大象传媒

Our worst war experience came in the Easter holidays of 1940. At Christmas that winter came the blitz on Manchester, one of the so called 'Beadeker' raids. Poor Manchester was pounded and a great deal of damage was done on successive nights. A few weeks later we had our own little blitz. At that time we were using a brick-built outshouse in the garden as our air raid shelter. My father had ahad a reinforced concrete roof put on it and all the walls were strengthened and the window blocked up. This night the sirens had gone, I got out of bed and we all went across the garden to the shelter. At that time we had a living-in maid and she had chicken pox. As she was infectious she had been left in the house in a smallish cupboard under the stairs. We sat in deck chairs in the shelter and we could hear the planes and hear bombs exploding and anit-aircraft fire also. Very frightening, you felt so helpless and vulnerable. After a time things quietened down and my mother decided to go to the house to see if the maid was alright. She hadn't gone long when we heard another plane and a stick of bombs falling. We were near enough to hear the rush of air as they fell, then the near- deafening explosion. The stick got nearer and nearer - then the wheeee of the bomb coming down and an almighty BANG, sounding just outside our little shelter. We were all convinced that our house had been hit. The bombs continued to fall further off, then came an eerie silence. My father cautioned us, the evacuees and me, to stay put and he went to see hwat had happened. To his relief the house was still standing, but he soon tripped over our windows, all of which, with the exception of those left open, as mine had been, had blown outwards and were lying in the garden. The front door was open, its glass gone and my mother was walking up and down the hall, roundly cursing the Germans, in words my father said he didn't think she knew! We found out soon enough that the bomb had fallen on a house obliquely across the road from us, demolishing at least half of it. In the cellar had been two maids, the family was away. The maids had to be dug out, very frightened but unhurt. The house was later rebuilt and is still standing there. Across the road from it an oil-incendiary bomb had dropped but luckily did not ignite. It had hit the top of a fir tree and cut it in half as it slid to the ground. The oil spread all around from the bomb and killed a lot of the plants. I can remember the horrid smell that lingered there for a long time.
As to our house, when the all clear sounded we returned to bed in what remained of the night. The next day men came to clear up and later that day wooden shutters, which my father had ordered several weeks before, to protect our windows from just such a happening, arrived. They were put on and acted as covers until we could have the windows replaced. We lived in gloom for along time.
Later the air raid shelter in the garden was abandoned as too small and too cold. And my father had a room in the house, the wash-house actually, converted into a bigger shelter. The ceiling was strengthened, a wall built outside the window, and the windows sand-bagged. There were four bunks installed and a double bed for my mother and father. Many nights all of us went to bed together in this room, as it turned out to be more restful than getting out of bed when the siren went.

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