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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Stella Graham from Coventry on behalf of Tony Hollis and has been added to the site with his permission. Tony Hollis fully understands the site's terms and conditions

November 14th 1940.

I was about nineteen months old, so the memories are not actually mine, they’re from my mother. We lived in an old cottage, one of three with joining gardens. We had a shelter, as did the neighbours. During the night of the 14th, air-raid sirens sounded and we went to the shelter. There had been raids before and I believe damage had been done and some people were killed. I think a lot of people became more used to it and were not too worried, but that was the heaviest raid. It was eleven hours before the All Clear sounded. Early on in the raid, my dad, mother and my thirteen year old brother were in the shelter. My dad’s best friend who lived some doors away came over and said, ‘Come on Albert, get a shovel, get a spade… a German parachutist came down in Reilly’s field. We’ll go and kill him!’ Some other people must have heard about it because they went as well, but when they got there it wasn’t actually a parachutist, it was a mine which they used at that time. So you can imagine everybody had been running there full of bravado only to turn round and come running back again! It was disarmed the next day by the Royal Navy I believe. The Germans had started using sea mines and experimented with them because when they landed on top of the ground, the explosion didn’t go upwards as if the bomb had penetrated soft ground, they went horizontally and did an enormous amount of damage when they went off. Many didn’t actually explode because the timer was clockwork and very often it would stop when they hit the ground.

Shortly after that, a bomb hit the path at the side of the shelter and the shelter collapsed. I have no memories at all of this, but my mother got out. She got hold of me and ran. Simply ran towards Bell Green which was away from the city. My Dad who wasn’t really a very fit man (he already had a bad injury to his leg and gained another injury in the shelter), he got out after my brother and ran after my mother. He ran about half a mile before he caught her.
Near to Bell Green, there was an outcrop of sandstone rock by the side of the road and at that time there must have been a cave or a hollow. He got a ladder and he pushed it into this hollow and saw other people sheltering there. He said ‘Look after my wife. I’ve got to go back for my lad’ And he ran back to the shelter. He found my brother - he’d lost his Wellington and didn’t want to leave without it!

They ran down the road with the dog (which disappeared for three days, but did come back). My brother has vivid memories of the houses. The windows were all broken and the curtains were billowing out. Shrapnel was bouncing and pinging off the metal lampposts. It was probably from the bomb blasts or anti-aircraft fire. They got to the rocks, collected my mother and decided to move on. They walked into the countryside and down a path. Skinner’s path, which led through some allotments down to a brook over a wooden bridge. They saw a bomb over the brook and thought it was going to hit, but it didn’t explode. They walked through the fields up to Deedmore Road. At that point they turned left and headed towards a cottage down towards Shilton. Along there my mother said it was so clear at night and the moon was so bright that they could actually see the German bombers. She was terrified, she kept jumping into the ditch because she thought they were going to be machine-gunned. They were walking along and she said she couldn’t understand why big lorries kept going backwards and forwards towards where they’d just left. Around there, there used to be an MOD property which is now a small industrial estate, which I believe at that time was a store for anti-aircraft shells. The lorries had been collecting these shells.

They walked along, heading towards Shilton and at some point beyond there, there are two farms. There’s still one working farm now. They came off the road and went into a barn. There were other people there sheltering. We stopped with them for the night and the next morning we came back again to the cottage. During the night, my dad’s friend Baz had sadly been killed. Anderson shelters were made of sections, and the bomb must have hit the back of it and it collapsed inwards where he lay in the bunk. The cottage was damaged, the roof and bedroom ceilings had fallen down. The doors were off the hinges and the windows were broken. They did the best they could. They didn’t have any gas or water. But at that time you just had to help. Neighbours and relatives helped. Eventually, in time it was repaired. We shared the shelter from then with the next door neighbours. They eventually had three girls. The oldest girl is slightly younger than me. My only memory of the war is seeing her (Carol) go into the shelter. I remember my mother waking me, saying, ‘C’mon, c’mon we’ve got to go to the shelter — the sirens have sounded’

The thing I remember most was the smell of the oil lamp. Obviously this was towards the end of the war and there wouldn’t be serious raids, but you still went to the shelter. I recall the smell of the oil lamp and seeing this girl from next door with her pigtails and nightclothes on in the shelter. I think these are probably my only memories of the war.
I started school in 1944 and once I was told not to worry because they were going to sound the sirens, but they were only testing them. After 1942 there weren’t really any raids. Germany had changed tactics — they attacked Russia and the aircraft were needed there.

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