大象传媒

After what the German armed forces had done to Poland only a fool would have treated the war-making capacity of Adolf Hitler in a light-hearted fashion. Even before the Prime Minister, to whom the German dictator had dealt many cards from the bottom of the pack, had announced over the radio on Sunday, 3rd September, 1939, that the country was in a state of war, all were aware of dangerous days ahead. There were very few who had not regarded the outbreak of war as unlikely and long before Mr. Chamberlain鈥檚 broadcast preparations were well advanced. Air-raid shelters of many different types were already in position and gas masks had been issued by the million. These were provided free of charge by the Government, naturally, and I had gone along on my own to the Weightman Memorial Hall to collect mine. Not a Whitehall handout, though, was black-out material and here the responsibility, as well as the picking-up of the bill, was with the householder. If the coming of war was an ill-wind of the harshest kind, then it blew good for the owners of the mills that manufactured light-tight curtain material. Some would become millionaires overnight as their looms worked round the clock for weeks to meet the overwhelming demand. The same would do for quarry owners and jute importers and their pockets would be lined as sand bags were filled by the thousand to stack in front of civic and military establishments up and down the land.
At home, however, we opted for shutters, as did most of the Newport Estate residents. My one-legged dad squatted on the kitchen floor in front of the fire bringing into play our full range of joinery tools, a hammer, saw, chisel and pincers, to nail together two primitive wooden frames on which some old, but unpunctured, lino was tacked. If it kept in the light, that was all that was required. The carpentry was not required to be of a City and Guilds standard! From then on, every evening before the prescribed time, announced on radio and printed on the front of every Echo, these two shutters were in place. At the window in the back door was pinned a suitable piece of curtaining.
Putting up and taking down the shutters was to become essential daily exercise. In the same way as the clocks of that time were wound at bedtime, or in the manner in which an empty milk bottle is placed on a doorstep now, the shutters had to be attended to. For ease, they were left outside on the ground below the window, a habit that had winter-time drawbacks. It was no fun, and a few swear words would be generated, as, in fast-fading light, hands were thrust into deep snow to locate the blinking shutters! Those wartime winters were severe.
News of German bombers approaching New Silksworth was signalled by a lone siren on the roof of the Temperance Hall, now the Christian Calvary Fellowship, and where it remained until quite recently. On a clear , cold, crisp winter鈥檚 night, its piercing, frightening wail travelled easily and if John Peel鈥檚 hunting cry was claimed to waken the dead, then this siren had a similar decibel output! Few were expected to sleep through it, yet some did. It was only natural, of course, when they announced next morning, 鈥業 didn鈥檛 hear any siren鈥�, that the unkind, pointed comment of 鈥榊ou wouldn鈥檛 ,would you?鈥� followed.
Once the war was under way and the siren sounding, we hurried to our Anderson type corrugated-iron shelter, sunk deep into the ground at the far end of a long garden, without a moment鈥檚 delay. 鈥淎lbert, Colin, get up鈥�, came the demand from the other bedroom, but we didn鈥檛 need any bidding. Already, we were out of bed and running downstairs in the dark. The shelter gave you a chance and you headed for it. We were very much aware, too that the whole village was awake and on the move. If after a time little seemed to be happening, my mam would slip inside to put the kettle on, but common sense kept you shelter-bound until the All Clear signal authorised the return to your empty bed, not now as warm and comfortable as when you left it. Although early raids were brief and uneventful, in the end the Luftwaffe gave us the full treatment and later it was no surprise to learn that for its size, Sunderland was the seventh heavily bombed town un the country. Explosive bombs, one, in particular, that emitted a terrifying scream before hitting the ground not far from the Barnes Hotel, fire bombs, known as incendiaries, flares and machine-gun bullets all fell from the skies, while moving in the opposite direction were shells and searchlight beams. Most of the former were hurled skywards by Leechmere Lizzie, the name popularly ascribed on the biggest and noisiest firer on the anti-aircraft gun emplacement at Grangetown. The whole of Newport seemed to shudder when it fired. Try sleeping through that!
Nor did the terror come only by night. A sneak, lone, Sunday morning raider came close to hitting the pit with a single bomb before escaping over the North Sea after machine-gunning pedestrians out on a Sabbath-day stroll. One May Thursday, a return to school after lunch was impossible due to the ferocity of the worst daylight raid of the whole war. Roker and Fulwell took a battering in the afternoon hazy sunshine and a notable loss of civilian life was the horrid outcome.
For small boys, of course, as I was, it could be described as exitement with a capital E! November the fifth had nothing on this! Lights, colour, noise, bangs, the lot! A much more solemn commentary, however, was that for my dad, lucky to suffer only a bayonet wound on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (we lost 21,000 dead), as well as for my mother, it was a second taste of a world war. Neither was yet 50.

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