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This is about the day my father disappeared. It was 11 December 1941 or 1942, either my 9th or 10th birthday. I should say that I was born in 1932, one of twin girls. My mother didn’t know what to call us. My grandmother’s name was Marie Rose so she called us both after her: I was Rose-Marie and my sister, Marie Rose. She died very young, from diphtheria. I have an older brother, who was in the Royal Navy during the war, and a little sister 5 years younger than me.

But back to my birthday. My father used to love watching clock repairers as a hobby. His main job was as a tool maker at Wards, Dale Road, Selly Oak. He was working the night shift on the night before my birthday and he said to my Mum ‘Don’t expect me home early in the morning because I’m going straight on to Stratford Road, Sparkhill, to get Rose-Marie a watch for her birthday’. We’d always had made-up watches until then — this was to be a NEW one!

That night was a very bad raid — one of the worst. We heard the news that there was an unexploded bomb on the Stratford Road and, when Dad still hadn’t come home by late afternoon, Mum assumed that Dad was caught up in it. We knew nothing for sure.

What had happened was that Alfred Road, opposite the Piccadilly Cinema had been hit by a landmine and in the middle of Stratford Road itself, just by the junction with Poplar Road, there was an unexploded bomb down in a crater.

Mum had a sister, Aunty Dolly, who lived in a shop she ran in Alfred Road. In Mum’s mind that shop had gone so she caught the number 44 bus to Alfred Road, where she saw that she was right. But Aunty Dolly had been out that night so although the shop was flattened, she was fine. Somehow, they found each other and they went around the police stations looking for Dad who was still missing.

You had to go to churches and police stations to look at the lists that were made of casualties and the dead. They had no joy. Three days and three nights passed before they found him in Selly Oak Hospital. He’d had two or three operations on his left shoulder when we found him, and had been unconscious most of the time.

What Dad told Mum when she found him was that the bus he had been travelling on had stopped further up Stratford Road and everyone had been told to get off because the bomb damage made the road impassable. Then he had continued to walk the rest of the way down the street because the jeweller’s where he wanted to buy my watch was opposite Poplar Road. As he was approaching the shop, he heard someone shout. There were some men trying to lift the unexploded bomb out of the crater using wooden planks. As the man shouted a warning, the plank slipped and bomb exploded.

There were one or two cars (quite unusual in those days) and Dad managed to leap under one of them, but couldn’t get right under so his left side was left out. He caught the shrapnel in his shoulder which caused the wounds. When he was first found, he gave the police a message to tell us about the accident but it wasn’t passed on to my Mum.

On the corner of Poplar Road was a terrible pile of bloodied bodies and limbs. There was a bank there with a door right on the corner and the blood of the wounded splattered up it. Whatever they did afterwards to paint or plaster the walls, the marks of the blood always came through.

I never got a watch for my birthday that year, but I did get my Dad back.

This story was told by Rose-Marie Orme (née Hillstead) to Jenni Waugh, ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War Outreach Officer, on Remembrance Day, 2005. Rose-Marie accepts the site’s terms and conditions.

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