大象传媒

BIRMINGHAM IN THE BLITZ

Winifred Barber

My Father-in Law was living in Erdington, Birmingham, when the war started. He had a housekeeper and a very nice house there and he had a small business making pearl buttons in the Jewellery Quarter. He had difficulty getting there when the war started, because he didn鈥檛 drive and had to get on two trams.

He decided he couldn鈥檛 do it anymore and within about a month my Father-in-Law had bought another house and sold his. It was in Handsworth and was an old type house, and halfway down the hall there was a door which led down to a cellar. There was no air-raid shelter in the garden because he had got this cellar. They didn鈥檛 give Anderson shelters to houses that had got cellars so he took us down to the cellar and they had really been working on it. One of the carpets that he hadn鈥檛 used from his previous house, he had put on the floor. He had electric lighting and also plugs so that he could have an electric fire and he also had an electric hob to cook on. He had a cupboard down there and when we looked in, he had got two big packets of Quaker Oats which he said would keep them going for days if they couldn鈥檛 get out of the cellar, but of course with rationing you couldn鈥檛 go and buy a whole load of stuff to put in the cellar, you had to put a bit at a time. He had also got a great big jar and it was filled with fresh water and left down there so that it was there if they needed it.

In early 1941 there were some terrible raids on Birmingham and one night the raid had started about 6 p.m. and he had moved down into the cellar. Around 2 o鈥檆lock in the morning he woke up and he felt as if he needed some fresh air. He was a cavalry man during the First World War and had been gassed and had got a weak chest. He went into the yard at the back of the house and looked out and he saw fires everywhere and the searchlights in the sky and he could see the tracer bullets going, so he knew there were planes up there. He only stood there for a few minutes and suddenly he heard the man who lived next door shouting to him.

He said he just wanted to say that he had seen a parachutist drop from the sky, and he said he was sure it had dropped into my Father-in-Law鈥檚 oak tree because he could see the parachute glistening in the search lights. My Father-in-Law thought it was a spy and was soon going to put paid to him, so he went to his shed and got out a rake, and he and the neighbour who picked up a garden fork walked down the long garden creeping along. When they got to the oak tree they stood underneath and looked up expecting to see a man in it, but instead they saw a great big land-mine. He said the shock of it made them throw away the rake and fork and they ran faster than they had ever run before into the roadway and then ran to the warden鈥檚 centre, and within ten minutes wardens from all over the place were arriving.

They knocked on the doors and got everyone out of their houses and evacuated everyone in coal carts, milk floats, whatever they could get hold of, and took them to a communal shelter some way away.

The mine went off a couple of hours later, and my Father-in-Laws house was toppled sideways, the roof fell off and the doors and windows were blown out, but it didn鈥檛 actually fall down.
When he found another place to live, the amazing thing was that inside the bombed house nothing had been damaged except for some crockery and some glass, and beyond the bottom of his garden, the houses there had all had their roofs lifted off and all the people who had lived there had fortunately been moved out the night before.

Had my Father-in-Law not got up in the middle of the night he wouldn鈥檛 have known about the land mine, and clearly many lives would have been lost.

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at 大象传媒 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鈥檚 terms and conditions.

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