大象传媒

During the Second World War quite a number of homes were bombed and many people lost their lives. Some districts were hard hit whilst the inhabitants of other places in the north-east of England grew a little complacent as the initial bomb scares faded.
Walkergate, where I lived when I was nine, was relatively quiet on the nights when the air raid warnings were in progress and mother and I grew rather lazy as far as going down to the Anderson Shelter was concerned.
The shelter had been sunk in the back garden of Number 3 Trojan Avenue, and even though my father had sunk a hole to gather and hold the rain water and had built bunk beds for us, it remained an unattractive proposition in the middle of the night.
Father, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine was excluded from the forces and therefore went down to London to help with bomb damage. He had always been the one to insist on the use of the shelter and I'm afraid that when he went away mother and I allowed our attention to detail to abate somewhat; the sirens often sounded but we stayed in bed, warm and cosy.
One afternoon, many months later whilst I played in the front garden I heard a click of the gate and beheld my father, overalls, cap and bag of tools coming home. He had strained his back badly shovelling clay. He would again take charge and that very night the air raid warning sounded so he insisted that we get dressed and go down to the bomb shelter.
The heating and lighting in those dug-outs was fairly rudimentary. The light was of course provided by a candle; the heating was another candle inside a plantpot with another pot upside down on top. I can still see the thing, one could spend an hour watching the smoke spiralling up through the hole. Sometimes we played "I Spy with My Little Eye" but this night was to be different. No sooner had we settled ourselves into the damp gloom of the shelter than there was a swishing noise, a crescendo and a thud - an unexploded anti-aircraft shell had hit our house entering by the front bedroom window and landing on the bed. It exploded inside the house with disastrous results.
The accident that had brought my father home had saved his family from certain death that night in Walkergate.

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