大象传媒

'This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Gwilym Scourfield of the County Heritage Team on behalf of Eileen Ward and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.'

All in the Same Boat -
A Childhood Memory of Wartime Coventry

I was eleven when the war started, living in Coventry. It was to have been my first term at Secondary school. The war delayed the start of Secondary education for me. Coventry was full of factories, working all hours on the war effort. It was a prime target for the Germans.

In 1940 there were a lot of bombing raids. We soon got into the habit of getting ready for bed around seven o鈥檆lock and waiting for the air raid sirens to signal we go to the Anderson shelter in the back garden. We shared this with our neighbours. Dad was an air raid warden and the boys often didn鈥檛 go into the shelter, choosing to sleep under the table or in the emptied out 鈥榞lory hole鈥� under the stairs. We would lay on the bunks in the dank-smelling darkness, our double bunk toe to toe with our next door neighbour and listen in terror as the deep rumbling sound of German bombers booming overhead. The crashing sounds of explosions and the shattering of glass lasted for many hours. An anti-aircraft gun nearby fired back at them, using a searchlight parked on waste land to seek out their targets. It was terrifying.

One day a bomb hit a house in the next street. We got home to find all our windows smashed. We had no gas or water. I remember dad putting a kettle on the fire in the grate to boil water. We had to get water from a stand pipe in the street for several days. In April there was a particularly heavy raid lasting a very long time. My school was hit. On November 14th we had the first 鈥淏litz鈥�, and then my parents decided to move my older brothers and me to safer place. I didn鈥檛 mind evacuation. It was exciting. I was a resourceful sort of person and new challenges were exciting.

My brothers and I moved to different billets. I was with another girl with an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Cooper, who lived in the gate house of Atherstone Hall, Atherstone. They were lovely folks who made us feel very welcome. They lived very different lives from those in the city, much simpler, slower lives. Mr Cooper had a huge vegetable garden. Perhaps that was why I don鈥檛 remember food shortages. I remember one day Mr Cooper telling us about the glows of fires in the night sky. They could tell whether the raids were on Coventry or Birmingham even from fifteen miles away.

When things cooled down a bit we went to see my parents on occasional weekends. My older brother found the homesickness unbearable. Eventually they took him back home, though I was away from home over three years. We listened to news broadcasts every day and just accepted what was going on. I realised after the war that my elder brothers had gone into Coventry to do duties which involved searching out casualties after the air raids. They weren鈥檛 even out of their teens! Looking back, it seems somewhat unreal, but at the time we just got on with it 鈥� managed as best we could and in the mornings all the men went off to work a usual 鈥� whatever the horrors of the night had been. We were all in the same boat.

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