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THE WAR IN LEICESTER — Childhood memories

The war really came to us in November 1940 when the German bombers apparently lost their way to Coventry and pasted Leicester instead. I was 9 years old. The Air Raid sirens sounded around 8 o'clock in the evening and we were advised to leave the house and use the underground shelter on Spinney Hill Park to the east of the City. I was in bed so I got dressed again and we all trouped down to the park. It was a requirement then not to show any light from the windows and so grandma, who lived with us, had organised a local carpenter to make folding shutters which completely covered the two large bay windows of 129 East Park Road. All the other windows had thick black material inside the curtains.

It was a clear night and when we arrived at the shelter there were already several neighbours down there. They had come with their pets: cats, dogs, rabbits and a parrot in a cage. Everyone was well wrapped up and reasonably cheerful. There was good natured banter about the war and air raids and some of the men were swapping jokes. It was dank and cold under the cricket pitch and the concrete walls dripped water down one's neck. At the far end of the shelter was a ventilation cover and after an hour or so it became quite airless inside this concrete tomb so someone suggested that the ventilator be opened. To do this one man climbed the stairs and went outside, walking over the ground above. We never saw him again because at that precise moment a bomb hit the cricket pitch. Inside everyone screamed as the concrete walls caved in. Water poured down and there was total darkness. The whole thing happened in a split second for just as quickly the walls reverted to their normal shape and it stopped raining. Shortly afterwards the All Clear sounded and we made our way back to the surface.

As we walked back up East Park Road the moon was shining and I saw an enormous crater in the road outside the butcher’s shop. There were paving stones from the walkway on the roof and all the windows in the shops had disappeared whilst in the crater itself the remains of a saloon car was enveloped in twisted tram rails. We quickly made our way indoors thankful that the shutters had been fixed around the windows. My grandmother could not stifle a gasp when we saw that all the glass had gone from our windows too — blown inside all over the dining room floor!

On the next night we had to evacuate the house again as the Air Raid warning sounded. The park shelter was no longer available to us since there was an unexploded bomb on the park, so we walked up to the Evington Cinema where a brick shelter had been constructed above the ground. I couldn't really understand what protection such a flimsy building would give us in the event of a direct hit. Later on I learned that no shelter either above or below the ground would survive that event but it did give some protection from blast. Fortunately I did not have to experience the truth of this statement! My father who was an amateur magician entertained us with tricks but the night passed off without incident and no further bombs fell in the immediate vicinity.

It was the following morning when I realised just how much damage had been done in Highfields and indeed how lucky we had been on East Park Road. I remember picking my way to school over the rubble of St Peter's Road where several houses had been hit. The roadway was littered with bricks, timber and rubble and several lamp standards lay on their side. We learnt later that the bombers had been aiming for the railway marshalling yards but most bombs fell well short of their target. St Peter's Church stood proud amongst the carnage around it, much like St Paul's in London after a bad night in the blitz. Leicester was spared any further assault by enemy bombers during the war although I remember many nights lying in my bed and hearing the drone of heavy bombers on their way north. The sirens sounded many times but we never ventured out to the shelters again. My mother considered it safe enough to shelter in our back passageway or beneath the stairs.

The huge crater outside our house caused severe problems for traffic and the tram service. But the tramway engineers came and constructed a crossover so that trams could terminate their journey outside our house and then return to the City Centre via London Road. The temporary track work in the road was not filled with stone setts as the rest of the network but stood proud of the road surface like railway lines on sleepers.

© 2005 Graham Francis

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