大象传媒

More childhood memories.
This is not written in the present tense.

Mother recovered from her unplanned trip down the yard
She apologised to everyone for her language, then started to collect the remnants of her precious tea service.

The Vicar, gentleman that he was, said that they had heard nothing, due to the noise of the bomb blast.

I was discovered trying to hide behind the old wooden clothes mangle that lived in the yard. Had my bottom soundly smacked, then was bundled into the safety of my shelter under the stairs. I shared the shelter with my sister the dog and the budgie.

My father, who was in a reserved occupation, he was involved in the research of some special navigation equipment for our aircraft, spent most of the night on fire-watch duty at the factory he worked at.

I never found out until years later that it was a very dangerous place to be. The Germans knew all about the work being done there, and kept trying to destroy it. He was lucky; they bombed most of the building around the factory, including civilian homes, but missed the factory.

The following morning we, our gang that is, went out to survey the damage from the raid. And of course to look for downed German fliers. We all had a weapon of some sort, mostly knife's and axes.
I do believe that had we found any they would have been dead men, or we would.

However, we never did find any.
What we did see was a most unfortunate event.
The bombs had not been very close, so no bomb damage.
There had however been causalities.
A shell, fired from one of our own anti-aircraft guns had failed to exploded at its predetermined height. It had fallen to earth, hit the pavement at the base of a street lamp, then exploded, blowing the complete lamp column into the air. It had crashed through the bedroom window of a house, killing the man and wife who had decided to remain in their bed.
Lots did this. It was a case of if it鈥檚 got my name on it; there is nothing one can do.
Their children in the next bedroom were completely unscathed.

I recall one night going with my mother and sister to the local community air-raid shelter. These were of concrete and brick, half buried in the earth.
The designer of these shelters had overlooked the fact that being half buried they were closer to the water table. This meant that there was always a few inches of disgusting smelling water covering the floor. Duck boards had been laid to try and keep our feet out of this. but it was like walking in a swamp.

After about an hour of putting up with these conditions mother decided it was enough. We were leaving.
The raid was in progress and the warden in charge said we had to stay.
Foolish man. No one told my mother what she could, or could not do.
She was four feet eleven and a half inches of hell on wheels. The half inch was important to her.
He backed off and we went home. She said that she would rather have us die of bombing than typhoid.

One lasting memory of that time was watching a lone German bomber, obviously lost, it was being attacked by one of our fighter aircraft.
The tracery of the vapour trails against the blue May sky looked quite pretty. We never gave it a thought that there were young men, maybe no more than eighteen or twenty, German and English, fighting for their lives.
The Germans lost. The bomber spiralled down in flames. There were no parachutes.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.