大象传媒

War was declared one month before my 7th birthday and I was 12 when it came to an end. Throughout it I was in Walsall, living with my parents, going to school and helping my father 'dig for victory'.

Due to his business connections with Australia we received regular food parcels containing tinned bacon, tinned margarine, powdered milk, raisins etc which supplemented the wartime rations. I didn't wonder at the time how these supplies got through to us. I took them for granted I suppose.

My father, a World War 1 veteran, was an ARP Warden during WW2. He also fire-watched on the roof of the Savoy cinema which I thought very glamorous when he would take me with him on day-watch at weekends.

Over the road from our house was a piece of waste ground called the Tip. Underground air-raid shelters had been dug in it and we spent many nights sleeping there during the height of the blitz. The memory of being woken up in the middle of the night and being taken 'down the shelters' remains vivid to this day, as does the cold smell of the night air and the damp in the concrete walls. Whenever I have experienced that smell since I am instantly taken back to those nights and I hear the sirens and the ack-ack and the exploding bombs

My most vivid memory of all is of the night of the raid on Coventry. Walsall was on the return flight path of the German planes after they had made their initial run. Those aircraft which had failed to discharge their load over Coventry then dropped their bombs along this flight path. When the all clear was sounded at around 4 am and we came up out of the shelters, we were greeted by the sight of fires all round the town. My mother and some of the other women went into their houses and came out with plates of toast and dripping which we ate sitting on the garden walls. When it got light we saw shrapnel scattered all around and at school later on that day we compared the size of our respective collections. (Mine had already been enhanced by melting down my lead soldiers but after Coventry I wished I hadn't. In those days, though, a piece of shrapnel was worth more than a lead soldier!)

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