大象传媒

On 25th September, 1940, I was an apprentice at the BAC (British Aircraft Corporation)Filton,when 'Jerry' came over in the daylight. In my opinion the air raid shelters on site had been built a bit too close together, I guess because they had to get a lot of them in. But the bomb that got me landed right between two shelters, and just caved them in on both sides.

Normally I would have been sitting right in the middle, where everybody was killed, but I had a detective novel which my mum didn't like, I was 16 at the time, and so I used to take it there to read when we went down the shelters, and I had to sit by the door to read it, which saved my life.

We heard the bombers coming; our warden was standing outside looking up, and the last thing I remember is he jumped inside saying, 'Get down quick'; he had seen a stick of bombs coming, and then there was a huge bang. And I did what my father had told me to do, because I was young I could do it. I put my head down between my knees, and covered the back of my head with my hands. That saved my life, because if I had been sitting upright I would have been dead like a lot of the other guys, because the concrete was like shrapnel, it just cut them down. I lost several good friends, including our lodger, in there. But I just got injuries to the back of my arms and my head. I got hit in the head a couple of times. That trashy book saved my life.

Rescue and a ride:

Then I heard this big man come to the entrance of the door which was crumbling in, a great big guy, he just picked me up like a feather and carried me off to the First Aid Post, and I had wonderful treatment there. And the 'all-clear' went at BAC, and with it automatically came a tape, 'Marching through Georgia', so you could march back to work. But while I was at the First Aid Post they said, 'wait here a minute we will get transport for you', and a great big black Rolls-Royce drove up and they picked me up and took me home; that was really something.

Survivors:

We were lucky in our family. I had a sister working at Rodney Works on the site, on that day. I thought possibly she had had it, because quite a few buildings were down, but she was alright too.

Poor old dad; they put the bodies in Filton Church and he had to go around and try to find me, that wasn't very nice. But he did find the lodger.

When I tried to go back to work, it was strange to me because there was nobody there that I knew. They brought people in off the night shift, so that the Tool Room must have been hit pretty hard. That shelter had sat fifty people, and only about four or five got out alive.

Getting away from it all:

The whole war bound the society together more than it has ever been before or since, because we were all going through it, we were being bombed every night for quite a while. The big blitzes, we had to move twice because we had no roof over our heads. My dad got a clever idea and took a cabin down at Portishead, those holidaymakers' cabins. On the second night we were there, 'Jerry' came over, and they were dropping sea mines by parachute, and one of them drifted over and hit the beach about a quarter of a mile away, and that cabin went about six feet off the floor!

Taking my revenge, in the Home Guard:

I did get my own back a few months later. I was working on anti-aircraft guns. I was in the Home Guard at 16, firing anti-aircraft rockets. There were 150 guns in that field, and each one had two rockets, and that was 300 rockets going up at the planes, all in one 'swoosh'. So if we didn't hit any of them, at least we scared them to death!

These rockets were six feet tall, and about eight inches around. You picked them up and slid them on the two shafts. You had headphones and you listened for your orders; you set the horizontal and the vertical and waited for the order to fire, and we all fired at the same time, that was really something to see. And on the night of the Baedeker raids (they were raiding all the cathedral towns in England), they went for Bath and we got one that night, that was my moment of revenge.

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