大象传媒

I was born and raised in Bristol and lived there during the war. I remember a November raid in 1940 or 1941 that was when we had the first big blitz in Bristol. We had an Anderson air raid shelter in the garden, it was covered in soil and we had vegetables growing on the top. The shelter used to flood so we had it concreted out to ground level with bricks in the bottom with scaffold planks across so we could keep up out of the way. There were four bunks in there as well, we used to share it with the next door neighbour. It never bothered us at all, when we had air raids we mainly used to sit in the house and listen to them nothing came down where we were. Until that November and it was rather obvious then that it was going to be a big raid. My father was in the police force and they always had about ten minutes when a raid started to get on duty, he was rushing round getting ready and there was my mother and my two sisters, I was the baby of the family. My dad put myself and my middle sister under the stairs as it was obvious that there was a lot going on. We were under the stairs and all of a sudden there was a mighty explosion just a couple of hundred yards away, they had dropped a high explosive and it killed quite a few people. The crash we heard which was something I have never forgotten was the sound of part of our roof going, the whole roof went and a big free standing wardrobe in the bedroom fell over. It made such a tremendous noise. The next thing I knew was that dad grabbed hold of me and rushed through the lounge and the kitchen down the garden to the air raid shelter. We were on our way down there and all of a sudden heard the rushing and screaming of a bomb coming down, both of us went flat on the ground and he pushed mum over and this thing landed just down the road. It wasn鈥檛 as big as the other bombs but it was a big one and we heard the blast go over like a strong wind, whhooosh, straight over the top. The thing that we always laughed at was that mum had a new dress on and when dad pushed her over she tore the dress on a piece of trellis and that seemed more serious than the blitz at the time. That was a clothing coupon!
We stayed in the shelter two or three days. If you went into the house and looked up there was a hole in the ceiling, a hole in the floor above, a hole in the rafters and then you could see the sky. They came round and fixed the roof, they did what was called war damage.

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

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