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A FEW OF THE LIGHTER MEMORIES OF WARTIME FROM A CIVIL SERVANT IN BATH

On returning to my billet one morning after firewatching at the office, I found that during the previous night a bomb had landed in the corner of the garden during one of the ‘Baedecker’ air raids on Bath. The bomb had uprooted an apple tree, which had landed through the roof of a single-storey extension at the back of the house. The roots were resting on a bed - which had happily been unoccupied, that night; the tree had remained upright and the branches were sticking out through a jagged hole in the roof. I remember that throughout the whole morning, local residents whom we did not know, were coming in the front garden and round to the back of the house to gaze at our tree, but I have no recollection of how we tackled the demolition of a mature apple tree in the wrong sort of bed.

The old laundry van, used as an ARP ambulance, had a clutch pedal that stuck down, so that to let the clutch in, one had to get a toe under it and pull it up - not the easiest manoeuvre for a learner-driver in such a hilly city as Bath.

The museum, used as offices, had a large room in which numerous more-than-life-size statues of naked Greek gods hurling dinner plates had to be pushed to one end of the room behind temporary screening. But the central heating radiators were behind there too, so when winter came, the gods had to be brought out to stand around in the office until the heating had been rearranged. Perhaps happily, it was not an office open to the public.

In a large hotel taken over as offices. firewatchers slept on camp beds between the racks holding ships‘ ledgers, with heavy garden spades nearby to dig ourselves out if necessary If the phone rang, we were instructed to reply “Ships Book Room here- try saying that in a hurry when woken in these strange surroundings in the middle of the night with the air raid sirens blasting forth!

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