MEMORY man Joe Seddon remembers it well - the day when the folk from around his old Parr neighbourhood were eating free onions for weeks. And it was all courtesy of a German bomber which dropped a stick of explosives on to a large allotment off Morgan Street, blasting onions out of their huge bed and scattering them far and wide.

"It was the only favour that Jerry did us during the second world war," chuckles Joe, a fit and wiry 68-year-old who can be spotted vigorously pedalling his gleaming yellow mountain bike around town.

"In those tough times of wartime rationing, it was a rare treat for the local families who sent their kids out to trace the onions and bring 'em back for the pot."

The onions were really the property of a makeshift training centre known locally as the Dole School, set up some time in the 'thirties.

Its trainees - jobless teenagers - had carefully cultivated that land , dubbed Th'onion Beds, as part of activities designed to keep idle hands busy and out of mischief.

"I don't exactly know what other lessons they got," jokes Joe, who now lives at Islands Brow, Haresfinch, "but knowing some of those Parr lads, I suspect that pitch-and-toss, pontoon and other gambling games were high on this list."

What prompted Joe's stream of boyhood recollections was my recent piece (March 28) about a local history project being carried out by pupils of Allanson Street primary school.

Joe's one of the school's old boys, having attended there from 1931 until 1938, the year of his greatest sporting highlight.

He was in the all-conquering Allanson Street soccer team which won the St Helens inter-schools cup, winning the final 6-nil and without conceding a single goal in the earlier rounds.

Joe still glows over popping in a couple of goals in that final (he still has his championship medal on his key-ring) and recalls that Jimmy Anders and Jimmy Marsh, two well-known Parrers in their day, also helped themselves to a brace apiece.

He can't quite recall who the 'Ally Bobs' beat in that final of 58 years ago - " but I do remember that their captain was Jimmy Stott."

Legendary Jimmy, who died in 1994, later became Saints skipper and a Test match centre.

Joe also recalls the old pre-war feeding centre, a tin-hut sort of building not far from the Allanson Street school. Pupils whose parents were on the dole would troop off at lunch time for their free meals.

The onion beds bombing might have caused some light-hearted banter and provided 'manna from heaven' but there was also a terrifying side to those wartime bombing raids on the St Helens district. The town had more bombing tragedies than is commonly realised - because reports of these kind were played down or censored out of the newspapers, so as not to destroy British morale or to give the enemy a psychological boost.

Joe recalls two elderly men, named Green and Burke, being killed by a bomb blast in 1940 after ignoring the air raid warden's warning to head for the shelters.

On that night, a stick of bombs also hit the Licker Fields (a Parr section of open land) the Parr corporation depot and Sorogold Street. The Pilkington timber yard also went up in flames on one of those black nights, says Joe, and at least two people were killed by a direct hit on Talbot Street, in the town centre.

A little place of worship, known as the tin chapel, standing on what is not the site of Lincoln House in College street, was set ablaze by incendiary bombs and an aerial torpedo crashed down in the old Brook area in the town centre.

Yet somehow local spirit remained unbowed and many folk actually became so accustomed to the drone of German bombers overhead that they took a chance and ducked under the stairs rather than heading for the safety of the dug-out and brick-reinforced air raid shelter.

"We kids couldn't wait for the all clear so we could collect shrapnel for souvenirs or to swop for marbles and comics," Joe grins.

By then a 12-year-old Parr Central pupil, he and his family were among those who almost paid dearly for their casual attitude to the warning wail of the air-raid siren.

The Seddons, living at 25 Morgan Street, were in bed when the blast from German bombs blew in all the windows along the street.

By a miracle they escaped injury from the blast and the flying slivers of glass which peppered the rooms.

This might sound a bit of a foolhardy attitude to today's generation. "BUT," says Joe, "you'd have had to live through it to appreciate what happened. All I can say is that they were unreal sorts of times, shared by neighbours who were right gradely folk !"

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.