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MY WARTIME EXPERIENCE

It was 3 months after my 7th birthday that WW2 started. I remember the serious look on my parents’ faces. Nothing seemed to happen for some months apart from my father having constructed some very heavy shutters for the downstairs back room. We were, I was informed, to use this as a shelter in the event of air raids.

However in the late spring of 1940 my father started digging a large hole at the top of the back garden. Then large curved sections of corrugated steel some 1/8th thick were delivered, which he assembled into the hole. I was told that this was an Anderson shelter as he now considered that our back room would not now give us sufficient protection. At the time I did not understand why but I now realise that our house was on the Radford Road almost opposite Fynford Road and only a few hundred yards, as the plane flies, from the Daimler Motor works which was of course heavily engaged in supporting the war effort and a prime target for the German bombers.

November 14th was a bright moonlight night and the sirens went off sending us to the shelters early. Wave after wave of German bombers went over and we thought they would never stop. Bombs were falling around us although eventually, despite the noise, I fell asleep in my little bunk across the end of the shelter. When we eventually emerged in the daylight there was devastation all around us with a smell of expended cordite, building dust and decay all around us. One of the terraced houses, a few doors away, was demolished and the elderly couple there — a Mr & Mrs Jones — were killed. All the houses in our row were damaged in some respect.

My parents held a quick ‘council of war’ (sic) and it was decided that I should be evacuated out of danger immediately. My mother’s sister in law who was a widow — she lost her husband in WW1 and I was named after him — lived not far away and had walked to us to see if we were in one piece. She was persuaded to take me out of Coventry and it was decided to head for Cheltenham where my mother had near relatives. There was no transport available, it had either been destroyed or requisitioned for emergency use. In any case the roads were in a shocking state with rubble and broken glass from bombed buildings littering the surface. So it was a question of walking.

There was no question of taking the direct route through the city centre as it had been devastated and was impassable; so we walked up the Fynford Road into Moseley Avenue. Progress was slow as we picked our way through the rubble. At the junction with Coundon Road the cluster of shops at the junction had been destroyed and the Co-op shop was still smouldering. It had been hit by an incendiary bomb. Everywhere there was devastation. Buildings were gaping open, walls missing, windows devoid of glass with curtains flapping in the wind. We walked through to Four Pounds Avenue and then into Earlsdon, which did not seem to me to be quite so badly damaged, -although this was a relative term! - and so to Kenilworth where my Aunt was able to get a message through to our relatives in Cheltenham. It was here that we were able to obtain a lift from a kindly soul who took us to Stratford upon Avon. From here we were able to obtain a bus to take us to Cheltenham and arrived very late after a very stressful journey.

After two weeks I was taken by train to my Father’s relatives in Cambridge, where I spent the next 5 years staying with an Uncle. On a couple of occasions when the bombing seemed to have subsided I was allowed back to Coventry for a short visit. One of these times we all went to Stratford upon Avon for a week’s holiday, my Father cycling back to Coventry most days to see to his business.

He had a General Drapers and Boots and Shoes shop on the Stoney Stanton Road. In the April blitz he lost part of the premises. An incendiary bomb had fallen on the shop but the ARP had got the fire well under control when a high explosive bomb hit the shop across the road. The blast from this bomb fanned the flames again with the loss of half of his business. This blast had an unusual effect. The pane of glass in one of his shop windows was sucked out together with the skirt of a dress, which was on display. After the blast the pane resumed its normal position within the window frame but trapped the skirt half in and half out of the window. The only thing my Father could do was to cut off the skirt leaving a small piece of fabric within the window frame!

My Father served in WW1 as a medical orderly in France and was too old to serve in the forces in WW2. However in view of his medical expertise he volunteered to act as a stretcher- bearer to help the ambulance service. During this time he had a very close shave when he was helping to evacuate patients from the Coventry and Warwickshire hospital in Stoney Stanton Road. He was walking down a long corridor when the end disappeared, when the ward he was to evacuate was hit by a bomb. A few seconds later and he would have been in the ward!

During the second big bombing raid in the next April our house was uninhabitable for some 3 months and my parents found temporary bed and breakfast accommodation in Corley some 10 miles away from Coventry to the North. It was during that raid that an ambulance was blown into our front garden and I understand that a picture of this exists in the Coventry Evening Telegraph archives.

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