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This is an extract from a family history written by my mother Mrs Barbara Baxter (nee Clifton) for her children, nephew, nieces and their children. She has given me permission to post this account on the web site.

But with the approach of autumn the daylight hours grew shorter and the warning siren sounded earlier, rarely later than 7 P.M. Now we all fell into a new routine. Homework, if it was to be done at all, had to be done immediately on return from school. After tea, my mother would fill a flask of tea and cut sandwiches and Olive and I would undress and pull over our pyjamas our warm trousers and woollies. I don’t think my mother ever went to these lengths, not being a pyjama wearing person, but warm coats and blankets would be ready together with the ‘comfort’ basket, torch, gas masks and a small case containing things my mother thought valuable.

As soon as the siren sounded, we would each take up our appointed burden and make for the shelter, often, as time went on, with the sound of planes and gun fire already near enough for us not to stay to admire the view, although, as time went on we got used to planes going over to bomb a target elsewhere and then we would gather together with our neighbours to judge, from the red glow in the sky where the incendiaries had found their mark. Birmingham was quire often the target for the night but, since the planes would be passing over, and there was always the chance of the stray bomb perhaps being jettisoned, the ‘all clear’ signal could not be given and we would have to spend another cold and cramped night in the shelter.

The usual practice was for the first wave of bombers to drop incendiaries which then served as markers for the real stuff. Every household had a stirrup pump for the purpose of putting out incendiary bombs but we were lucky in that only one landed in our garden on the night of our ‘blitz’, which my father, for once unable to sleep through it all, succeeded in putting out. My father never joined us in the shelter and usually managed to sleep through all the noise of anti aircraft fire, the constant drone of the bombers overhead and the exploding bombs which could be heard from some miles away. Perhaps this was the only way he managed to survive the awful winter of 1940-41 for we rarely saw him at all during daylight hours as he tried to deal with all the burst water mains.

Surprisingly, we soon adapted to this routine, only complaining when, as frequently happened, we were obliged to abandon a favourite radio programme, like ‘Itma’, or perhaps, at this time, it would have been ‘Band Wagon’. We sometimes managed to get a little sleep in the shelter but we had to sleep curled round one another, and, after several hours of it, we got very stiff. Then when the ‘All Clear’ sounded, usually in the early hours of a frosty morning, there would be a cold bed waiting and it would seem that no sooner had you got warm than it would be time to get up for the usual morning routine. I cannot remember that, until the November 14th raid, I ever missed a day at school, though, of course, there might sometimes have been delays and diversions on the bus journey, due to unexploded bombs.

An old school friend of my sister Olive’s had arranged her wedding around this time. Overcoming all difficulties of food and clothes rationing, she was determined to have the real thing — a white wedding. Although icing sugar was by now unobtainable, a concession was made in the case of brides and the cake was duly ordered and lay waiting in the shop for collection shortly before the wedding. There was only one obstacle; an unexploded bomb was also awaiting its turn to be diffused and the shop, naturally, was out of bounds for both customers and staff. Undeterred she managed to persuade the police to let her under the barrier, at her own risk, of course, in order to rescue the cake. The wedding judging from the pictures I saw went ahead with all the style of a peace time occasion.

So life, of a sort, was still possible, and most people adapted to it, until that unforgettable night of 14th November, the night of a full moon, clear and frost — a perfect night for the bombers, as we soon discovered. I suppose the sirens went around the usual time, perhaps a little before 7 P.M. but we had no way of knowing how many hours it would be before we could emerge from our shelter. We were, of course, very lucky and I think even then we knew it. Often on other nights, we had been able to climb out of the shelter during a quiet spell and look around the sky to see where the activity had been, but on this night we never considered such a possibility for the droning of the bombers never ceased until daylight. In any case, we were in no doubt as to where it was all happening for the fires blazing up over the city centre could be seen even from the doorway of our shelter and the noise of bombs and gunfire was unceasing.

We had an anti-aircraft gun emplacement on the Tile Hill Road which we heard plainly. It was manned partly by A.T.S girls, one of whom had her head blown off in the course of that night.

When we finally emerged from the shelter it was daylight and I don’t think any of us had slept at all, but we didn’t, as was usual, look for our beds because we knew that this was something quite different from the routine raids we had got used to. There was, at first, an eerie silence for no traffic was moving on the roads, but soon, when we looked out of our window we saw the first stragglers leaving the town. From then on, the whole day through, a constant stream of people passed our house (on Broad Lane) all heading towards Berkswell, but perhaps only concerned with getting away from whatever horror they had experienced. Some were pushing prams loaded with children and possessions, some were still in night clothes, but all walked, as it seemed to us, silently, like sleepwalkers.

Our neighbours on the other side of the house from the Jones family did not share our shelter, so naturally we anted to compare notes that morning. Mr Walker was an optician and had, for many years, owned a small shop close to the city centre where he had built up a thriving business. Fearing the worst, he had gone off that morning to try to find out what had happened to it and, even as his wife was telling my mother of their concern, he returned and, on seeing his wife, broke down and cried. He had managed to get near enough to the scene to see his small shop totally flattened. He was a man in his fifties, a professional man, perhaps, we thought, rather pompous and self-important. We would see him going off to Church Parade on Sunday mornings, dressed in his uniform as an officer of the Boys Brigade, cane under arm and jaunty forage cap perched on balding head, and smile a little, but my mother, and all of us felt truly sorry for him that day.

It was many weeks before we heard the stories of some of our friends whose experiences had been so much worse than ours. Our old neighbour from Abbott’s Lane, Mrs Maycock, came to see us and told us about a night of sheer terror, from which, miraculously, as it seemed to them, they had escaped unharmed. They had, at the height of the raid considered leaving their shelter and making a run for it, as some people had attempted, but they found themselves totally surrounded by firs and realised they were trapped. Even more ominous, the huge gasometer, plainly visible from the houses at Abbott’s Lane, seemed to them an un-missable target, and every fresh explosion increased their terror of that final one which must have brought their end. It still seems, to me, quite a small miracle to see that row of four small houses standing, just as I remember them, when so much of the Coventry I knew as a child is no more.

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