大象传媒

My Father was up at sunrise each day working in his garden until it was time to take his truck on the roads doing his normal work. In the evening after our meal he would be back into the garden working to grow food and looking after our animals hens geese etc; We were getting a lot of air raid warnings at the time as the German Bombers came in over the North Sea heading inland to the big city's.

Father like all the other men in the village did extra security jobs such as Air Raid Wardens, Special Police, Fire Watchers, Auxiliary Firemen and Home Guards.

Dad was a Fire Watcher, when the Sirens went and we headed for the air raid shelter he had built in the garden which had electricity for lighting and making a cup of tea the cure all of the war, he grabbed his Stirrup Pump bucket shovel and tin hat heading for the Church tower or some other high place from which they could watch for incendiary bombs.

On one particular night the sirens were late and we could hear the bombers overhead, the 4.7" guns at Kiaora behind our house about half a mile away went off with a crash and we could hear the shells going over with a rushing sound you don't forget in a hurry. It certainly hurried us on our way to the shelter. Dad on hearing shrapnel falling stood in the shelter of our front door wearing his tin hat and ready to run to the church tower across the village green.

We had just got settled into the shelter when there was a scuffle in the entrance tunnel that had a bend in it against light getting out and blast getting in, Dad shot into the shelter like a cork from a bottle and smashed his head against the central support beam knocking himself cold.

Mother turned at the commotion and saw Dad laid out on the floor with blood streaming from his head, she started to scream "he is dead the ** Germans have killed him" to which I replied with my eleven year old logic "well he was alive when he came in" that started her laughing and when poor dad got his senses back he found us all rolling about laughing, he must have wondered if he had woken up in a mad house.

It turned out that while standing in the front doorway a piece of shrapnel had come whizzing down and hit the lip of his Tin hat splitting the rim making a slight graze on the tip of his nose and burying itself in the brick paving, he had got such a shock he took off to the safest place he knew the shelter and there he got his war wound - a split head.

At that age I thought any one in uniform was brave but civvy's in tin hats did not rate, I now know different of course those men stood out in the open, picked up incendiary bombs and covered them with sand, put out small fires with their stirrup pumps and water buckets and marked the dangerous butterfly bombs that the planes dropped.

They also did a full days work then dug for victory and tended their animals. I reckon my father was one of the many unsung heroes of World War Two and they never got the real credit for what they did.

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