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SOUTH WALES IN THE BLITZ

Winifred Barber

When the Second World War first started, South Wales was considered to be a safe area and we weren’t supplied with shelters of any kind. They said we would have to do the best we could for ourselves.

We had a big cupboard under the stairs, but it was on the outside, not the inside of the house. There was a door out in the passageway and it had been used as a coal house. My husband put a bit of carpet on the floor and he put up a shelf, so that he could put the baby’s gas mask on there, because the gas masks were huge that a baby had to have. Where as ours were small, and you could wear them around your shoulder, the baby’s were about a yard long and about a foot and a half wide. The baby went right inside and then there was a handle on the top that you pumped up and down. When we got into the shelter he had put a couple of chairs in there and we had the baby in a wicker basket (they called them weekend baskets years ago). It was quite big and we had it in between us, and when there was a raid on we would lean over the basket.

We could hear the planes come over. With the English planes the hum was continuous, but with the German planes the hum was different, so we knew immediately if there was a German plane up there. We could hear the plane go round and round for sometimes 10 minutes, it was a terrible sensation. You would then hear a big explosion and you knew the bomb had dropped.

One night, there hadn’t been a bomb dropped for about half and hour, but the ‘all clear’ hadn’t been sounded. My neighbour called me and said ‘what a terrible night it’s been’ and I agreed, and said ‘perhaps they have finished now’, and suddenly we heard a bomb coming down. And we both lay on the floor face down, and suddenly there was a terrific thud and the bomb dropped in the park opposite our houses, and it shook everything but it didn’t go off. Of course they had the bomb disposal people there almost immediately and they said there was no detonator in the bomb, so we said thank you for the saboteurs — they had a lot of that, a lot of the bombs didn’t go off.

My neighbour and her sister were going shopping and she had left her coat at the cleaners to be cleaned, and with rationing you couldn’t afford to lose a coat, so she was concerned in case a bomb had been dropped on the cleaners. They went to see if it was still there. It was, but all the road was filled with rubble, and hadn’t been cleared, so they made their way through it and suddenly her sister saw a lovely glove lying on the ground, and she picked it up and realised there was a finger in it! Things like that were happening all the time.

One young lady I knew, whose husband had gone to the war , lived in a flat over one of the and she gave birth to her baby. She wrote to tell her husband that she had had the baby, and then there was a terrible raid.

She had got her bed and the cot by the side of it. The bomb dropped and she and the bed dropped down three floors and of course she was unconscious. When she came round she was in the hospital and asked for her baby, the nurse said she didn’t know anything about a baby, but would find out for her. The baby wasn’t found, and the next day the lady got up and left the hospital to go and find her baby. She walked up and down where all the buildings had been bombed and she looked up onto the roof and suddenly some way away from where she had been living there was a roof with four chimney stacks on it. She could see a bit of a shawl hanging from the chimney. She thought it looked just like her baby’s shawl and within a few minutes the fire brigade came and they found her baby wedged between the four chimneys, but of course it was dead. They gave it to her in her arms and she was so grateful, because she couldn’t have written to her husband to say she didn’t know where the baby was. She felt that now at least, she could write and tell her husband what had happened. It was so sad because he had never seen his baby.

Of course in Swansea we had three continuous nights of air raids, but every morning I used to send my Mother a post card and every morning she sent me one to say they were all right, and that we were alright.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Winifred Barber (author) and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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