大象传媒

There was a daylight raid on Filton airfield on a Wednesday.I was playing in the garden and I remember looking up and looking west, I could see aeroplanes in the sky circling about, they were travelling west and they dropped bombs, and houses in Station Road and Mackie Road got damaged. And then later, I think It was Good Friday, 1941, about midnight,an air raid warning had been sounding for some time and we hadn't even bothered to go to the shelter that night (we had a brick built shelter with a concrete roof in the back garden), and three bombs were dropped, the first of which exploded, the third one sounded very noisy and close, I though it was coming down the chimney, but it landed next door. Two houses were completely demolished and the two either side were knocked down soon afterwards as a safety precaution.

We walked out soon after midnight, straight from home, put a coat on over our pyjamas. We didn't stop at the first air raid shelter, we went on to a brick built service shelter at the top of Wades Road. We were there just a few minutes, and then we went up to a shelter that Crouches had at No 2, and then from there we went to another shelter between the laundry house and the laundry, and after a while I think we left that one and went to a shelter which was near the Parish Hall, and eventually we put up for the night at the top of Southmead Road in one of those houses. Maybe the air raid wardens directed us to one shelter, and then to another; we moved from one because there was supposed to be an unexploded bomb nearby. The Council eventually requisitioned a house for us in Southmead Road, and we were there until 1952 when this pair were re-built.

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