大象传媒

It was in 1940 that the heavy bombing of Sunderland began and lasted until 1943, during which time 267 people were killed and over 1,000 injured. I lived in an area called Hendon where my parents had a general dealers shop. On one side of our road ran a railway line. This was a main artery for carrying coal, ores etc to and from the docks at the Port of Sunderland. It was a very busy area especially for shipbuilding. All around where I lived was heavily bombed as the German planes were aiming to disrupt this line but they never managed a direct hit.

My earliest recollection of the war was as a young child being wakened by my mother, wrapped in a blanket and carried into the shelter of our nextdoor neighbour. Once outside, on the way to the shelter, everything was inky black as no street lights were allowed. However, if you looked up you could watch beams from the searchlights criss-crossing the sky searching for enemy aircraft. My father would deposit my mother and I in the shelter where we would join Mrs Scott and her young son, then he would go to his A.R.P. post and Mr Scott would go to his fire fighting duties.

Although the shelter was made as comfortable as possible, it was still gloomy, cold and had a musty smell. The light came from little candles placed on saucers filled with water (for safety reasons I suppose). These sat on brackets high on the wall.

The bombing was very heavy around us and often the shelter shuddered and vibrated. The noise was also deafening. At times you could hear the bombs as they whistled through the air. Often it was so loud and seemed so close my mother would lean over and cover me with her body as a way of protection. Mrs. Scott did the same for her son. In later years she would say she thought the bomb was going to fall on us. The only time the shelter was alive and full of noise and sometimes laughter was when people who were on their way home when the sirens went ran for the nearest refuge. At times like this there was standing room only. Even today, the thoughts of the shelter have no happy memories for me. A few years ago at the Imperial War Museum, London people could experience what it had been like to be in a shelter during an air raid but I couldn鈥檛 go in, not even if someone had offered me a vast sum of money to do so!.

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