大象传媒

My story is called A Blitz which is the German word for a sudden attack and here it is:-

Boom! Bang! Bang! Bang! Whiz-z-z...... The mobile guns roared as the bombs dropped around us. We were sitting in the air raid shelter one night during a blitz in Liverpool. For four hours we had sat there, Bang! - and still there was no sound of the All Clear. We could hear the breaking of windows outside as the shrapnel soared through the air. Whoo-oo-oo! We all covered heads with our hands as a "Whistler" landed on some houses a few hundred yards away.

"That was near," said Joan, "I wonder" ...... but she did not have time finish the sentence, for the shelter door was flung open by the force of the blast and all the candles were blown out. As I was closing the door, I saw a blaze of light very close at hand, and I decided that an incendiary bomb had fallen on the railway station. A tumble of bricks -breaking of glass - a piercing cry. We heard the shouting of a warden, then everything became quiet. I opened the door and even though it was only two a.m., it was light enough to read a newspaper.

At last, a lull! I crept very gingerly out of the shelter and made a dash for the house to make a hot drink before the guns started up again. I was just going back, carrying a tray of hot drinks, when I heard the drone of a 'plane overhead. I rushed into the shelter and my mother closed the door after me.

C R A S H !!! Above our heads we could hear the debris falling on the roof, thud, thud. Once more the door was flung open. The soot poured in, and the family and I found ourselves lying in a huddle on the floor. As soon as we had managed to find our feet, we realised that our house must have been damaged.

We heard screams from next door, and, as we found out later, our neighbours had been sitting in the house and had been flung from one end of the room to the other. We could hardly wait to go outside to investigate, but the bombs were falling continually as we waited for the All-Clear to sound. Nobody spoke. I must have fallen asleep because the next sound I heard was Whoo-oo-oo, the steady note of the All-Clear. We jumped up and rushed out into the garden. It seemed day-light although it was only about three-thirty in the morning.

We stood stock still, and stared at the remains of our house. Then we plodded our way to the pile of debris and walked through the space where the door should have been. When we eventually found our way in the remains of the living room, everything was covered with soot which lay about seven inches deep. No chairs could be found, and the remaining walls were all cracked. I wandered out into the street, and both rows of houses were in the same state as our own.

I looked across the road and saw the Decontamination Car standing in the road and the wardens digging in the debris. People had crowded together in groups, talking about the two old women for whom the wardens were searching under the bricks. Other people were staring up at a chimney pot, looking at the two green parachutes to which had been attached the land mines that had caused this bloodshed and breaking of people's hearts and homes.

When everybody had realized what had happened, people began to clear away some of the debris as best as they could. Nobody felt depressed, even though his house had been blasted; the raid only made us more determined to fight back and help to bring victory to the country more quickly.

People who had not been in a blitz have no idea what those in blitzed area have experienced, and how they are carrying on even though many of them have lost friends and relations.

In 1938 I passed the scholarship and went to the Liverpool College for Girls in Grove Street, Liverpool, and I transferred to the Park School in Moor Park, Preston in 1941. After a few weeks at this new school, all pupils were asked to write an article for the school magazine. I did one and it was accepted and I felt proud when I saw it in print. It was a perfectly true record of events apart from the word "garden". I thought this sounded "posh" as at that time we lived in a terraced house with only a back yard.

On the morning after our house had been bombed there wasn't any gas, water or electricity and everybody was walking around in a daze. My mother decided to take us to Preston to stay with some friends partly because we had nowhere to live and also we had had interrupted sleep over the previous seven days. A the trains to Ormskirk were run by electricity my mother, my sister, myself and our dog walked all the way to Ormskirk in order to catch the train to Preston. We never went back to Liverpool to live.

MARJORIE HARTLEY, Lower Va

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