大象传媒

I was nine years old when the war started. It affected us more at the beginning than the end. I remember watching Coventry when it was blitzed. I could see a glow in the sky from my home in Handsworth. I thought: 'good heavens, someone must be having it.'
Then I saw a light over our roof, going in the direction of Coventry and realised it must have been the light showing the aircraft where Coventry was.
A lot of the older parts of Birmingham were hit. Many of the old back-to-back houses were bombed. I would go to school or work one day and think to myself 'I'm sure there was something there before' and I'd see 30 odd houses had just disappeared.
We'd be up and down all night, going in and out of the shelter, we got used to it in the end. My dad was a warden, going round the streets, checking everyone was alright. He worked in a grocery shop so we would often gets bits of extras that other people didn't want, things like tinned salmon no-one could afford. We would spend our Saturday nights, counting the ration coupons that had been brought in. We had to account for everything as we only got back the items we had coupons for.
One time we were without water, gas or electricity for a fortnight. We had to cook on the fire in the front room, the best room. My mother didn't like that.
Our home was very near to Kynoch, the amunition plant. When I was ten years old, I found a fin off the end of a bomb in our garden. It had Kynoch written on it. It must have been from weapons the Germans had captured from us. As children, we used to collect lumps of shrapnel and put them in the coal house. Years later, I ended up working for Kynoch myself.

(This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Wyre Forest Volunteer Bureau on behalf of Audrey Commander and has been added to this site with her permission. Audrey Commander fully understands the site's terms and conditions.)

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