Mother went to Scarborough just twice in her life. The first visit was in August 1914, when she spent a holiday there with her parents. During their stay, the first World War began, and the German Navy shelled the coast.
The second time was on Friday, 1 September 1939. We were having a family holiday at Saltburn in East Yorkshire, and had made an excursion to Robin Hood’s Bay, walking from there over the cliffs to Scarborough. There were ugly rumours about affairs in Europe, and after lunch we gathered round a wireless set in the café to hear that Hitler had invaded Poland. Mother vowed that she would never go to Scarborough again! And she never did.
In the circumstances, a hasty retreat was indicated. The second week’s holiday was abandoned, and on the Saturday we set off for home, along with hundreds of other frustrated holiday-makers. The stations were full of evacuee children, and the journey was long and difficult.
While we had been away, we had loaned our house to some cousins of Mother; they had been faced with several problems during our absence. The first was the question of the black-out. They had managed to blank off a few windows with brown paper, but we knew little then of the total obscurity which the Air Raid Wardens would demand.
The second problem was the evacuees. A contingent of children had arrived in the village from Manchester, but in our absence our cousins had declined to take one in. By the time we arrived home, all the children had been found accommodation, so we unwittingly avoided having a young lodger. Many of the children came from the poorer quarters of the city, and I recall that my Aunt Florence tried vainly to instil middle-class manners into her young tearaway!
On Sunday morning we knew that the Prime Minister would broadcast at 11.15, and although we guessed what he would say, we felt constrained to listen. But Sunday morning meant Chapel – what should we do? Father settled the problem with a marvellous idea. Grandfather Heath (who lived but a stone’s throw from the Chapel) had a so-called ‘portable wireless’ – a cumbersome affair with external batteries, but with a self-contained aerial and loud-speaker. This apparatus (with the preacher’s permission) was taken into Chapel. After the opening devotions, the wireless was switched on; Big Ben boomed out the quarter, and we heard Neville Chamberlain’s words “ . . . . this country is now in a state of war with Germany.”
There must have been some restrained emotion in the building that day. One can imagine old Mrs Sutcliffe looking across the Chapel to the plaque on the wall which was erected in memory of her son Frederick, killed in action in France in 1917, and wondering if he had died in vain. Her daughter Florence would look at her husband (my uncle, Jack Chapman) sitting alongside her; he had been badly gassed in the first War, and had suffered from a chest problem throughout the remainder if his life. From her place in the choir, Prudence Renshaw would look at her husband Ernest in his usual seat at the back of the Chapel; he had served in France, and was now an Air Raid Warden. Sitting beside Prudence, Annie Morton might well have glanced over her shoulder at her husband Sydney on the back row of the choir; he, too, had come back safely from France. No doubt the Chapmans and Mortons breathed a sigh of relief that their sons were only eight years old, whilst Tom Sigley, sitting next to his lifelong friend Sydney, must have been glad that both his children were girls.
I am sure that my parents were concerned that I was now fifteen. If the war went on more than a couple of years, I might be called on to fight. And what of those young men associated with the Chapel and Sunday School who had already attained military age – Myles Arnfield, Fred Massey, Roy Dent?
The War had come at last, and it was the end of twenty-one years of fragile peace. So, too – almost symbolically – the summer came to an end, and a few more months saw the end of the thirties. I had suddenly grown up, and this was the end of my boyhood.
Mellor, like everywhere else in the world, would never be quite the same again.