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THE NIGHT COVENTRY BURNED

My office was next to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in London, and one night in1940 it took a direct hit. I was seventeen and working in the office of a munitions factory. When we arrived for work next morning we were told to go home and wait for a letter. Eventually my parents received a letter from the management to say that all factory employees were being relocated to Leamington Spa. The management promised to look after the young employees and contribute to the cost of their lodgings. I was put with Ivy, who became my best friend, in a family with a young baby. Life in Leamington Spa was very different and it was easy to forget there was a war on. There were no preparations, no air raid shelters, no sirens. But at 6-00pm on the 14th November the peace was shattered and Leamington Spa heard sirens for the first time. Our landlady called us to hurry downstairs and join her under the table. We had become hardened by our earlier experiences in London and decided to hide under our eiderdown where it was warmer. Then we heard the familiar drone of bomb laden planes. We leapt out of bed and raced downstairs and squeezed under the table with our landlady and her baby. Her husband was working a night shift at the Daimler factory in nearby Coventry. We could hear the ack-ack guns all through the night but in the early hours of the morning they fell silent. Presumably they had run out of ammunition.

Paddy the dog wanted to go outside so I opened the back door and the scene that confronted me is still clearly imprinted on my memory. The whole sky was lit up and Coventry was on fire. I shut the door and decided not to tell my landlady because her husband’s life must be in great danger Instead we spent several hours anxiously listening for the sound of his motorbike. When he eventually came through the door, his face was ashen, and in an anguished tone he simply said ‘Coventry is no more!’ The narrow streets had allowed the flames to spread rapidly, and few buildings were left intact. But within a week a massive clean up operation had taken place and most of the shops had re-opened.

Margaret Tinsley (nee Church )

This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by a volunteer from Crawley on behalf of Margaret Tinsley and has been added to this site with her permission . Mrs. Tinsley fully understands the site’s terms and conditions

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