大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a Volunteer from Reading on behalf of Mr Ron Paige and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Paige fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

For the first year of the war we lost a year of school as they were building the shelters. Once or twice a week we went to school to get set work from the teacher and would do it at home. We鈥檇 always hope that the school would get bombed but it never was.

In the school shelter we used to play Chinese whispers to pass the time, down one side of the shelter and up the other. Sometimes we could be in the shelters from 9am to 5pm. When the doodlebugs started dropping bombs we could hear the explosions but never knew what happened. We knew it would be ok if it stopped humming overhead.

There were bomb shelters that you put in the largest room in your house. Sometimes we had to go to bed in this shelter while our parents used to sit in chairs outside. One night I did an impression of a whistling bomb; my parents dived from their chairs to under the shelter. Then after a while they realised there was no explosion. I got a good hiding for doing that!

My dad never slept in the shelter, he insisted on always sleeping in his own bed.

When my aunts house was bombed out they found a pair of my uncle鈥檚 trousers hanging in the next street.

One night during an air raid a German pilot had bailed out. He landed on the roof of a house where a very religious old lady lived, down the street. She came out of her house and thought it was someone sent down from heaven. But the home Guard was on their way down the road and took the German away.

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