大象传媒

ALERT

My youngest brother Mike was born in May 1941. My mother had been obliged to go into hospital for the birth because of the danger of complications. It had been arranged that an aunt, Floss who then lived at Pontesbury and who had no children of her own, would come over to Shrewsbury to look after us. Dad was now working shifts in the Fire Service so that he was not available to help out much in this regard. We were old enough o appreciate that Aunty Floss was going to be on unfamiliar ground and would need our co-operation. She was a gentle and affectionate aunty so this was not going to be too difficult to manage.
At that time I had just started work at Wilding鈥檚 the printers in Castle Street. John was working, part-time after school at a pet shop at the top of Wyle Cop. It so happened that during the time that Mum was in hospital there was a run of about ten days of air raids on Merseyside. The flightpath of the bombers lay directly over Shrewsbury and the throb of aircraft engines could be heard continuously overhead. This would go on for about forty-five minutes or so, as they travelled in waves towards the target, and the same thing on the way back. It was the week of the full moon and the shapes of the planes could be glimpsed in the moonlight. At times the bombers would be caught in the beams of the searchlights and could be clearly seen in detail. There was a battery of searchlights stationed at Ellesmere Road. But there were no Ack-ack guns anywhere near so we assumed the searchlights were there to help the night-fighter aircraft.
On this particular evening I had left off work at 5.30 and had arranged to meet John out of work so that we could make our way home together in the event of an alert. This spate of air raids had given the ARP wardens the excuse they were waiting for to wield the authority they craved for and which had been denied them thus far in the war. As soon as the sirens went off they would turn out in force to direct any unwary pedestrian into a shelter where he would be incarcerated until the all-clear. The sirens on this evening went early, just as I arrived at the pet shop. We decided to avoid taking the most direct route through town and instead to go down Wyle Cop and get onto the river path and hopefully make it home that way thus avoiding the attentions of power-mad wardens. To our dismay the wardens had already blocked off the street and anyone found in the open was being shepherded into a shelter near to the Lion and Pheasant. So we turned tail and sped back up Dogpole and through St Mary鈥檚 Court intending to get onto the riverside via Water Lane. The sight of a warden near the church made yet another detour necessary and we cut through into Castle Street. The game was now almost up and we were stopped by wardens blowing whistles, near to the Castle entrance and found ourselves being purposefully manouvred into a shelter directly opposite the Library building. Inside it was like a sandstone tomb, dank and chilly, lit only by a couple of smoking hurricane lamps. Around us sat about twenty other bewildered people wondering how they had managed to get caught up in this charade. But there we were, forced to sit on hard wooden forms looking at one another until the all-clear sounded at about 9.30pm.
As can be imagined Aunty Floss was both relieved and pleased to have us home again safely after spending the past three hours imagining all sorts of horrors happening to us. In those days of food rationing she knew that it would have taken something very serious to have kept two growing lads from their evening meal. And no doubt the responsibility for our welfare had been bearing down on her in our absence. But now we were home and we got a good supper to help make up for the miserable experience which we were now tending to look upon as quite an adventure.

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