Welcome to my podcast, 'John Scott Lawton's English, You Know'.
In this personal episode, I interview my 88-year-old mother, Muriel Lawton, about her experiences as a child growing up during the Second World War. She was evacuated, or moved, from the city of Manchester in England, to go to live with two families that she didn't know at first. In 1939, she was evacuated to Mobberley in Cheshire, just south of Manchester, which was then a perceived target of German bombers at the start of the war. When these attacks didn't come, she went back home to Manchester after just a few months, only to be re-evacuated the following year (1940) when Manchester, a large industrial city in the north of England, was indeed the target of a very heavy German bombing campaign.
During this second evacuation, Muriel as a seven year-old child, lived with a vicar or rector's family in Rode Heath, again in Cheshire, in the countryside bordering Staffordshire, again to the south of Manchester. She stayed there for over three and a half years, only seeing her mother once during all that time.
There are a couple of trigger warnings associated with this episode. First, my mother describes the distressing scenes that she witnessed as a young child following overnight bombing raids on Manchester, involving the discovery of dead bodies and body parts. These episodes prompted my mother's second evacuation to the perceived safety of the English countryside. Second, although my mother greatly enjoyed her own experiences of living with new families, other children were not so lucky, and we talk briefly about the fact that some children suffered abuse at the hands of host families; the children being made to work almost as forced labour by the people who were supposed to be caring for them.
The purpose of making this podcast is to save my mother's stories for my children, her grandchildren, and indeed now her great grandchildren to listen to, in her own words and her own quiet voice, as she recalls her lived experiences from a very challenging time in our history as Europeans. Such reminiscence work is, I believe, vital in to order to keep these stories alive and to learn from the very challenging lessons of the past.
A few years ago, my father-in law, now deceased, Sidney Witham, told his wartime stories as part of the BBC's written memories project, 'The People's War'. His story and that of his wife, Kathleen, can be found at:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/73/a2799273.shtml (Sidney Witham) and
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/68/a2799868.shtml (Kathleen Witham).
For more information about this podcast series, or to make any comments or to ask any questions relating to English Language learning, please contact me at [email protected] or visit my LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-scott-lawton/ or my company page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/john-scott-lawton-consulting/?viewAsMember=true
Please use a sound comment if using the Anchor App, if possible, to ask any questions or to comment on the language used in this podcast.
Finally, please take a look at my website where I post additional content to support this podcast series: https://johnscottlawtonsenglishyouknow.wordpress.com/
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