Time & Place: When my family fled the bombs

A Lancaster terrace sheltered novelist Wendy Robertson, and the Canadian airman who came back for her mother

One day in 1940, my father came home and said to my mother: “Pack your bags, we’re going to Lancaster.”
He was working in the aircraft industry in Blitz-torn Coventry and his factory was being transferred. My mother, who was pregnant with me, was on the train with my toddler brother and sister the next day.

No 44 Vale Road was requisitioned for our family and we lived there for the duration of the war. I was born there on March 10, 1941.

It was a lovely house, with a bay window and a long narrow garden with a gate inside the tall wall at the end. My father taught my mother to ride a bike in the back lane. She was pretty but she was plump, and I will always remember her wobbling along with my father holding the seat.

I think it was a turn-of-the-century suburban terrace. I used to think of it as a fairy-tale house. It had a cellar: I always wanted to end up in a house with a cellar because it seemed like a special place. My father was very inventive and used to make things down there. According to my mother, he invented the ballpoint pen, but I think Bic got in first. He used to write long letters, while my mother was a great storyteller and reader.

There were three bedrooms, and a spare room beyond the bathroom. I shared the middle room with my sister and when my mother had another son, the two boys shared a room. The army used to go round to the houses in the district and if anybody had a spare bedroom you had to take in a soldier. During the war, we had a Canadian soldier billeted. He looked very glamorous in his uniform and he was the first man my mother knew who manicured his nails. In later years, she told me that he wanted to take me back to Canada with him, because children were seen to be at risk during the war. Looking back, I wonder what my mother’s relationship was with this Canadian.

We used to listen to war reports on the radio in the little sitting room. There was a three-piece suite, a sideboard, a fireplace with decorative objects and a pile of books. My mother’s nephew was in the army. Towards the end of the war, she received a letter saying he had been killed. He was only about 20. She put the folded letter behind the clock on the mantelpiece; I remember looking at that letter and feeling her sadness.

Several weeks after we moved to Lancaster there was a bombing nearby. Mother said: “Oh, the buggers have followed us here.”

When you are brought up in the war, the experience really imprints itself on your soul. Many of my novels have wartime sequences; The Long Journey Home, about the fall of Singapore, is set from 1941-1946.

I remember the street party for VJ Day, celebrating victory over Japan, in 1945. All the children were in European national costumes and I was dressed as a Dutch girl. There was a feeling of great relief, the good winning over the bad.

When my father died in 1949, our little world came tumbling down. He had asthma and this was before you could get help for it. My mother went back north to her family in Co Durham to build a new life. I look back on our home in Vale Road as a special place because it was the last time we were all together.

The Canadian came looking for my mother in the 1950s. He went to Lancaster and Coventry asking neighbours where she was, but he must have given up.

A few years ago, I wanted to show my daughter this special house, so I took her there. I walked up and down the street feeling emotional, but I didn’t dare knock on the door and ask, “Can I come in?”