THERE can be a silver lining in the darkest of clouds, as reader Eileen Rimmer points out while picking up on our 'bomb raids on St Helens' theme, which has echoed through this page for the past couple of months.

It's surprising how neighbourly and chirpily-optimistic folk were during those wartime years; and Eileen's little tale is a particularly heart-warming one.

Writing from her home in Humber Crescent, Sutton Leach, about those terrifying German bombing raids, she reveals: "A happy event happened during all that!"

At the time, the family of Eileen (nee Critchley) lived in Hillside Avenue.

"While we were all hidden under the table in the kitchen," she recalls, "my mother was in a little bed at the side of us and was delivered of her third son. The plaster cracked over her, in the corner of the ceiling, when the bomb dropped in Gamble Avenue."

But, happily, the family escaped unscathed.

"I was only about seven or eight at the time," adds Eileen, "but it is one thing that has stuck in my mind from the war. My dad (he had already served in France during the 1914-18 war) constantly patrolled the cemetery area as an air-raid warden."

In common with the rest of war-torn Britain, the district displayed indomitable spirit. "Windlehurst was a happy and neighbourly area," she signs off, "and everyone stuck together."

ANYONE else got a personal memory of the second world war to share with us? If so, please write to me at the Star.