大象传媒

My Dad was away in the Royal Navy and my mother was home with three children, I'm the middle one, with an older brother and younger sister. We lived in Redcliffe, Ship Lane, my Gran lived around the corner. The day of the BAC raid, when hundreds of people were killed, we were at school, we went to the shelters there and spent the afternoon there, the all clear hadn't gone when it was time to go home, so each teacher took so many children and we had to keep as close to the wall all the way down the road as we could and as you got to your house you were released to go home, and that was so you didn't present a target. On the night of 24th November, the sunday night blitz, it was her birthday, she was with us and we were in the house, the raid was on, i can't remember the sirens, suddenly the bombs fell, the house behind us had a direct hit, it blew the windows out. My mother had her back to the window, we had a wooden blackout, and this came right across the room and hit her shoulders and she was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and went forward on her face and ended up under the table. I was already on the floor, playing with a toy. My brother and sister were in the room. the next thing we knew, we got to the front door to get out of the house, but it was jammed, a bomb had fallen behind the house, one opposite the house and one at the end of the road. The ARP men came to the house and got the door open, and said, come on children, go out to the shelter in St Mary Redcliffe School at the top of Ship Lane. We wouldn't go because our mum was walking with a stick and there were telephone wires all across the lane, but eventually they got us up to the shelters and we stayed the night there. During the night a bomb fell on the school and the shelter next to us was damaged. I was 11 years ago and it was bewildering, we felt fear afterwards during air raids but not at the time. We were worried about mum. We heard afterwards that our Gran's house had been bombed. During that night the raid went on till midnight and my mother's sister lived in Bedminster and she sent her son, my cousin Doug, who was in the Royal Marines home on leave, over to see where Alice (my mum) and the children were, and he came and found us in the shelter. The first thing we wanted to know was the state of Gran's house, so myself and my brother and Doug came out of the shelter at midnight and went to look and see what damage there was to Gran's house. But we couldn't get round there, to Redcliffe Square, her road, you couldn't go round there, we had to go by Ship Lane, along the cut to Bedminster Bridge, at the bottom of Redcliffe Hill, up the hill and turned back towards Ship Lane but we couldn't get near because of the damage and the rescue workers. The house behind us, I was at school with the boy that lived there, his dad was an ARP man who was out, but his mum and his sister and his grandmother were all killed and he was in hospital for two years. I saw him at the end of the war because he came back to school (I left school in 1944). When we found we couldn't get to Gran's, we headed back to the shelter to see our mum and the sirens went again and there was another raid. We stayed in the shelter all night. We went back home and we'd been instructed to hang an R in the window, but there weren't any windows. We couldn't stay there, and most of the families there were housed in St Mary Redcliffe Church Hall. We spent one night sleeping on the skittle alley, each family had a patch. After that they moved all the families because the hall wasn't very big to Wills Recreation Hall, which had a nice dance floor and we had a patch there for a week. The WRVS used to bring round meals, I remember having porridge for breakfast. We had letters from relatives, and my mother couldn't move about, and they asked us to come down to south Wales, and we moved there, we stayed with a family for a while down there. In the meantime my father, whose ship was in Aberdeen, was given 48 hours leave. He came down to find us and it took more than 48 hours to get to us. He found us eventually, then he had to go to the nearest police station and report because he'd outstayed his leave. I don't remember how he got back to his ship. From then, we found a farm cottage, another relative found for us, and we stayed in south wales for 2 years, at a place called Oakdale, about 11 miles from Newport. I enjoyed two years on the farm, as I like animals it was good. We came back to Bristol in 1942 and the raids were more or less over by then. I was then 13. We lived in Bedminster and had a marvellous street party on VE Day in Dean Crescent. I have a picture of the party. They had a piano in the street and one of the ladies played it. We spent quite a time going from street to street to see what they had going on there.

On the night of the first raid, Joyce was with my family, my mum, dad and brother and we went to visit my grandmother in Gorse Hill, Fishponds. The sirens went and my grandparents didn't have a shelter so we went to the communal ones in Briar Way. We went inside and there were seats all along the sides and we sat and sat and nothing much happened, and we dozed off a bit, then I woke up and my father said, Joy, come and have a look at this, he took me to the entrance of the shelter and you could see all over the city and it was as if the whole city was on fire. We stood there for some time and later the all clear went and we went back down to my grandmother's house. My father's youngest sister Lil and her boyfriend Frank, who was in the army, had been into town to the cinema and they got caught in it and she told us as they came down Castle St there was a big Coop and there were people inside throwing out pairs of shoes, to find the size they wanted. They managed to get home. I spent part of the war in Southmead and remember the daylight raid on the BAC. I was home to lunch and the siren had gone and my mother and I went onto the front doorstep and looked to the right and we could see a German plane coming over and we could see the swastika, coming from the BAC, many people were killed that day. (This was before the blitz). My mother's mother lived in appledore in north devon & my brother and i and cousins from Shirehampton were sent down there to stay with them. We gradually came down. I regretted being down there because my aunt lil had promised i could be her bridesmaid and she got married while I was still down there. We came home when it got quieter. On VE day I was in Ham Green Hospital with scarlet fever and my mum sent in some red, white and blue ribbons and we could hear all the jollifications going on in pill and they couldn't visit because it was a fever hospital, and i used to write to mum and she said, don't worry we'll have a party for VJ day, but we didn't! I remember that horrible feeling of getting out of a warm bed and going down to a cold shelter. I remember my father painting the inside of the shelter and sticking sawdust onto it to prevent condensation. We had a candle in a flowerpot with a hole in the top and another pot on top to keep us warm. One day my brother was having his hair cut and the siren went off, and he had to come home with his hair half cut.

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