大象传媒

I was 10 years old when the war started so was not old enough to do any work for the war. I lived with my mother because my father died when I was six years old, my mother did not work during the war but worked in the Dockyard in the Electrical Department as soon as the war was over. We lived in a small terraced house in an area called Poets Corner because all the roads were named after poets, mine was Shakespeare Road. During the day we stayed in the house but at night, because my mother wouldn't have the garden dug out to have an Anderson shelter erected (she didn't want us to be on our own when an air raid started which were more frequent at night), we used to go across the road to a public shelter which was about 10ft deep. When the sirens sounded to tell us the Germans were about we would pick up our bedding and hot water bottles and which we had ready and went across the road taking our animals if we had them!! The German aircraft were called 'Doodlebugs' and one night in 1940 we were down the shelter and a bomb was dropped on one of the large Co-operative stores. The store was flattened, it was on the opposite corner to the shelter so we were lucky to be alive when we came up the next morning all that was left was the basement and clouds of smoke. A few days later someone noticed a rat running around so a little dog was released; he soon finished off a lot of them that appeared later. Many more bombs were dropped in that area but they were only small incendiary bombs and mainly caused fires. By the time war was over I was due to leave school and begin a life of work.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.