大象传媒

Staffs County Council libraries, on behalf of the author, have submitted this story. The author fully understands the rules and regulations of the People's War website.

My family lived in Sheffield during the war. Sheffield was heavily bombed. I remember that there were guns positioned on opposite sides of the city and it seemed to us that when the guns were fired we got the shrapnel from the opposite side of the city but we were clear of the guns fired from our side of the city.
I remember one night my dad coming home from work poorly and went to bed. Later, the air raid sirens sounded. My mother shouted up to my father asking him to come down so that we could go in the air raid shelter but he wanted to stay in bed as he wasn't well. My mother, grandma and me went under the table in the kitchen. Suddenly a bomb was dropped really close by. The shutters on the windows blew open, the glass in the windows blew in and the outside door blew open. My dad came running downstairs and we all quickly made our way to the shelter.
On another occasion, my family and our immediate neighbours were all in the air raid shelter having just spent all of the night in there. When we all trooped out to go back to the house, we noticed how quiet everywhere was. There was no one left in the houses in our street or in the adjoining streets. We found out later that everyone had been evacuated in the night because of a suspected bomb in the road - we were the closest to it but we had been forgotten!! Apparently, because our air raid shelter was situated so far from the house, people had assumed that we had already left.

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