大象传媒

My sister and I were evacuated just a few days before the war started,at the time we were 5 and 7 years old respectively.We reported to school in our gas masks , clothes and with 30 or 40 others , we traveled from Tyesley railway station to Cheltnam and then by bus to Southam. We were all taken to a school hall whilst they tried to find someone who would take us. Because my mother did not want us sepererated took till the end of the day to find someone who would take two small children.A Mr & Mrs Pocket.
We only stayed in Southam for about 2 mounths as my mother missed us but we went to school . My memory is having a patch put in my trousers, which my mother would never do , which i hid by putting my hands behind my back in assembly .
We returned to Birmingham before the blitz started . My first recollection of hearing sirens was being in the centre of Birmingham at night and trying to get home bus which stopped as soon as bombs started falling and we had to walk the last 2 miles .
We shared a shelter with the family next door who had 8 children some of whom were in the forces . My sisiter and I being the youngest slept as best as we could under the wooden benches which everyone else sat on . Every now and again the shelter door would be opened because the condesation would be running down the metal walls and the air would be stale . All i could see when this happened was a sky which was red . There was a anti - aircraft gun at the end of the street and the continual noise of guns , bombs crashing into the ground continued for hours . The longest raid was 13 hours from 6pm to 7pm but they was rarely less than 9 hours . So almost every night for nearly two years we were woken up taken from a comfy bed to sleep in a damp and cold shelter .
I can remember going to school one morning and finding that the nearby Warwick Road was closed because a Birmingham Corporation bus was lying on its side and a least 30 of the house had been hit by high explosive bombs . Another morning I arrived at school to find it had no roof and pool of water lying in the hall. If raids occured while in school we had to evacuate to a brick built shelter .
Looking back the most hair raising moment was when i went to the outside toilet and found a high explosive incendiary bomb which had come through the roof . I thought it was part of a car as my father was a motor mechanic . So I took it into the house to ask my mother what it was . My mother almost had a heart attack and ran down the garden a buried the bomb . The police came to take it away and comfirmed it had failed to detonate .
St Johns Road where I lived was in the middle of a triangle of factories (BSA , Rover and Serck) which supplied guns and vehicle parts , which was the reason for so much bombing occuring in this area . Only my father was at home when a string of bombs fell down the road ,one of which hit and demolished 3 houses next to our house . The Germans left us with this eyesore for over 20 years !

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