大象传媒

On Sunday morning the third day of September 1939, my sister and I, she nine years of age, I all of fourteen, were sitting with our Mum and Dad at the table in our kitchen at 48 Herbert Street, Hoxton, in the East-end of London, listening to the sombre voice of Mr. Chamberlain the Prime Minister coming from the loudspeaker of our Relay Wireless, aa he announced that we were at war with Germany.
When the broadcast finished dad switched off the wireless and we sat in stunned silence. After a minute or so my dad stood up and said "Right son, you and I need to go out into the back yard and do some more work on the dug-out.
We'd started digging what came to be known as 'our hole' during the crises in 1938, when dad, remembering his experiences in France during the 1914-18 war thought it would be a good idea to make a dug-out for us to take shelter from the expected bombing.
We had managed to to dig out a hole about six feet by four, but as we got down to a depth of three feet the subsoil made the digging difficult. Meanwhile the crises had lessened somewhat and so dad decided, much to my relief, and I believe his too, that rather than construct a proper dug-out we'd have a trench to jump into instead.
In the Spring of 1940 the corrugated iron sections of a 'Anderson Shelter'were delivered to our house and the Council workmen were pleasantly surprised to find most of the hard work done for them. All they had to do was slightly enlarge 'our hole', assemble the shelter and cover it with earth.
For the rest of the war years my dad made good use of the mound of earth over the shelter, planting Dwarf Beans and Vegatable Marrows on it. This was to be the only use made of the shelter for it remained flooded with about a foot of water the whole time it was there.
During the Blitz, when the air raid siren warning was given we would go across the street to my Grandma's back yard, her shelter was more attractive than ours being covered with Dwarf Dhalias, and usually dry, except when we'd had a lot of rain, when water would seep through the joints in the corrugated iron.
There was never enough space for us all to get into the shelter as our houses were shared with other families so the men stayed outside. I remember I was quite proud to be included in this group, although when bombs fell nearby I found myself edging closer to the shelter.
As the Blitz continued the fear of getting a direct hit by a bomb seemed to get less and we only used the shelter if it was a really heavy raid. The feeling seemed to be that you'd only get hit if 'it had your name on it' and of course everyone believed their name wasn't!

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