大象传媒

Incendiary bombs

My most vivid memory from world war two would be the incendiary bombs. These weren鈥檛 really 鈥渂ombs鈥� ; they didn鈥檛 blow things up, they just burned. They burned fiercely and lit up the streets, houses, factories 鈥� everything within 40 or 50 metres. . When these bombs came down it was like daytime in the night.

The Germans dropped these bombs on big cities at night so they could see what they were doing. The fire brigade, made up mainly of volunteers, did their best to extinguish the brightly burning bombs but often houses or other buildings were alight and the rescue services were usually mainly concerned with saving lives or with putting out the bigger fires.

While they were doing that we were scurrying for the air-raid shelters. Everyone had a shelter in their garden; these were called Anderson shelters, after the man who designed them, and were made of corrugated iron sheets. If, like us, you didn鈥檛 have a garden and had a yard instead you had a shelter made of bricks.

We scurried because when the incendiary bombs came down we didn鈥檛 need a siren to tell us that the bombers were coming. Sometimes we were too tired to hurry; the Germans didn鈥檛 come at the same time every night, though it was nearly always night-time when they did come because they obviously didn鈥檛 want to be seen by the guns which were in place all over the country to shoot down the enemy planes.

But they needed favourable weather conditions as well as darkness, so they could arrive in the early evening (during the winter nights) or it could be early morning. Sometimes they would come night after night and it was no fun being woken by your parents at 2 or 3 o鈥榗lock in the morning to be dragged to the air raid shelters.

Sometimes, especially in the cold winter nights and mornings, a family would just ignore the sirens and stay in their warm beds. There was no heating in the shelters 鈥� the heating in most family homes was hardly adequate but the shelters would be freezing. Most people had makeshift beds inside their shelters but going from a warm bed to a cold one wasn鈥檛 nice. Most of the families who stayed in their home survived, but some didn鈥檛.

One night a string of bombs was dropped in Wallsend. One of them scored a direct hit on an Anderson shelter and the whole family were killed: they were called Anderson. Another bomb hit a house about 200 metres away and it contained one of the unlucky families who had decided to stay at home and who obviously didn鈥檛 get away with it. There were no survivors from a family of seven; they were also called Anderson and were closely related to the Andersons killed in their shelter.

That was an awful week for Newcastle. The bombs fell night after night and while the Germans were mainly out to hit businesses this made living in Wallsend very dangerous indeed because some of the biggest shipyards in Britain were just a few hundred metres away. They tried to drop their bombs on these yards along the Tyne but they weren鈥檛 always accurate. In that same week a bomb hit a factory in North Shields which had over three hundred employees sheltering in a huge cellar. There wasn鈥檛 a single survivor.

Another bomb hit the public toilets in Shields Road, Newcastle. This was at about 9pm and there were men who had been in nearby pubs who had sheltered in the toilet because it was underground but this was another direct hit. Amazingly there were a couple of survivors. One of them was called Philip Poole and I got to know him years after the war because my step-son married his daughter. Phil had shrapnel (that鈥檚 bits of metal from the bombs) in his body until the day he died a few years ago. They told him it was too dangerous to try to remove some of it as he had bits of metal near his heart and other vital organs; they also told him he wouldn鈥檛 live much longer but he survived for nearly 50 years!

It would be wrong to say we weren鈥檛 ever frightened, but I can honestly say that most of the time we weren鈥檛. When you鈥檙e a kid you adapt and accept things. We believed everything we were told and so we honestly believed that the Germans could never beat us in a war because that鈥檚 what the grown-ups told us, so it was, in the main, an adventure.

I remember friends crying their hearts out because they had found out that their father, brother or some other relative had been killed. There was a lot of that, a lot of tears. But they didn鈥檛 last too long. I suppose people then had different attitudes and once the tears stopped there was a feeling of pride that someone you loved had given their life to try to help his country to win the war. I remember being a bit ashamed of my family because we hadn鈥檛 had anybody killed and I felt a bit left out; those of my friends who had lost a father or brother got special treatment at school and sympathy from everyone and I was jealous.

Now I鈥檓 ashamed of those thoughts, but I was just a kid and they were strange times. Never enough food for a growing lad, though my mother was a marvel and now that I鈥檓 grown up I have no idea how she managed; clothes that had been darned so many times that there was more of my mother in them than there was of the manufacturer. Young people now take the mickey out of anyone who isn鈥檛 wearing trainers that cost at least 拢100 but we were pleased to be warm in winter and cool in summer, and alive.

We didn鈥檛 see a banana for 6 years 鈥� there were far more important things for the ships to carry. Kids who were only four or five years old when the war ended had never seen one. After the war ended and bananas were brought into the country again we older kids thought it was hilarious to watch the younger ones trying to work out what to do with the curved, yellow fruits. Most tried to bite into them without peeling them.

I have lots of memories of the war. Good and bad, happy and sad, warm and cold. But if I close my eyes I can drift back easily into Newcastle in the early 1940s and all I can see are those awful incendiary bombs burning fiercely and so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at them 鈥� but they were eye-magnets; you couldn鈥檛 look away, and then you were being dragged through the dark night into the shelter, bumping into things because you were nearly blind. The real bombs would come next, destroying houses, factories, shops and people. Friends and neighbours you had been talking to outside of the chip-shop last night weren鈥檛 there in the morning.

It鈥檚 long ago but I remember. I鈥檒l always remember. But I鈥檓 glad it鈥檚 long ago. Because of the propaganda, and the war itself, it must have taken me 30 or 40 years to realise that Germans are just people, pretty much like you or me; a lot of them were killed too. Millions of people died.

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