大象传媒

I was a 10 year old boy when war was declared. Prior to the heavy air raids on Hull, nothing much seemed to change, except for air raid shelters being built and rationing being introduced. The most important thing to me, as a schoolboy, was not having to go to school the next day if the sirens had sounded after 10 pm the previous night.
The early raids on Hull were considered light compared with London and Coventry. My school pal and I used to watch from our vantage point on the bankside in English Street in Hull as the small raids developed. The River Humber apparently formed the perfect land-mark for the German bombers, having crossed the North Sea. The anti aircraft guns would open up and we could hear the shrapnel clattering on the roof tops, by which time we would scurry for the safety of an air paid shelter.
Things changed on the night of 7th May, 1941. The way I remember it, the raid lasted 3 hours. I was in our shelter with my family, in the garden of 64, English Street, Hull. The drone of the German bombers seemed to be continuous, the aircraft arrived in waves. The constant anti aircraft fire and the unfamiliar beat of the bombers engines along with the whistle and screech of the bombs was a very frightening experience. At the height of the raid we were shaken and shocked by two expectionally loud explosions. They turned out to be bombs which had straddled our house. One landing in English Street and the other in Lister Street.
As the raid subsided we could hear voices crying out. What we didn't realise at the time was that they were voices of people trapped in the cellar of a bombed house in Lister Street.
I discovered the next day that one of the houses hit belonged to the Dove family. One of the boys in the family was a class mate of mine. Sadly the whole family had been killed. They were sheltering in the cellar of their house because the air raid shelter, which was being built in the garden, had not been completed. We were told later that although some of the family had survived the initial explosion the cellar had filled with water before the rescue squad could reach them.

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