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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by a volunteer from Lincoln CSV Action Desk on behalf of Fred Hurt and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Hurt fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Coldbath House Raid

It was Trip Sunday and I’d been out playing with my friend Roy Johnson. We’d been looking around the place but there were some military chaps around so we kept away from them and looked in the back of the house where we found a rowing boat which they had just been varnishing. Of course we had to touch it and get messed up. It started to rain so we hurried off home. I’d forgotten that we were having visitors for tea that day. Roy dashed off home and I was thinking that I was going to get into a row because of the visitors coming. When people came I got to sit in the seat in front of the window which was usually pushed against the wall to keep the table out of the way. Anyway, I’d just got into seat when someone said something about a siren. You could just hear it started to wind up when the bombs actually fell. They just fell out of the rain cloud. People tell me it was five o’clock when they looked up to see the bombs falling down. One of them hit Coldbath House and another landed on the allotments in St Anne’s Road. Another one landed on the Nurses’ Home, fortunately on the end mainly used for storage and another fell on a house which is now an old people’s home near the prison. When I looked at my seat, there were big, long bits of glass stuck in it. They would have been in my back. My mother had made a sponge cake which was a real treat, and when she tried to cut it, it was full of glass. It looked perfectly alright but it was full of it. I ran down to tell my friend and he’d hardly got home. There were people out and wondered why that was but there were a lot of windows broken down there.

We were covered in soot but didn’t know it. I was running down the road and a young woman in front of me ran to tell her mother what had happened and that she was all right. It was still raining and it went down her face like rivulets through the soot and she looked a right mess.

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