大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Maggie Smith from WM CSV Action Desk on behalf of Jacqueline Wilde and has been added to the site with her permission. Jacqueline Wilde fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

Part 13

My father was a theatre manager first and when cinemas came in he became a cinema manager and his cinema was over the other side of the town, and he hadn鈥檛 got a car so that if the buses stopped when the air raid started he had to walk all the way into the city centre. From the city centre he had to walk to Handsworth and if I was coming off duty I used to meet him there at about 10 o鈥檆lock at night in one of the public shelters, the public shelters were built under some of the big stores like Lewis鈥檚 and Grey鈥檚 places like that. The downstairs some on them had two basements and they turned them into air raid shelters with seats, they would hold 400 hundred people even more than that. People in the area used to either go and take their blankets and stay there the night if they were passing through Birmingham and there was an air raid they would take shelter in these and there was one at Gray鈥檚 which is no longer there now, but in was on the corner opposite to Lewis鈥檚, downstairs in the basement and I used to meet my father and we would go home together. This one particular night it was rather a heavy raid and the buses had all stopped and they were all in lines drawn up to the kerb just outside Gray鈥檚. I was standing at the top of the basement steps with my father and all the people were still sitting either in the buses or were downstairs in the shelter, and suddenly one of these noisy bombs started to come down, the noise was terrific they rattled and the people heard this high explosive coming down and they rushed off the buses and they just knocked my father and I clean over in their frantic effort to go down into the shelter. I was knocked down the stairs, fortunately I only had bruises but it was a bit scary because the high explosive was very near and it landed and we saw the explosion a road away. When the all clear went people came out again and got on the buses and they went on their way, trying to avoid the craters that were in the road where the bombs had dropped. We went to Snow Hill got on a bus back to Handsworth, but they stopped about 11 o鈥檆lock in those days, we didn鈥檛 have all night buses at all so after that you had to walk.

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