大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Amy Bennett-Newens, a volunteer from CSV Action Desk on behalf of Toni Bergonzi and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Bergonzi fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
When I first went to Cockshut Hill School in Yardley in September 1940, the war had just started. It made little difference at first, but then we were issued with gas masks, which we had to carry in a cardboard box with a strap to sling it over our shoulder. I was dissappointed to have the ordinary black mask like my parents when some (younger) children had Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck masks.
At school we had to practice putting on the masks and we also had to go down the air raid shelters. These were brick built and semi submergedqnd then covered in soil. Having gone down the slope into the shelted class by class, we then came back out through the emergency exit, which was at the other end to the main entrance and consisted of an upright metal ladder that lead out through what looked, from the outside, like a manhole cover on top of the shelter. That was always the best part of the exercise - climbing out using the ladder.
Luckily we never had to use them in anger.
The nearest we came to it was when we were all called in urgently out of the playground by the teachers, when long strips of what looked like silver paper started falling from the sky after a plane (one of ours - at least there had been no air raid warning) had passed high over head. I believe since that it was something to do with radar experiments. We were forbidden to pick them up.
At home we also had an Anderson shelter, which I remember, helping (hindering?) my father and his brothers to erect in the garden. A deep hole was dug about 3 feet and the shelter, which consisted of corrugated iron sheets with a right angle curve at one end, was bolted together in the hole, about half protruding above ground level. The earth from the hole was then put over the top. Dad even built a sort of porch entrance and lined the inside up to ground level with concrete - probably as well as when the rains came our next-door neighbour, Mrs Brendon found that their shelter flooded, and she and her children shared ours.
When the air raids started I would be carried, half asleep but aware that the air raid siren with its rising and falling warning sound had gone off, down into the shelter and would be put on one of the two bunks. These were made of an oblong woodedn frame with thin interwoven metal slats running lengthwise and width wise. They ran along each side of the shelter. But more than anything I can still recall the distinctive warm smell on entering the shelter.
This came from two clay flower pots, one upside down on top of the other and with a lighted candle inside. It also gave off a surprising amount of warmth. I usually slept through the raids were over central Birmingham I could hear the planes - the engines of the German ones having a distinctive note, which went up and down. The names became familiar from, I think, the newspapers - Heinkel, Dornier, Junkers 88 and Messerschmitt 109 - I certainly knew the names.
We had only one near miss and that was when a bomb landed in our road, I think it destroyed No 70 and we lived at No 7. Certainly for a few days we had to go out to a water cart with buckets to get water.
My Grandparents also had an Anderson and my Grandad had a narrow escape when on returning from work he went to join the rest of the family in he shelter. As he went to get in a land mine landed in the street beyond repair.
After the raids stopped the shelter became my "den" until after the war when it was dug up and formed the basis of a garage my father built at the end of the garden. I only read recently that you had to buy the shelter if you wanted to keep it!

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