大象传媒

Legend has it that Stoke on Trent escaped the blitz due to the pall of smoke from the pottery bottle ovens and the glare from the steelworks.This caused the Luftwaffe to assume the area had already been bombed!
Anyway,the outbreak of war was a bewildering experience for the children in the infant class at our school.
We had been to the nearby Welsh chapel to have our gasmasks fitted,blue for boys,red for girls,with little nozzles and round eyepieces,to resemble Mickey Mouse masks.Our new toys intrigued us,we were happy wearing them while soapy water was smeared around to ensure an airtight fit.Baby had a sspecial mask,a khaki container with a mica window,into which the infant was placed and air supplied by a hand pump.
The school cellars served as an air raid shelter and as the sirens waailed a practice alert we hung our masks around our necks in cardboard boxes and filed into the shelter.
Father had been busy at home,erecting an Anderson shelter in the back garden.This was a self assembly job,involving sheets of corrugated iron,bolted together,sunk into the ground and with the excavated soil tamped down on top of the shelter.Meanwhile,Mum had stuck paper strips in a cross on all of the windows to prevent flying glass if a bomb dropped.She'd also made blackout blinds to fit the windows,these had to be closed at dusk,so ni light would br visible to enemy night bombers.
The gas street lamps were extinguished too,sandbags attached to each one ready to put on an incendiary bomb.Steel static water tanks appeared in the streets an emergency water spply for the stirrup pumps which the ARP used on such bombs.Large circular tanks held 1000s og gallons of water fot the Auxillary Fire Service and did duty as swimming pools for local children.
Like many men in Stoke on Trent Dad was a miner,working six shifts a week at Hanley deep Pit, a coal mine in the High St; then doing duty as a Home Guard.As he returned home one morning a enemy bomber flew low,being fired at by a Bofors gun from the TA baracks. The aircraft jettisoned its bombload,which demolished several blocks of derelict terraced hoses which had been emptied ready for demolition!

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