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Re CARDIFF Blitz I understand that you would like some memories of that frightening night

Well I was 6 years old at the time and on that day my mother Edith Davies had arranged a visit to one of her friends who lived in Broadway Roath .
We lived in Penllyn Road Canton so that afternoon I accompanied my mother and we caught a tramcar outside the Canton Cinema bound for the Royal Oak terminus.
As I remember it was a chilly day but sunny and we stayed until it was dark then caught the Tramcar back to Canton .
When we got to Queens Street the sirens were sounding and the tram was stopped somewhere by what is now Churchill Way. In those days the canal ran through the centre of the area and on each side there were brick air raid shelters .
We were shepherded into these and they were packed with people the only seating was duck boarding seats along the sides It was really cold and before long the bombs were exploding all around.
For some reason I did not feel afraid probably due to the excitement.
The raid seemed to last for hours and despite lulls the all clear took ages to sound but it did eventually ‘
.
Then we were taken from the shelter and outside there were fire engines and firemen men trying to put out the fires but the hosepipes seemed to be frozen, there was rubble all over the place and I could see along Queens Street that there was massive damage and fires burning mainly I think in what was R,E Jones Tea Rooms and Marments .
Walking through frozen sheets of water and solid hosepipes we arrived at the YMCA building near Queen Street Station and given cocoa.
My mother had no idea how we were going to get home to Canton but sometime in the early hours a man in a car was stopped and it seemed that he was travelling through Canton perhaps to Ely.
He managed to get me and my mother into the car and then we had a very bumpy ride through the freezing water and solid hosepipes toward Canton
On the way we could see the bomb damage and one part that sticks in my mind is the Lloyds Bank building opposite Franklins the bakers and Uffs the tobacconists was burning badly (even next day we could see the burning embers inside.)

We arrived at Penllyn Road and my father who was in the Home Guard met us and I believe that he gave the man in the car 10 shillings which in those days was quite a lot.
The raids were not over however and the sirens started again as soon as we got in the house as we had no air raid shelter in those days we all got under the stairs including Laddie my dog .
It was not long before a massive explosion rocked the house and I believe that this was a land mine which destroyed two houses near the junction of Llandaff Road and Romilly Road.
When the sirens gave the all clear at last we went out into the street and could see the flames from Canton High School which was gutted.
I was a pupil at Radnor Road School at the time and the plus side for us was that we did not have to go to School on days after a night raid.

In the months that followed we had many smaller raids and I remember standing outside our Anderson Shelter listening to screaming bombs landing in Lansdowne road . Incendiary bombs fell quite often one through the roof of the Canton Cinema which I understand did not go off . One story was told by a friend who said that a fire bomb came through their roof and landed in the kitchen so they threw their cocoa over it .
Until the Sixties when the old pennant paving stones were removed from the streets there was a round indentation from an Incendiary bomb immediately outside
36 Penllyn Road where we lived.
There was a film called A Night to Remember But that was about the Titanic but my night to remember was that frosty night in 1940

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