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This contribution to WW2 People's War was received by the Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Norfolk. The story has been written by Fred Morrad and has been submitted to the site with the permission and on behalf of Mr. F Morrad. He fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

The Anderson Shelter worked!

I remember Ronny Fox, a friend of mine of my age who lived about 100 yards down the road from me, on the same side of the road. The main L M S London to Scotland railway line of four tracks was at the end of our back gardens, although his garden was closer to the line, being no more that 15 yards away whereas ours was about 40 yards away. This gave them a larger garden, and they had an Anderson shelter well away from the house, at the end of the back garden.

The usual way to install an Anderson shelter was to excavate a hole to a depth of about 4 feet, pout down a base ( concrete if you could; rammed earth if you couldn't), and build the shelter in it using the pack ( mostly corrugated iron) which was delivered to your house. The shelter had a vertical front and back and a barrel roof formed from bent corrugated iron sheets making the sides. The excavated earth was used to cover the barrel shape and the back. An earth wall was placed in from of the entrance, giving a sort of burrow into which people went when the sirens sounded. The Anderson shelter was in my view a brilliant idea, being robust and simple to construct, cheap and using the minimum of scarce resources.

One night the sirens sounded: we shared a shelter with our next door neighbour so we all took cover. During the raid there was a tremendous bang near us but we couldn't see anything when we came out at the end of the raid because it was later at night. We saw from a bedroom window early the next morning that bomb had landed on the railway track closest to Ronnie's garden — and to the Anderson shelter. They had all been buried in the shelter by the debris, and had to be dig out! They were all unharmed but very shaken by the experience. One railway track had been severed completely, but it was repaired within the day.

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