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My Brooks family lived at 18 The Green, East Acton in West London. We had been issued with an Anderson Shelter in 1939 (see story - EAST ACTON: ANDERSON SHELTER, SUMMER 1939) It had not only filled a lot of our tiny back garden but a lot of our life, as well. From the first summer daylight bombing raids and later night Blitz starting in 1940, up to the last Doodlebugs in March 1945, we had gratefully - if reluctantly - huddled inside it.

Usually it was just us, my mother Violet (but 'Doll' to the family), sisters Beryl and Jasmine, and me. But as the blitz got worse Mum’s sisters Audrey and ‘Glad’ and toddler Adrienne Ames would sometimes join us. Our Ames relatives at nearby Taylors Green didn’t have a shelter (My grandmother said it would ruin the small back garden!). At times there could be three adults and four children in that tiny and ‘tinny’ refuge.

Running to it I had seen the burning factories behind Long Drive (see story — EAST ACTON BLITZED: FEBRUARY 1944). Often we had climbed out the next morning to find our home damaged — hit by incendiary bombs; ceilings down; windows shattered; roof slates broken. Although frequently damp and stale smelling it was still an essential and familiar part of our home.

Suddenly the war in Europe was over and we had no need to shelter from air raids anymore, which seemed very strange at first. Some of my friends’ families, who had paid for their Anderson shelters, dug them up and put them on the surface. With doors fitted they made useful garden storage sheds. (One or two can still be seen in old gardens.) I wanted to get into and use our shelter. I thought I could store things in it, and play war-games, but when I pulled the door away the shelter was full of black water and was extremely smelly. It was obviously dangerous, so the door had to be wedged in place with stakes, to stop my young sister Jasmine, aged five, falling in. Unfortunately that was the very last time I saw inside it.

It had been in our garden for more than half my life, for as long as I could remember, in fact - a large pile of earth that I played round and now finally, on. At long last I could climb on it without ‘damaging’ it! When it first arrived it was taller than me, now I could easily look over the top. It was, and always had been, part of my childhood ‘landscape’. Then - as suddenly as it had arrived - it was gone.

I got home from school one day and went out the back — there was just bare lumpy earth where it used to be. Mum said the Council men just smashed the ‘concrete’, pulled out the corrugated iron, put the earth back, and straight on to the next one. It was gone in no time at all she said, smiling and obviously pleased. The garden suddenly looked big and it was strange to be able to look, and walk, straight across it. Mum wanted to put grass seed down, and perhaps make another rockery; to put it back to the way it looked before the war.

Although I was only ten, I understood that adults wanted to wipe-out the war-time things, the reminders of bad times and unpleasant memories. But I remember feeling an uneasy sense of loss at its disappearance. I had lost something large, reassuring and protective. I think we owed it a lot, and I would have liked to have seen our shelter go.

1971: Final Farewell to War-Time Home
After thirty four years my parents were finally leaving East Acton to live in Devon. The furniture had gone and I was about to drive them to their new home in my Mk II Ford Cortina (with wide wheels, rally seat, black interior and black vinyl roof - very smooth!).
I took one last look around the house where I had spent the war and a major formative part of my life.

Despite my best efforts over the years that small circular tea-plate sized patch on the sloping ceiling over the stairs still faintly showed where the dud incendiary had passed through. I could still discern the two slightly different replacement stair treads underneath it. The front bedroom, where the ceiling had fallen on my sister Beryl and me, reminded me that our ceilings had been repaired with boards with a knobbly surface, and re-plastered much later. When ‘modernising’ the front room, I remembered removing the picture rail, which had never joined in one corner after the bomb had hit the public shelter on The Green.

But it was the back garden that had the most memories: the now gracefully leaning garden shed where I used to hide my secret store of shrapnel in its ‘Oxo’ tin; the houses on Long Drive, once seen against the roaring inferno of burning factories; looking east between the houses where we had seen one of the first ‘Doodlebugs’.

But principally I was drawn to the space outside the back room window: the ground was smooth and grassy, no cinder path, no sign of the shelter’s existence now. But it was still down there — the remains of the crumbly concrete floor and walls, a pin-up picture of ‘Jane’ of the Daily Mirror, a toy Spitfire, and a lot of my childhood - noisy, exciting, anxious, precious and very, very lucky — yes, a sheltered childhood.

Revised extracts from ‘A Sheltered Childhood ~ Wartime Family Memories of an East Acton Child’

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