大象传媒

I was born in Coventry on 13th June 1938, which may not have been a good time to have been born in that city. My parents had been married three years before and had already lost girl twins, born a year before me and who had died at birth. They were of that generation whose parents found difficulty in understanding why they were buying a house instead of renting one as everyone else in the family had to that point.
This lack of understanding was probably exacerbated by the knowledge that in the year they were married my father had been out of work more than he had been in it. From leaving school at the age of fourteen he had done various jobs in the motor cycle and car factories of Coventry eventually seeming to settle on being a paintsprayer and finisher.
When the war began my father did as many others and built an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. This was a very small affair, brick sided, half sunk into the ground, with a cast concrete roof and earth piled up around the sides that stuck up above ground level. Although very young when first taken into it I do remember it being very dark and damp and frightening. I much more clearly remember helping Dad to dismantle it after the war and helping the driver of the lorry who came to collect the rubble load it onto his truck. The roof was used to hold up an embankment at the other side of the entry way at the bottom of the garden, where it remains to this day.
Despite the work that went into it this shelter was little used not only because of its disagreeable nature but because the next-door-but-two neighbours had a much larger construction which could not only house them but several other families as well. And so it was in November 1940, on what was almost certainly the most traumatic night of my parents life, that we had made our way over the intervening fences into this shelter where we spent the night of the great Coventry blitz with three other families.
I have a memory of crossing those fences which I am not sure is real or not. My mother was carrying me and as I lay in her arms I saw the silhouette of an aircraft flying over us. My mother told me later that she had no such memory - as far as she was concerned they had waited until a break in the raid before hastily moving to the more congenial atmosphere of the neighbour's shelter. At some point during the night there was a lull in the explosions and the sound of aircraft, so my father decided he would go back to our house. He had run out of cigarettes and was finding things a bit difficult to bear without a Woodbine.
Later he would tell how he went in the back door into what was a kind of kitchen/diner to look in the sideboard. Finding no "fags" there he went into the front hall to go upstairs to look in the pockets of his work clothes only to find he could not get up the stairs: they had been reduced to matchwood. The inside wall of the bathroom at the top of the stairs was down and he could see a gaping hole in the outside wall and the dark sky illuminated by flames beyond. He knew that a locomotive on the lines outside the railway sheds had been hit and had blown up earlier in the evening and assumed that a chunk of that had come through the house. He returned to the shelter fagless and I guess not a little upset.
Shortly after getting back to the shelter (later accounts varied as to whether it was ten minutes or twenty) there was a huge explosion which shook up those in the shelter considerably. After some time when things had quietened down a braver or more curious member of the community went out to investigate and when they returned I heard the words that are the first that I ever remember hearing in my life:"Morgan's has gone". Many years later I told my mother of this memory and she told me the name of the person who said those words.
A landmine or delayed action bomb had exploded in our house blowing down it and the houses in the terrace either side of it (two on one side, one on the other) In the single end house to one side the lady of the house had been sheltering under the stairs. Miraculously after spending some weeks in hospital she survived the ordeal to move back, with us, into the houses when they were rebuilt after the war.
It is difficult all these years later to convey the terrible impact of such events on the lives of the people who went through them. Apart from the loss of my teddy bear and some bad dreams which faded as the war ran its course and ended I don't think I was much affected but I think my parents' lives were blighted by that and subsequent events forever. In light of our current prosperity and the rather more open way in which we tend to live our lives the ways in which their lives were affected, or at least the way they expressed those effects seem almost trivial.
My father had been making a stair carpet and hall runner for the house using the plugged wool technique. The runner was done, the stair carpet about a third completed when they were blown up. For years my mother lived with the shame of having some of her bed linen returned to her from the roof of a house in an adjacent street. I believe we were still using some of it, cut down the middle and resewn, at the time I left home some twenty years later. But these things were just the symbols of the loss of years of hard work and scrimping and scraping to put a home together at a very difficult time and all blown away in one moment.
Nor was this helped by what happened next. After spending several weeks living with an aunt and uncle and two cousins we had managed to rent another house and were starting to put life back together when my father received a letter from the military. It was I believe from the headquarters of the Worcestershire Regiment at Norton Barracks. It informed Dad that since he had failed to respond to the call-up notice that had been sent to him, if he did not report to the barracks by about ten days hence they would send a military escort to collect him. It was some days later that a battered set of call-up papers arrived at the house. Despite forwarding addresses having been left the Post Office had failed to locate our new address for a long time. The authorities had failed to find Dad at work because had changed jobs during this period from Morris Bodies to Rootes and the Ministry of Labour had failed to register the change.
So off he went to war. The saving grace was that no matter what loss my parents suffered they did not die nor were injured, a piece of good fortune that attached itself to all of the rest of a very large extended family throughout the war.
The only visible remains of this little event are a block of four houses that now look newer, but by now only slightly newer, than their neighbours; a large crack, now of course filled in but which can still be detected in the side wall of the neighbouring block of houses; and the concrete roof of an old air raid shelter holding up an embankment.

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