World War 2 bad parenting

Bad parenting in Britain during World War 2

An old lady was describing her terrible parenting experiences during the Nazi bombing raids on the city of Sheffield, northern England, during WW2.
She was a little girl at the time, her parents had divorced and her mother had re-married. Her mother and step-father had started a new family and they had two young children.  So the old lady was now the step-daughter of the family and the step-sister of the family’s other two children, who were also girls.

The old lady, who revealed her age, would have been aged about 10 at the time and the other two little girls would probably have been aged between 6 and 8.
In the interests of honesty and accuracy, it has to be pointed out that the family didn’t live in the city itself, they lived in a village which was about 8 miles from the city. Obviously, the bombing raids would not have been directed at the village, they would have been directed at the city.
This was because, at the time, it was an important steel-producing centre, so it was an important strategic target for the Nazis.
I have no idea whether this 8 miles distance makes any difference, whether the village could have been struck by bombs accidentally. This depends on how accurate the Luftwaffe was, more specifically on how accurate the Luftwaffe navigators and bomb-aimers were.
One point about this: it was notoriously difficult for the Luftwaffe, the RAF and the USAF to bomb a city or other strategic target really accurately.

So it’s quite possible that the Luftwaffe navigators,who were navigating at night, could have accidentally bombed the village and their home rather than the steel mills in nearby Sheffield.
During a bombing raid one night, her step-father realised that he had run out of cigarettes. But rather than go out to the nearest store and buy some himself, and possibly risk being killed, he decided to send one of the children to go to the store and buy some for him, so that she would risk being killed, instead.
What a wonderful person he must have been.
Even better, rather than send his own daughters, he decided that this was too risky, so he decided to send his step-daughter, the old lady, to buy some for him.
It has to be said that parenting experiences  like this must have been extremely rare. Few if any British parents would send their children out during an air raid and risk their childrens’  lives rather than risk their own lives like this.