大象传媒

On February 3rd,1943 I became fifteen years old, on February 10th,1943 I finally grew up.

On that Wednesday afternoon I took my seven year old brother to the Central Cinema in Friar Street to see the Disney film, Dumbo. We sat in the circle as it ensured a better view of the screen for my young brother. At sometime, well into the film a slide was shown announcing that the Air Raid sirens had sounded. No-one moved, by that time most daylight raids at least were carried out by single aircraft. Reading had only had a scattering of bombs actually on the town during the war to date so no-one was concerned enough to leave.

However,shortly afterwards the sounds of bombs exploding followed by the roar of a low flying aircraft firing it's machine guns were heard.

The next second there was a huge explosion nearby. I was thrown upwards off my seat by the shock that was caused by the upheaval of the cinema, when I came down my seat had tipped up and I landed on it's edge! The cinema filled with a fog of dust, it must have had the best clean since it was built!

The projector obviously had stopped and an announcement was made advising people to leave, they needn't have bothered, everyone was leaving anyway. I grabbed my brother and ushered him down the stairs. Outside I looked to the left where the sound of the explosion appeared to have come from, it was the way I would have walked home. All I could see was a huge pall of smoke and dust but I could make out that Blandy and Blandy's offices, next to St.Laurence's Church seemed to have disappeared.

However, the sight of one or two prostrate figures and others staggering out of the dust and smoke from the end of the Arcade, and the sound of people screaming convinced me to turn the other way. Whatever I might have done, I certainly couldn't have helped with my brother in tow. I walked west along Friar Street until I reached Union Street which was a pedestrian way through to the main thoroughfare, Broad Street. We walked past the closed shops and emerged into Broad Street. There we had a shock, most of the shops had the glass blown out of the windows and down to our left we could see a trolleybus on it's side outside Wellsteed's Department Store.

We had no alternative but to walk east, we lived in East Reading. We had to walk in the road to avoid the debris, it was just as well we did as a huge shopfront fell out as we passed. When we got down to the southern end of the Arcade I could see one or two people lying motionless on the ground and others walking about looking dazed. The whole street was covered in debris, glass, stone, bricks and slate and, of course, the shattered trolleybus. Alarms were going off everywhere.

At the end of Broad Street we walked down the short hill of King Street into the King's Road. On the left water was pouring out of bullet holes in the guttering of the National Provincial Bank. From there we walked home to my much relieved mother, the people in East Reading had heard the bombs and seen the smoke and dust rising from the town centre and feared the worst. We were lucky, but from that day I had personal experience of what war really meant.

Four bombs fell on Reading that day, in a line from just south of Minster Street to the one that had landed on the People's Pantry (one of many Government sponsored cheap restaurants) which had caused the most casualties. Rumour had it that the first bomb had bounced off a pipe that ran between the two halves of Simonds Brewery and landed in a glassworks behind Minster Street. Where two men were working, miraculously neither was injured.

Some people were not so lucky for the bomber, reportedly a Dornier DO217, machine-gunned people in the streets as far north as Caversham as it flew over.

The bomb that fell on the People's Restaurant caused 41 deaths and 153 injuries, by far the worst casualties suffered in Reading during the war.

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