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Molly Harris
Three Bombs On Bath

I was born in Bath and still lived there when war broke out, and through the war.
I remember the Bath Blitz.
Bath had three air raids within forty-eight hours in April 1942, which were thought of as reprisals for the Cologne, and Dresden bombing.
There were rumours that Bath could never be bombed, because it was something to do with the atmosphere which could pull the planes down if they flew over the centre of Bath.
Obviously the rumour was incorrect, as we found to our cost.

My father wanted to do something for the war effort.
He'd been involved in the First War and was too old for active service. He joined the auxiliary fire service. It was later called The National Fire Service.
The terms of the volunteers were that they were on duty all night, twelve hours altogether, every seventh night, but they were on duty immediately every time the sirens sounded.
It was quite a performance in our house. The entire equipment including a fireman's hatchet was laid out, so if my father had to leave in a hurry, at least he knew where everything was.
Often my mother would stay awake, frightened of missing that call.

The first night of the three raids my father had gone out on duty.
Unfortunately we had very little protection. Incendiary bombs were coming down, and one landed on a house where friends of my parents lived, about ten doors away. They were so frightened they just ran out of the house and came along to us. We all waited through the night wondering what was going to happen next. We didn't even know if my father was alive or dead.
The following morning we wanted breakfast, by this time we had no water, electricity, or gas. In those days we had a paraffin heater. My mother produced a frying pan and cooked breakfast for everyone on the paraffin heater.
We kept chickens so we had no problem getting eggs. I can see it now, my mother cooking eggs on a paraffin heater. It must have taken her a couple of hours, but we all had breakfast.

The first raid, was nearly all incendiary bombs, and a few hours later, a further raid of high explosive bombs.
My father never told us about what he saw that night, but they were stationed very close to the local gas works, and one of the holders was hit, and it was full of tar.
There was tar everywhere. What a mess.
We were used to having the odd bomb, which were probably meant for Bristol, Coventry or Birmingham. Overall we were bombed very badly, and lost a lot of friends.
I was actually called up but because I worked for a firm of accountants where all the men had been called up I could stay there.
We had the job of arranging the distribution of livestock, which was considered to be 'War Work'.

To compensate for that I had periods of forty-eight hours working at the YWCA in the centre of Bath, where there were a lot of service personnel.
One of my jobs was to peel vegetables to make soup. I remember being presented with a large sackfull of artichokes. Well if anyone has tried to peel artichokes, they would know the difficulty with all the knobs, which we usually attempted to cut off. That was very wasteful, but we would never have got them peeled in the time. I don't know if they were given to us or very cheap but Artichoke Soup was always on the menu.
Since then I've hated artichokes.
My mother used to work for a famous cabinetmaker; they were making parts for Spitfires, something to do with the wings. It was turned into a wartime factory, and my mother carried on working there.

I remember just before war was declared my mother packed some wine glasses away. They weren't very valuable but had a strong sentimental value, a wedding present. When she unpacked them after the war all the stems had broken.

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