Gut Feelings

A photo of the Louisa Street Bombing

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/familys-blitz-memories-shared-and-displayed

 Rachel’s post about gut feelings held a certain resonance with me today.

I wouldn’t be here today, if my Grandmother had not listened to her gut feeling during an air raid over Liverpool in 1940, Nor would another 20 or so members of my family.

One gut feeling meant that two dozen others plus would exist.

She used to tell a good tale of it. 

So did my mother who was a girl of fifteen at the time,

But there they were in 1940 running through the Liverpool streets during an air raid. My grandmother, my mother and my uncle Jim who was around ten years old at the time

My family had three choices. 

They could either go to the public shelter which was furthest away or run to the family shelter in Louisa Street Everton where my grandmother’s in laws had congregated, their last choose was to make  for the nearby school.

The school was slightly further, but my grandmother had been promised a single “ reinforced” room just for her own use in it, so she was torn between the choices.

My mother remembered than the bombers were already turning at St George’s Church, the highest point of that part of the city when my grandmother stopped in the road unsure of which shelter to make for.

She prayed and her gut feeling made her turn for the school.

The bombs were falling when they fling themselves onto the school floor, and nearby explosions brought in windows and doors as the Louisa Street Shelter suffered a direct hit which brought the roof in onto my paternal family fatally injuring  my great grandfather instantly and killing seven others. 

Just tonight I found my great grandfather’s name James Samual Fry in the official Liverpool and Merseyside Bombings Blogsites on line

My grandmother followed her gut feeling that night and soon after, with family dead and no home to go back to , she followed that little voice in her head and took her family to wales where she settled in the back of a small shop, in the village of Gwaenysgor, just a mile or so from Trelawnyd.

I will leave you with this lovely song

from Going Gently https://ift.tt/2VLNFql

Selston

St Helen's Church, Selston - predates the era of coal by several centuries

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway-line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped beneath the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak-leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. 

First lines of "Odour of Chrysanthemums"  by D.H.Lawrence (1910)

_____________________________

See above. These were the first lines I read as I began my A level English Literature course at Beverley Grammar School in the East Riding of Yorkshire in September 1970. For some odd reason, I have always remembered that reference to Selston and today I visited the place for the very first time.

I had just driven Frances and Phoebe down to nearby Sutton-in-Ashfield where they met up with Stewart  ahead of a long drive down to Surrey. They are spending the weekend down there with several members of Stewart's family. Our rendezvous was the "Costa" coffee shop by the A38.

A small, thin house - Mansfield Road, Selston

I expected Selston to be a grim post-industrial mining village which had had the heart ripped out of it by Thatcher in the eighties but it turned out to be quite a pleasant place with many nice private houses along with streets of social housing. The days of coal mining are long gone now and if he could rise from his grave in New Mexico, D.H. Lawrence would hardly recognise "The Land of My Heart" as he once called this corner of Nottinghamshire.

By the way, when Frances was getting the coffees in "Costa", two women - probably a mother and daughter - cooed with delight when I  lifted Phoebe from her car seat.  They commented on her lovely eyes and her general cuteness. As a proud grandpa, I was, as folk will often say in England, "right chuffed".

Horses by Nottingham Road in Selston

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/37JXPKl

Friday happies.

 My favorites today 

A nice shrimp dinner

Happy mail

A new word search

Vaccines 

And most importantly, I don’t have to convince of my opinions. 

That’s not my job

It’s to love you

Despite your shortcomings 

As I try

To the same

For myself 

Please pray for a dear friend’s husband as they determine the type of cancer and it’s severity. Thank you so much for your prayers. 

from R's rue https://ift.tt/3sciGzc