大象传媒

I can always remember my mother - we hadn't got a bathroom then, we had a tin bath in front of the fire. And I can remember the air-raid sirens going off and she was in the bath - you've never seen anybody scramble out so quick.
Then, Dad - he only used to work across the road at the ECC - and he used to go firewatching in the evening and that'd leave us on our own back at home.
And suddenly the sirens would go off and they'd frighten you half to death. It was such a dreadful sound.
But it got to the stage where we didn't bother to go in the shelter because nothing actually happened. Then the people next door stopped using it. We said, if anything happens just pop over quick. It was just so cold all the while, in there. There was no heating or anything. We'd got a little paraffin stove. Well, you know, it stunk like anything and you smelt of the fumes when you came out. Dad made a sliding door to go across, but I mean, there was no light in there. There was nothing. You had a candle and those were difficult to get. So later on, towards the end of the war we thought, blow it, I'm not going to bother going in there. You might get up out of bed but you didn't bother going in the shelter. It was a waste of time any way 'cause if anything had hit it...
I mean, when they came after the war to knock them down, the bloke got on the top with a big sledgehammer, hit it once and put a hole through the roof straight away.

[This story was submitted to the People's War site by Wolverhampton Libraries on behalf of Jean Davis and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions]

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