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NOVEMBER 14TH 1940 — THE COVENTRY BLITZ

By Thelma Torrance (nee Hird).
Submitted by her son, Barry Torrance

We became used to air raids during 1940, and it became a habit to hurry home from school or work, to have a meal and get things ready to take down to the air-raid shelter for the night, as soon as the warning siren sounded.

Sometimes we went into next door's Anderson air-raid shelter. Sometimes when the raids started very quickly, we stayed under the dining table or in the cupboard under the stairs. I don't know why but we felt safer there!

More often we walked up to the public shelter which was dug out under the ground in Moseley Avenue.

You could walk about in the passages in the public shelter and sit or lie down on the wooden benches. There were primitive toilets down there, with sacking "curtains" for privacy - very necessary during long air raids. In the winter we went armed with blankets, scarves, woolly hats, gloves etc., because it was very cold.

On the night of November 14th 1940, the air-raid siren wailed out very early in the evening. We didn't have time to have our evening meal. (My father was in Nottingham where he worked for the Ministry of Supply). My brother, Derrick, aged 18, was in the Police Auxiliary Messenger Service (this was before he went into the Navy), so on the night of the Blitz he went off on duty with this service.

My mother and I went up to the public shelter. It was a bitterly cold moonlit night - and we were very cold and hungry. We had hardly settled down on a hard wooden bench before we heard the first sounds of the "vroom vroom" of the now familiar sound of the German Bombers.

People came pouring into the shelter telling of the approach of "hundreds" of Gerry planes. The night became a nightmare. We could hear the planes approaching in wave after wave. Each time there would be the whines of the bombs as they came down. People kept ducking, feeling the next bomb must certainly be a direct hit. Bombs fell all around us continually, so close that the shelter - although underground - was rocking like a ship at sea. Air raid Wardens kept coming into the shelter, telling us where the bombs had fallen and what had been hit.

After a few hours they described the fires that were glowing in all parts of the City. We weren't allowed out of the shelter in case we showed chinks of light as we left. Later the lights in the shelter went out because the electricity cables had been hit. It became very eerie then, with torches and a few candles being the only light - and the rocking of the shelter was very frightening.

My mother and I were very worried about the whereabouts of my brother, Derrick, in all the chaos. We were also very hungry and had to watch a woman feeding biscuits to her dog! We could have snatched them off her!

Then the Germans started dropping land mines. The A.R.P. Wardens told us they could see them coming down attached to parachutes. The noise and the impact on landing was terrific.

The night went on and on, with wave after wave of bombers dropping their loads, and more and more fires starting. Distressed people - many of whom had come out from under the rubble, came into the shelter all through the night. People helped and comforted each other and the Wardens kept us informed about what was happening around us.

Eventually dawn began to break and the droning of the planes ceased.

Unbelievably the "All Clear" sounded, and gathering up our belongings we crept into the daylight. We were filthy and our hair and throats were clogged with the thick dust.

It was like stepping into another world. Smoke hung thickly in the cold, cold air. It could have been fog but the scorching smell told us it wasn't. We only lived down the road, but now every familiar house was damaged. Piles of rubble instead of homes - half houses with perhaps a bed hanging lop-sided from a slanting floor, greeted us as we walked down the road. When we got home we found a gaping hole in the roof with water coming in -but we were lucky.

Fire engines and ambulances were trying to negotiate craters and rubble - and they worked non-stop - giving first aid - and digging people out of the rubble.

We were very worried about Derrick and so relieved when he eventually turned up, absolutely filthy, tired and bewildered. He had been out on duty, in the thick of it, all night.

Everything seemed unreal. Trying to be "normal" my mother set off for where she worked but could not get there because the roads were impassable. I set off for school (Barrs Hill) and found it had been bombed. I saw a number of "trees" I had not seen before - but when I got close to them I found they were underground pipes which had been hit and landed up in positions 90ï‚° from the ground. I saw the first land-mine crater on the way -horrific - and it had destroyed everything.

As I went home past Bablake School on the Coundon Road, there was a steady stream of people heading out of town. They had been bombed out of their homes and had an assortment of rescued belongings on prams, wheelbarrows, etc. They were heading for shelter in Kenilworth and the surrounding villages. To me they looked like the streams of refugees in Europe that I had seen on the News at the "Pictures".

My mother sent me to have a wash to some friends in Three Spires Avenue. I didn't have a wash because when I got there, the house was gone - just the piano standing on the pavement. That family moved out to Braunstone - to their Grand-parents - and stayed there until the end of the war.
I went back home. There was no gas, no electricity, no water and very few food shops with food in them. We got some dirty water from a rain tub and boiled it on the open fire in the back room. We also cooked some food on the fire and toasted some bread. Word went round that a baker in Spon Street had managed to bake some bread, so I queued for ages to get my ration of one loaf.

My father was going frantic because he had heard of the raid and couldn't get through to us from Nottingham. All the telephone lines were down. It took him two days to get through the damaged buildings and the craters to get to us. He was very relieved to find us alive - and we were very pleased to see him! He took us off to Nottingham - on the way we stopped at a hairdressers to have our hair washed - and to a cafe where we had our first decent meal for days.

It was after this raid that the Germans invented the word, "blitzkreig" - shortened now to "blitz".

Having lived through such destruction by our former enemy, my generation finds it difficult to understand why today's young vandals find it necessary to cause so much damage and misery to their own people. It is encouraging that conservation is becoming the concern of many more people- particularly most school children.

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