大象传媒

When the war started I was still very young life but our lives were to change quickly as we came to realise we had new responsiblities even so this didn't stop us from enjoying ourselves. Me and a group of friends all volunteered to firewatch at our local school on a saturday, it was a bit of a joke as the school was never bombed at all but it gave us time to have a bit of fun and still feel like we were doing something useful. Often our watch duties ended up with us playing bridge, fighting with our gas masks using them as clubs or just running around our classrooms having a laugh it was all good fun. Even though we did have a lot of fun during the early days we soon came to realise that the bombings could hit us in castleford just as easily as anywhere else. One night the air raid sirens went on whilst I was at home during dinner, so me and my parents all went to the anderson shelter in the back yard, it wasn't particularly nice or comfortable but you just got used to it. We were in their for ages and we never heard anything and we got so bored that all of a sudden my dad snapped and told us to go back in the house because it was too cold and wet to spend all night in the shelter when nothing was going to happen. As fate would have it when we got back in the house we suddenly heard the sounds of German bombers overhead, you could tell them were German as their engines made a wurring sound, so we all ducked underneath the table, although I wasn't really sure how much that would have protected us if there had been a direct hit. From where I was I could see out the window and I could just make out the outline of planes as the flew overhead on their bombing raids. Then all of sudden their was a tremendous explosion all around and seemed to be coming from all different directions. Luckily no one was hurt and it was truly remarkable because the next day when we all went outside, we could see houses on either side of ours had been hit and badly damaged, and many of the other houses down the street had been hit as well. What had happened was that a German plane had dropped its stick of bombs early, just before its target which was the Glass Houghton Coke Ovens not far from where we lived. The bombs had landed all down out street but it was pure luck that we were the only ones actually in our house at the time and one of the few houses to not get hit. The same day me and a bunch of other lads from the street went all around the houses collecting bits of shrapnel from the bombs which hit although we were careful as for some reason the Germans seemed to drop a lot of time delayed bombs. We collected all the shrapnel up and some of us made trinkets out of them. Seems silly now but was amazing how close we came to not living through that night.

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