we dived on our backs shouting, ‘It’s a German. It’s a German.’
CB: And you were used to hearing aircraft.
JH1: Oh yeah.
CB: Because you heard the —
JH1: Well —
CB: Our aircraft going off on operations.
JH1: Well, yes, at night time you were kept awake by the aircraft circling. We thought they were around more or less where the Cathedral was until they all got grouped together and their destinations worked out and then it went quiet.
CB: That must have been quite a noise when there was a lot of them.
JH1: Well, it was a drone. You know, if I see any of those I can, as soon as I hear it, it’s a recording I know what it was.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Because they all had a different sound. Yeah. The bombers of ours that was going backwards and forwards had a sound which you got used to and you knew and recognised but you would sort of lay half asleep and hear droning. Then all of a sudden nothing.
CB: And as a young boy did you become interested in aircraft spotting and identifying?
JH1: Well, we all did.
CB: You did.
JH1: Well, it was part of —
CB: Yeah.
JH1: You could posters from the Ministry of whatnots. I can’t remember it. Beautiful colour photographs of Spitfires to hang in your bedroom.
CB: Oh right. Yeah.
JH1: And they, there’s, well I’ll tell you a little story which is, I got appendicitis.
CB: Okay.
JH1: And mum took me up to the hospital and I was prepared with painting all this orangey stuff all over me and waiting ‘til the surgeon came. The door opened and the surgeon came through and he had a plate in his hand with two slices of toast because there’d been a crash.
[recording paused]
JH1: That was it. And I never had my appendix out. A bit different isn’t it? [laughs]
CB: So obviously it wasn’t appendix trouble after all.
JH1: Well, apparently not but he would have gone ahead if it hadn’t crashed. There was a crash at Waddington I think it was. Came in and said, you know, ‘We’ll postpone it. You’ll have to come back later. Another day.’ And he came in with two slices of toast.
CB: That’s an unusual consequence of war that —
JH1: It is. Weird isn’t it?
CB: And war times.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: It’s something that, it isn’t one that we typically think of at all is it?
JH1: No. No.
CB: No. What about your parents? Did they serve?
JH1: No. No.
CB: Or involved in any war work of any sort?
JH1: No. My dad was a machine engineer and he was whatever it were. He didn’t go. But we moved from Nottingham, we lived. That’s where I was born. Brought into Lincoln so he could be at Rustons Bucyrus or Ruston’s Hornsbys. And as soon as we all got settled in at 82 St Andrews Street he was sent off to Grantham, and he had to live in digs and only came home occasionally on a Sunday.
CB: And what was he doing in Grantham then? The same work for the same company?
JH1: Well, he was a machinist. He was what they called a precision machinist, what turn, very precision parts that went in to instrumentation.
CB: And were they making parts for aircraft? Or –
JH1: Well, they would.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Yeah. Which may, reminds me of something else.
CB: Go on.
JH1: Well, we used to go everywhere by cycle and one day I was down Doddington Road way which was all ballast pits and there were, it was just after the war this was and there was a big RAF lorry tipping a load of instruments into the pits to bury them.
CB: Really.
JH1: Yeah. I know what they were because I was an apprentice electrician and somehow one or two fell off the lorry [laughs] which I sort of took and they were, they were well I know what they were, they were ammeters, because that’s what they would use but they were wrapped in grease and in greaseproof paper in a very strong cardboard box which was full of grease and then dumped into the pit. So somewhere along that length of road there’s either a house built over a huge thing of bomber spares. Well, it’s true. And he saw me. The bloke who, the officer in charge who was stood there like this. He saw me and the next time I went to see if I could get some more because the blokes who I worked with were amateur radio people and you just couldn’t get milliammeters, they were like gold. And I suddenly returned, turned up with two of these in absolutely immaculate condition. They said, ‘Go back and find some more.’ [laughs] But then he’d put barbed wire around it. And that was what I was going to tell you.
CB: So, if somebody gets a metal detector out down there they might have a bit of a shock.
JH1: Well, yeah. I mean a lorry load. How many times the lorry went I don’t know because when he saw me and waved I cleared off sort of thing. But you know you could imagine down there is probably all sorts of instruments that were been ordered but were now redundant.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Which leads me on to something else. Well, at Skellingthorpe, Doddington Road there was an aerodrome down that way and it had loads and loads and loads of these ten tonne bombs.
CB: Really?
JH1: Massive bombs. But my interest or our interest was they had little red propellers on the end and we found out how you could screw them off. You would walk around saying, ‘Yeah. I got four of these propellers or six of these propellers.’
CB: So collecting fragments of, or equipment.
JH1: No. They weren’t fragments. They were complete brand new bombs.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: You know, and you, well you could climb over. Well, we did. We climbed all over the damned things. I mean if any, well obviously they wouldn’t but if anything had gone up I think Skellingthorpe would have disappeared forever. You know, they were longer than this. Well, from that window to that window. That’s how long they were roughly and a huge diameter.
CB: So I suppose any of these parts that were found in any way were interesting to a young boy.
JH1: Well, you invented things, didn’t you?
CB: Yes.
JH1: You know, in the same as [laughs] I shouldn’t say this probably but the girls would collect the foil dropped.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Anti-radar foil. And they’d all come to school with these bracelets. And all made out of the foil. Aluminium foil and they were dropped to stop the radar.
CB: Yes.
JH1: Apparently.
CB: Yes.
JH1: As they came in to land at Waddington or wherever all around that’s what they would drop it. Which the amount of another thing.
CB: Yeah. It confused the radars didn’t it?
JH1: Yes.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: But there is, the next, we lived in Washingborough then and next door almost to our house was Mr — an old chap [pause] Anyway, a very old gentleman.
JH2: I’m trying to think of his name.
JH1: And he was the farm manager for Bardney Estates. And the last, well almost before he died I took him down around and he told me how they used to plough the fields with steam engines, but right down from the main road if you go down to the something called something corner apparently he claimed, he’ll tell you, they dropped a bomb you know and it went straight down there and nobody’s ever dug it up. There was a war. You know. It was so obvious. He says, you know and the thing is he had a lot of stories which you would have been interested in but nobody was collecting them.
CB: No. Do you remember any of his other stories?
JH1: Well, only in as far, well, yeah. I could. There’s one or two. I don’t know whether you —
[recording paused]
JH1: There was a night when my sister [pause] and my mum and my aunt, we were in the Liberal Club in Lincoln which was a social place, on a Friday night. And then it was bombed. And I, I could better write this down actually because it starts off when we were fooling around running up and down because it was upstairs. Banging on the floor. We were making noise and we were told to stop it, you know. And it didn’t and it were bombs.
CB: How old was your sister compared to you?
JH1: She was about a year and a half older than me.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Yes. And anyway we were told to go down into the cellar and then my mum got worried because she’d noticed all these pipes in the cellar seeing as they were all hot water pipes, you know. They weren’t but still and decided that we would have to go home and we went home and all the way home —
[recording paused]
JH1: We went home. Oh no. Wait a minute. Missing everything. So my mother decided we should go home and we went up out of the cellar and opened the front doors and across the road was a mass of flames.
[recording paused]
CB: So, I imagine as a child then some of it would have been difficult to understand what was happening. But you had [pause] How about rationing and clothing shortages? Things like that?
JH1: Well, there were no sweets.
CB: No sweets.
JH1: No.
CB: No.
JH1: Well, there was a ration of sweets but it was so small you can’t really remember it. But everything was a shortage. The first pushbike I had I made up off the dumps. Yeah. Built it out of scraps. And when I finished spraying it and painting it, it looked like a brand new one. I was so proud. It might have been a brand new one.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: You know, everything. Well, there was no traffic on the roads because nobody had any petrol presumably. But the first time I went from Lincoln to, not Branston. It’s Washingborough. There was two of us on a three wheel bike. One stood on the other, on the one pedal. Then we swapped over. I went to see one of them’s aunt who couldn’t believe where we’d come from.
CB: Did your parents grow their own vegetables at all?
JH1: Well, no because we didn’t have any gardens. Streets. Oh, well, it was so small my mum, well my mum had a full time job because when I left, when I left school they used to go down to the printing works that was in Lincoln, a small place and wait until she finished what she were doing.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: She was operating machinery. There was no, well it was so small it wasn’t, well it was about half as big as this. This, this thing. And of course we had, my dad was away. Away at the time.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: My mother was working full time. So that, you know there wasn’t real, plus the fact that we lived, at the end of our street in St Andrews Street here is just not far from, but there was a farm. Well, there was a huge bunch of allotments there and there was also a huge bunch of allotments which are still there up at the top of the hill. You know those allotments against the Bomber Command base.
CB: Oh I know. Yes. At the top.
JH1: It was there then.
CB: The top of Canwick Hill. Yes.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Well, it was just as busy growing things and I think they purchased, you know for fresh vegetables. In fact, you used to go up to the, underneath the railway arch in Lincoln. We would go and take a can and get the fresh milk out the cow. You know, all those sorts of things were there. Yeah. Yeah. You did. Oh, I’ll tell you what I used to [pause] liquorice wood submarines. We had no sweets but you could get, have you never heard of liquorice wood?
CB: Yes. I’ve heard of it.
JH1: You can chew it.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: And I’ll tell you something else I shouldn’t [laughs] I happened, this was I suppose a different thing. In a factory in China walking around looking at different machinery and stuff and lo and behold there was a big pile of the liquorice wood. And when I started picking it up and eating it the other people said, ‘Don’t do that it might poison you.’ ‘No. It’s good.’ [laughs]
CB: So that was somewhere you went years later.
JH1: Oh yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Yeah. Nothing. It was just —
CB: So —
JH1: Just reminded me. Well, it triggers your mind doesn’t it?
CB: It does.
JH1: Sort of things
CB: You wouldn’t have expected to have found that in a factory in China, would you?
JH1: No. No. It’s, but if I can remember suddenly there was a shop on the High Street where Dixon Street ends. She had a little, she sold food, no. Not food [pause] confectionary and things like that, and it went around. Oh, that’s another one. She, she went around, it went around the schools that she’d got some kali. This was the first kali that we’d ever tasted and immediately she was inundated with all the school kids grabbing the [unclear] because they wanted some kali. That was the first time since the war started you had anything because there was nothing.
CB: And when the war ended obviously there was National Service. Was that still happening when you got to that age or not?
JH1: No. I didn’t.
CB: No. It had ended.
JH1: I was too far back for that before that started. No. Yeah. Interesting
CB: Well, thank you. Yes.
[recording paused]
JH1: We were going on to the Common because we were going to the top of the hill to the allotments. That’s why we were there. And I can tell you the place where it happened within a few feet because I was there the other day because that’s where I walk from. But the, we come up these, there was a passageway comes up from Lincoln up to where the Common starts and there’s a passageway opposite. I think it went over the railway bridge. Over the railway bridge. Then around to the allotments and then under another railway bridge and along the way when we were with my sister and my mum going home we went from shelter to shelter because on the street sides there was huge concrete shelters which my mum thought we should stop in each one. And while we were in there we could hear all the guns flying trying to shoot the aircraft down. You know. But the other thing is I’ve never seen a record of this because where we were originally at the Liberal Club wasn’t far from the cinema and the cinema was packed apparently.
CB: The cinema was — ?
JH1: Packed.
CB: Packed.
JH1: With people.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: And it’s when they, you know when you see the pictures on the news of that time of people bombed and the whole things aflame. That’s what I saw.
[recording paused]
CB: One day I’d gone down with my dog. I won’t give you his name. I just—
CB: No.
JH1: But I went with my dog as I used to in the school holidays and sat there fishing and a Spitfire appeared. Went [whoosh] just above the water.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Of course, I was going —
CB: Yes.
JH1: And then six of them came.
CB: Oh.
JH1: For about ten minutes I had my own private Spitfire.
CB: Spitfire display.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: And when, you know.
CB: Well, you were certainly living in the right, right county for seeing the aircraft.
JH1: Well, they were obviously practising but then they see me jumping up and down waving my arms, it was quite.
CB: So they went up and down.
JH1: Up and down.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Come straight down the river upside down.
CB: Wow.
JH1: A few feet above the water.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: But then that’s probably what they were training for.
CB: Well, yes. Obviously there was, there were training units as well as operational.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: Active units. Yeah.
JH1: I mean there was a lot of, a lot of things like that would happen but it was just, you know. Another one. Yeah. But, yeah.
CB: And today we get very excited about the Red Arrows who are practising.
JH1: Yes [laughs] Yeah, because when you think that those lads who were driving them were not a lot older than me.
CB: No. They were very young.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: So, but no it lasted for about ten minutes.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: They were doing things with a Spitfire which presumably they shouldn’t have done [laughs]
CB: Training.
JH1: Yeah.
CB: Manoeuvres and —
JH1: Yeah. I mean at the same time the railway was active and there were steam trains going up and down. But you know it just came out the blue and then they disappeared and I’m there, and the only one that ever saw it.
CB: I know sometimes they dip their wings, don’t they? To acknowledge people on the ground who are waving.
JH1: Oh, these were going like that. Sideways.
CB: Sideways.
JH1: And upside down. Well, they were —
CB: Amazing.
JH1: And the more I run up and down waving my keep net. Yeah.
CB: That was a memorable fishing trip.
JH1: Yeah. It was. And nobody ever heard of it.
CB: Well, they have now.
JH1: They have now. Yeah.
CB: They have now.
[recording paused]
JH1: I think we were, we were told at school. We were still at school that a bomber destroyed a house in, I think it was De Wint Avenue. I’m not quite sure but the thing was it got around the school and of course all the kids jumped on their bikes and we’ll go and have a look at it.
CB: Off down to the De Wint Avenue to have a look.
JH1: Yeah. Yeah. But there was another one that comes out of this. Because there was no sweets there was a firm called Barkers and Lee Smiths who crushed peanuts for the oil. They would come down the Witham in barges and then a big hooky thing would go in. But the thing was that it would go around the school there was a barge in and immediately you’d go home, scrounge a brown paper bag off your mum, then go and sit on the railings [laughs]
CB: Wasn’t there —
JH1: Sit on the railings and try and get the men to give, put a shovelful of peanuts out. That’s where you got our sweets from.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: And you know, of course there were all these kids and there, the, the men on the barge would take pity on you and fill your bag up and that was your sweets.
CB: Yeah.
JH1: Anyway, that was it.
CB: Thank you.
[recording paused]
CB: So, moving on to you then, Jean. You were a child during the war, weren’t you? What do you remember?
JH2: Well, I was born in 1935 so I was four when the war started. My earliest memories are when I started at the Infant’s School which was just around the corner from where we lived. We used to take our gas masks on our shoulders. And in one of the classes we had like, I think you’d, I don’t know if you’d call it a first aid, an emergency kit. And we had a tin with a lid about eight inches by four. It was an old tobacco tin I remember. And in this tin we had a packet of raisins, some bandages, some safety pins. And that’s all I remember but each child in the class had one of these and it was stored. They were all stored in a cupboard and that was our emergency pack. And when there was an air raid the siren would go obviously and those who lived a long way from the school went to the shelters nearby. I lived nearby so I could walk home and then that’s where we stayed ‘til the all-clear went. And we got —
CB: And this, this was in Derbyshire.
JH2: This was in Derbyshire. Yes.
CB: In Shirebrook.
JH2: In Shirebrook. Yes. in a mining village. We didn’t actually see any action as such but I do remember lying in bed at night and hearing the drone which seemed to go on and on and on of the aeroplanes. And I can remember saying to my mother, ‘What are, what’s all that noise?’ And she would say, ‘Oh, it’s all the aeroplanes going to fight the war and keep us safe.’ So that was my memory of that. We never had any new toys. Everything was second hand. We didn’t have many toys anyway. I had a doll. One Christmas morning, I knew I always wanted a doll and I came downstairs and there in this chair was sat this doll and it had belonged to the daughter of a friend of mine and she’d cut nearly all its hair off. But, but my mother had made a really nice outfit for this doll. I can picture it now. And I thought it was wonderful. It meant so much and I’ve got such a clear recollection of it. That was one thing. We had a three wheeler bike which again was second hand. I had a brother who was eighteen months younger than me so he used to play on this bike. The doll’s pram I had had no hood on it. I don’t know where that came from but we accepted all these things because that’s the way it was and that’s the way the world was in those days. The ration books. I was the one who always spent the sweet ration first and it was, it wasn’t a lot really. But you know it meant a lot to us. I can remember queuing for food. My mother would send us shopping, and we’d go and queue. My dad had a huge allotment and I don’t know how he found time to do it all but everything we had came from the allotment and he worked very hard at it in between doing long hours working in the mine. Have a pause a minute. I’ve got to recollect my thoughts again now.
CB: Well, before we do that may I ask you your father was a miner.
JH2: Yeah.
CB: So I imagine that that was exempt from active service.
JH2: Yes. He was. Yeah. Yes. I can talk about that. And —
CB: So all those men carried on working obviously because we needed the coal for the power.
JH2: Yes. It was protected employment. Yes. And he used to cycle about three miles a day on a bike with no gears to work and then he would probably walk miles again underground and then cycle back home again and that was what he did every day. And sometimes he’d go and do what we called a double shift. He’d get, just get home because there was no communication, it was word of mouth. Somebody would come and say, ‘You’re needed again.’ So he had to do it again with no break in between. But again, that was the way it was.
CB: And did your mum work at all?
JH2: No. She didn’t. No. No. She kept everything going in the house and you know, just looked after us really. Yes. She was a very good housewife, sounds an old fashioned word now. But yes she did all the cooking, baking, made bread and all that kind of thing. It’s not exactly war related I suppose but that’s the way it was.
CB: It’s how life was.
JH2: It’s how life was. Yes. Yeah.
[recording paused]
JH2: My, my grandfather. My, my dad’s father he was a tin smith and he had his own business so obviously he wasn’t a protected occupation so he was sent to work in a munitions factory. And unfortunately, while he was working there he caught pneumonia and died. He was only forty four.
CB: That’s very young. Very young.
JH2: So in a sense that was an indirect result of what happened.
CB: Were they in Derbyshire? Near you.
JH2: Yes. In Derbyshire that was. Yeah.
[recording paused]
JH2: All, all children, well everybody had to have a gas mask and my brother because he was a little bit younger he had a Mickey Mouse gas mask. And we thought it was really funny. And I can remember the smell.
JH1: Oh yeah. I can.
JH2: Oh, it was a rubbery awful smell really, but again we just accepted it. It was just everybody had got one. It was just normal. Just part of how it was in the war.
CB: And the Mickey Mouse gas mask. It was so called because it had something at the sides that looked like ears. The big ears for Mickey Mouse.
JH2: Yes.
CB: Was that an all in one for a baby?
JH2: No. This was just for a smaller child. It was, I remember it was, it was coloured.
CB: What colour was it?
JH2: I can remember yellows and reds vaguely but it was quite different from the, the, what I called the black ones. But it was just the way life was.
CB: I think they had an all in one type of thing for a baby.
JH2: For a baby. Yes.
CB: [unclear]
JH2: I don’t remember those.
CB: No.
JH2: No. But it was just my brother who was that little bit younger and he had one. So that was quite, we thought it was funny really.
CB: And did you have an Anderson shelter?
JH1: Yes.
JH2: In the garden we had, yes an Anderson shelter and my dad actually dug it all out. How on earth he did it I don’t know but he went [pause] well you could stand up in it. So it was, it was deep into the ground and we had a seat in it, and over the top he put, how he did this I don’t know but it was the roof was railway sleepers which are really heavy and on top of that it was grassed. And we never actually used it as a shelter. We didn’t. We didn’t really have need to, but we used to play in it. And I can remember it smelt of dank damp earth and not very nice really but we thought it was fun. You know it was a fun thing to do to go and play in it.
[recording paused]
JH2: When the sirens went, if, very often it was at night so mother and dad would come and scoop us up, wrap us in our eiderdowns, take us downstairs and we had a cupboard under the stairs and we would sit in there until the all clear went. I can remember that really well. But again, we thought nothing of it.
CB: And that was supposed to be one of the safest places in the house.
JH2: Yes. It was. Under the stairs.
CB: Well, thank you both of you. Thank you ever so much for your time and for your stories. And I know you found parts of it distressing, Jack but you were keen to, to tell the stories. But thank you very much both of you. Thank you.
JH1: Thank you.