大象传媒

Thursday night, 12th December 1940, was the first part of the Sheffield blitz, the second attack being Sunday the 15th. We were living in Lancing road at that time, near Shoreham Street,

At 7 o鈥檆lock the sirens sounded and we all went down in to the reinforced cellar (we did have an Anderson shelter but my father wouldn鈥檛 let us see it as he didn鈥檛 think it was safe).

Living near the city centre, there were lots of bombs falling in our area-we were near to Lavers woodyard which caught fire early on and the flames lit up the sky. The houses across the street and also next door were badly hit and our own house nearly demolished with the blast, also our Anderson shelter in the back garden was flattened, so if we had been in it we would have been killed.

I can still remember the choking dust around us and the terrifying noise as we crouched in the cellar. My father was on the cellar steps above us and I remember my mother looking up at him and screaming, she thought there was blood pouring down his face, but it was beetroot juice from a glass that had fallen and smashed on his head and given him concussion!

After we had pulled our selves together we crawled through the tunnel into next door's cellar (all the houses had this tunnel leading from one house to the next right down the road in anticipation of an emergency like this), and struggled out of the rubble three doors down the road on to the pavement.

Looking up, we saw German planes in the bright red sky, swooping down over the rooftops and machine-gunning us. My father threw me down in the road with himself on top of me, my mother was in a passageway nearby. The bullets were flying around us but miraculously none of them hit us.

When things quietened down a bit, we got up cautiously and ran down the road to my grandma鈥檚 house and into her cellar, where we stayed for the rest of the night, and also for the next month as we had nowhere else to go, in fact six people spent Christmas in that cellar!

The next day we went back up the road to see what was left of our house, which was very little. Half the staircase was left, and we saw that my wardrobe had fallen across my bed, throwing all the blackened bedding on to a tree nearby. The mirror inside the wardrobe door had smashed into all my clothes, and everything was black with dirt and of course unwearble.

Across the road a friend of ours had been killed by the blast, and because all the mortuaries were full she had been left on the pavement covered by tarpaulin for three days and people were stepping over her until she could be moved.

A few days later we went back to the house again to see if anything could be salvaged, and the army were making the area safe. My father had some bottles of home-made wine in the cellar which had miraculously survived, and he gave the soldiers these bottles. I can see them now all sitting on the pile of rubble and drinking from these bottles!

We could not save anything at all from the debris-all our furniture was ruined, together with all our clothes. We had a lovely piano and I was having lessons, but we never got another one. The compensation we eventually received covered merely basic items of furniture such as beds, tables, Chairs, etc.

We eventually got a house to rent in Charlotte road next to my grandma鈥檚 house, which was nothing short of a miracle as there were no houses to be had after the blitz, and from there we had to make a completely fresh start.

Another house was later built on the site of our old house in Lancing road, but a few years later there was another scare as an unexploded bomb was found on the site, which was fortunately rendered harmless, so someone else had a lucky escape too!!

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