During the second World War, cousins Joyce Sumner and Kathleen O’Conner lived at No 14 and No 11 Lostock Fold respectively. Their Auntie Maggie lived at No 13.

Joyce started at St Saviour’s Mixed and Infants Church of England School in Lostock Hall in 1938 and Kathleen in 1939. Fashion conscious even in those days, every girl had to have a pixie hat and, if your mother hadn’t knitted you one, you made one by turning the end of your scarf inside out and stitching it down.

Before they had an air-raid shelter in the grounds of the school, different members of staff had different ideas of what was a safe place when the sirens went off to warn of enemy planes overhead. Once the headmaster put them under the stage which Kathleen thinks was a very dangerous thing to do; another member of staff herded them into the cloakroom where there were glass windows everywhere; and another took them into the toilets which seemed a bit of a safer bet. When the shelter was built, no-one ever went in it. "It was too scary" the girls remember.

Although they can’t remember living in awful fear, they had been taught to tell the difference between British and German planes by the sound they made. German planes "chugged" they say. One day, coming home from school, they were sure the plane approaching was "chugging" so they dived under the hedge and stayed there, huddled together, until it was gone. To this day they don’t know whether it was German or not.

Kathleen’s father, Terrence O’Conner was in the Home Guard at Lostock Hall.

Terrence O’Conner is second from the right standing. Notice that he and some of the other men are wearing service ribbons. Terrence had lied about his age in 1916 and enlisted in the army.

Terrence is pictured here (left) at a training camp in Yarmouth in 1916. Later that year he was fighting in the trenches in France, aged 16 years.

At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Home Guard at Lostock Hall. They met in a sports pavilion at the back of a pub and Kathleen would go with him on Sunday mornings.

After a while they got their uniforms and rifles and great camaraderie developed between the men. They put on a concert in the pavilion. Kathleen’s dad was the comedian - under strict instructions from his wife not to tell any "dirty" jokes as there would be ladies there.

In his spare time, Terrance made wooden toys as presents for the local children and kept about 20 or so very noisy budgerigars in a shed at the back of the house.

About 10pm one night, during World War II, when Auntie Maggie was visiting Kathleen’s family at No 11 and Joyce was in bed at No 14, there was an "unholy bang". The Germans were dropping incendiaries to light up the area with a view to bombing a significant target — the girls think Leyland Motors — and one had dropped on the roof of No 11 Lostock Fold.

Terrence ordered his wife, mother-in-law, Kathleen and Auntie Maggie under the table while he went outside to investigate. Joyce’s mother must have rushed to the bottom of the stairs to get Joyce; Joyce can remember dashing to the top of the stairs and seeing her mother there but cannot recall how she got down or anything else after that.

Kathleen disobeyed her dad and followed him out into the street. "It was like daylight!" she says.

Next day they heard that one had dropped on the nearby convalescent home (now St Catherine’s Hospice) and killed a woman in her bed. All the budgerigars had died of shock.