大象传媒

THE ITALIAN JOB

Our air raid shelter was the front cellar of the house; Father had put a couple of scaffold poles up to reinforce the ceiling, made a shutter of two layers of wood with steel between them which fitted outside the small window and that was it. One night I was in bed by the wall between the front and back cellars when I yelled "Bombs mum." at my mother who was in bed near the window. I then dived under the table.

Mother saw the shutter jump off the window, do a pirouette and fall down flat. Then we both heard the debris dropping like the stones in a quarry after the blasting. Father who was standing at the top of the stairs was blown down them and half way up again. My sister who was in bed upstairs had pulled the bedding over her head and after the bang everything was covered in glass.

The young girl two doors away who was standing in the equivalent position to where I was laying, was never seen again because that is exactly where the nearest bomb exploded. Her mother with a visitor鈥檚 infant in her arms was buried at the foot of their cellar stairs, and both were gassed by the broken main supply to the house. The visitor who buried a short distance away in the rubble, survived. The son of this family, who was home on compassionate leave because the father had been killed in the navy, floated down in his bed which turned over and landed on top of him in the debris, the bed protecting him from the rest of the stuff which came down on top.

Half the family from the house between them and us came into our cellar, wondering where the rest of the family was. We soon found out that they were all safely in another house wondering the same about those in ours.

In the house the other side there was a large hole in the wall and the old lady who lived there on her own could not be found. A great deal of discussion centred around whether she was wandering the streets in a state of shock, or had perhaps been sucked out through the hole and buried in the debris. Then someone told us, she had gone away the day before, to stay with friends in the country.

GLASS

Up the hill from us, the next bomb demolished an end house, two people who had just reached the coal cellar under the front path walked out, and two others, still in bed upstairs walked off the top. The ornaments which were on the mantle pieces of the corner fire places, were still attached to the next house. They remained there for weeks.

Down the hill from us two ladies died as their house blew apart. That worried me. Those two ladies were terrors for yelling at any children who dared to play, even very quietly, in the lane beside their house. The previous day I was with a small group who were bawled out for doing just that and one of the other lads had said, "I wish Hitler would get that pair." I have been careful not to say things like that ever since.

There was another strange thing about that house. It was the only place in the area with black tape across its windows to reduce the effects of a blast. Most people had used white or clear.
Pieces of their glass, tape and all were found in our teapot! Now to get there they had to fly about thirty five metres and turn a right angle, also they were rather large pieces of glass. The lid was correctly on the teapot and the teapot was correctly on the shelf half full of glass!
When the debris was cleared from that house a few small items remained, notably a bible, in the middle of the site, somewhat battered and with its pages blowing over in the breeze. I think there was a fourth bomb which came down the other side of the railway line.

In our chicken house at the bottom of the garden one hen lost all the feathers along one side of her body. "Half oven ready." as father described her, but she was not in the least bit put out by the experience so father let her carry on and grow some more.

The next day Lord Haw Haw announced that an aircraft of their heroic Italian allies had destroyed an ammunition train in Plymouth. We knew they had missed.

I always thought it terribly unfair that they hanged William Joyce, otherwise known as "Lord Haw Hew" when they caught up with him after the war. He told us when to sleep in our shelters and when it was safe to stay in our bedrooms, also many Plymouth people would take to the countryside and sleep under the hedges, or go and stay with friends in the country, when he warned of en impending attack. This must have saved countless lives.

THE BUTTON

Up the hill from us a Mr Sergeant lived in Connaught Avenue. Coming out of his house one night to see what was going on he heard the whoosh of a bomb coming down nearby so he flung himself flat in the middle of the road. When he got up feeling himself all over to make sure there were no bits missing and no leaks, he found he had lost a button from his Civil Defence greatcoat. For ten minutes he searched for the black button on the black tarmac in the blackout with his approved torch shielded down to a thin pencil beam. Then he realised he should be looking to see if the bomb had started any fires. However search as he may he could find nothing so assumed it must have exploded in another sector, but it was a big one.
When he had found the button at first light next morning I joined him and father in taking a walk around to see what had happened. Certainly something had knocked out the corner of an upstairs bay window in a house in Tevy Place, but the only clue was a piece of unmatching masonry. Then as we walked up Pearson Road I said,
"It's Lonsdale Villas."
''What do you mean they look all right to me.
"When I draw a map of Lonsdale Villas they look like two pairs of shorts hanging on a clothes line," I replied. "But there's a leg missing."

The bomb had gone into the mud of the garden, slanted in under the fourth large house of the semi-detached properties, and detached it very cleanly from its neighbour. Now we knew where the piece of masonry had come from to knock out the window of the house over a hundred metres away.

MAPS

My map drawing was all part of the fireguard activities. When there were many fires around, firefighters were called in from other areas such as Bude, and there were teams from Canada as well. It was the business of the street parties to be able to tell them where to find hydrants and static water tanks among other things.

I searched for one hydrant for some time, then kicked away some rubble left in the lane outside the back door of the local small builder, and found it. This caused another upset. Of course covering it was an offence and no one could understand why he did it. True, there was another one with a larger water main outside his front door but this was no excuse. It took more than a mere threat of prosecution to make him mend his ways. The authorities cleared the hydrant and he covered it again. Only when he received a summons to attend court did he clear it and keep it clear.

PARACHUTES

Of course all sorts of things fell out of the sky, one night three Germans came down on their parachutes. One German landed on Townsend Hill and was rescued by a policeman from a bunch of women intent on lynching him. One landed in Alexandra Road and was knocked flat by a man who was not prepared to chance having a pistol aimed at him, or at least that was his excuse. The other came down on an old bomb site in Lisson Grove. When he had disentangled himself from his parachute he found an air raid warden quietly standing over him. Fortunately "Come" means pretty much the same in both languages.

The route to the warden鈥檚 post in the basement of the church at the top of Belgrave Road went along the lane behind Mutley Plain where Timothy Whites and Taylor鈥檚 chemists shop was blazing merrily. As they walked toward the inferno the German became very agitated and took a lot of reassuring to keep him going. The warden thought he was afraid that some of his mates above may try to stoke the fire a bit but they were such rotten shots there was not a lot to worry about.

Safely in the wardens post someone was found who could speak German and then they discovered that he had thought they intended to throw him on the fire. Of course as this was in fathers second fire guard sector he was there, walking through the storeroom of Widgers paint merchants next door to see that it was not affected, but it was. It was very hot and a tin of paint exploded in flames behind him, then another, then another even closer, so he decided it was time to get out and inform the senior professional fire officer present.

One dark and foggy night we heard the throbbing of what appeared to be a German aircraft flying very low and very slow. Wondering whet was going on we all went and congregated at the front door. A discussion with our neighbours on the opposite side from the bomb site centred on whether it was a lost German, or a lost American. No British aircraft we had heard about throbbed like that, they all roared steadily.
Suddenly some parachute flares burst into life immediately over the post office in eighty one Belgrave Road, next to the Co-op shop. Burning pieces of the flares bounced off the post office roof. Then the guns opened up. Then the sirens sounded. Not wanting shrapnel denting our craniums we went in out of the way.

NUTMEG GRATERS

Early in the war I was a pupil of Hyde Park Road School and one day I turned up to find it was now a smouldering shell. The rainbows shimmering colourfully on its walls, as a result of the sun shining through the spray from the firemen's hoses, were beautiful. As was the thought of no more school for a day or two while the authorities decided where to put us.

I was most upset though about my brand new satchel, which I had left in the classroom having no homework to do that night. A space in another school was found quite soon to my dismay but that was also bombed one night shortly after I got there. Then I was evacuated to Cornwall but that is another story.

Later I want to the Plymouth Junior Technical School which at the time was located in Armada Street. At the end of Armada Street where it joined Tavistock Road was a little shop which for a time had a good supply of nutmeg graters, all slightly different but to the same design. Our plumbing master "Pop" Serridge thought he recognised them. Of course such things were in short supply as were all raw materials including lead for plumbing classes. Many supplies though were imported in tins so we collected these and alternated lead work with tinplate work. He had wondered why in one of the classes all the youngsters wanted to make nutmeg graters every week, for mum, for aunty, for granny, for elder sister, and so on. Now he knew, bought by the shopkeeper for four pence and sold for six pence. After that the supplies dried up.

CHEERS

Our air raid shelter at school was the reinforced basement, a horrid place where I imagined being buried alive with the legs of a corpse wrapped around my neck. If however the sirens sounded in our own time while in the buildings the rule was that we had to go into this hole or get off the premises.

One day after a heavy raid on the city a number of us had been given detention at lunch time for failing to do our homework the night before. Most of us had gone to bed early because Lord Haw Haw had told us that Plymouth was to be totally destroyed until not a brick was left standing that night. He was always saying things like that, we knew he exaggerated a bit.

As we were filing into the appointed classroom we heard the throbbing sound of a German aircraft, then the sirens sounded. Everybody cheered and filed straight out again, most of us walked on and went home for lunch.

The greatest danger in these circumstances would have been the shrapnel from our own guns, but they had been ordered not to fire unless the Germans were in range and the reconnaissance 'planes flew too high for that. Therefore we only had to listen for our own fighter planes which would take until the German was half way back to Cherbourg to get high enough.

I often wonder what the German aircrew would have thought if they had known that a crowd of English schoolboys cheered their arrival.

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