大象传媒

The night of one of the worst air raids on Coventry was also the worst air raid on Birmingham in 1940.

My father was on fire watch duty on the Coventry side of Birmingham, which was very severely bombed night after night.

On this particular night I remember that I, aged thirteen, had a bad attack of toothache and didn't want to spend yet another night in our little dug-out Anderson shelter, so I refused to leave the warm house to go with my mother and sister and sit on a hard bench in a damp cold musty cell with the bombs whistling down and the thunder of the ack ack guns in the nearby park.

The rest of the family retired to the shelter, armed with blankets, cushions, flasks of tea and torches, while I stubbornly stayed curled up on the settee, holding my throbbing jaw. I was never particularly frightened by the threat of the house collapsing on top of me. The raids had been going on for so long, it was just part of life.
However, I was roused from my misery by a crash overhead and a loud knocking on the front door. When I opened it, I was pushed back into the hall by men armed with buckets and a stirrup pump. Two incendiary bombs had landed on the roof and another had dropped onto our garage roof, housing our neighbour's car.

I fled into the road, toothache forgotten, shrapnel scattering down all around.

The railway line at the back of our house had been hit by a 'landmine' (a large bomb which descended on a parachute). The railway bank and surrounding wasteland was a blazing inferno. We heard later that my father's cousin Joyce, an air raid warden, had been killed.

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