大象传媒

We had an Anderson shelter in the garden of our house in Richmond Road in Cardiff. The bombs were dropping all over the place. One night, I think it was January 4th, 1941, - my brother was 11 years older that I was and it had been his birthday - we went into the Anderson shelter to go to sleep. We always slept there becauses it was going to save our lives if a bomb dropped. We left our home behind us and our parrot with a mat over the top of his cage, a big thick mat. Anyway the bombs started to drop and unfortunately a bomb dropped three feet from where we were sleeping in the Anderson shelter. The back of the Anderson shelter was blown in and the front was blown out. By this time there had been a few more people who had joined us in the shelter. We had bunks and there were a few screens. My mother said to me, as the baby,"Are you all right, Pat?" I said, "No-o, I've got dirt in my eyes." My face and my head were covered in mud. I was retrieved, unhurt and making a fuss as usual, but there was a lady on the top bunk who had very badly injured legs. The door of the shelter had blown up into the air and dropped down on her legs. My mother had thought, "Let's put all the clothes and everything on the path of the garden" because she was worried about incendiaries and that fire was going to burn the house, but this bomb wasn't an incendiary. So she said, "I've got to gather some things together." She was worried people would come and break into the house the next morning, but there was no house to be broken into! There was nothing she could do but to send me off to a church to be looked after, so off I went down the road on my own, aged 5, with my parrot who survived the blast. The house was very badly damaged and there was a lot of rubbish on top of his cage but as I walked past the house, he started to talk. He was very annoyed and just said, "Hullo!" For his birthday, my brother had been given a coronation coach - it wasn't too many years since the coronation of King George Vlth - and it was a beautiful coach of solid silver. I went through what was left of the house and as I looked up through two storeys, I could see the stars shining This poor coronation coach - all the horses were all rough on the floor in the rubbish. Anyway, we all survived. My father came along - he was an air raid warden -and he used to rescue people from the air raid shelters. I was being looked after by various people for a few years after that because we lost our home and we lost everything. But at least we were all alive.

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