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"Four Hundred Bombers" by Trevor Cook This is Trevor Cooks story: it has been added by Jim Lord with permission from the author who understands the terms and conditions of adding his story to the website.

It was shortly after seven on a clear, cold winter evening. The date was November 14th 1940 and I was 10 years old. My brother and I were swinging in the back garden of 66 Banks Road, Coventry. Our outdoor evening pleasure had been prolonged by the light of a full moon garishly enhanced by a myriad of spluttering yellow flares poised, as if suspended across the sky like a proximate galaxy. The air raid sirens had sounded some twenty minutes earlier and swinging in the garden would seem a somewhat casual approach to such an event, but somehow it had become a part of our daily routine. From August 1940 the city was the object of intermittent air attacks, which followed the usual pattern; the wail of the sirens and the drone of engines overhead always claimed as 'one of ours' until the whistle of a bomb's descent followed by the distant crump of an explosion, disproved that optimistic theory. Then came the all clear and some belated sleep. On the days following those random attacks my brother and I would collect shrapnel and fire bomb fins.

But this night was different. As we swung higher, over the fence we could see the centre of the city glowing redder and redder until we were called inside to huddle under the table in front of the fireplace. Over four hundred bombers that November night, unopposed, dropped a greater weight of bombs than over any single area in England during the war.
My father was working in that city centre and we had barely the gathered inside under the table to 'sit out' the raid in the usual fashion, when without warning, the earth opened up and the sky came in upon us. In one tearing, crashing, grinding, deafening second we were buried beneath the ruins of our house. A piece of shrapnel had passed through the table top and leg just inches away from my head. Too dazed to panic and choking with dust, we stumbled through a grotesque arch of twisted timbers and furniture to the night outside. Already the earlier yellow sky was tinged with orange as tongues of red flame across the city centre reached into the sky and as we lurched into the shelter of an open-ended alleyway nearby I thought of my father. My mother conducted a careful inspection of us to assure herself that we were unhurt, although I could we that her own hands were bleeding.
Our neighbours soon joined us and the husband dropped with his wife on the dirt beside us as he jokingly enquired of the condition of their egg ration. Our amusement was, however, short-lived. A stick of bombs whistled down, each one louder than the one before, until one whistle rose to a deafening shriek. 'My God, this is ours' my mother sobbed, and at that moment the whole family clasped together were lifted into the air as one and thrust to the ground some feet away. I lay stricken, for what seemed an eternity, a painful ringing in my ears and unable to see through a dense grey acrid cloud hiding the debris that had clattered to the ground around us. I became aware of blood that was not my own. Our lighthearted neighbour of a few moments before lay with his leg shattered by the blast. Until the time he was carried off on a stretcher to the hospital post in the school at the end of the road, he displayed great courage. Later, that school was completely destroyed by a landmine and we never saw him again. The hours of the long night wore on. Whilst the merciless destruction continued around us hour after hour, my only recollection is of a confusion of thoughts central to which was the welfare of our father.
The centre of the city was soon reduced to a desert of rubble; essential services were completely disorganized; within a mile of the Cathedral all roads were quite unusable; most buses and trams were destroyed; the railway systems were out of operation and transport ceased to exist. Gas, electricity and water were no longer available. The anti-aircraft gun crews having run oat of ammunition, joined the firemen and Civil Defence workers, who, in the midst of now uncontrollable fires were tearing ineffectually at the debris with their bare hands to release those entombed below.
Shortly after the last bomber had departed the cold steel-grey dawn came at last and uncanny silence prevailed - only the crackle of burning house frames broke the stillness in the air. We emerged from our shelter dazed and numb with cold and began to salvage what we could from the rubble. It was then that we shouted and cried with joy as our father appeared over the top of a pile of bricks.
Faces blackened and in bedroom slippers, like a small band of refugees we set out to walk out of the city. Our route took us through numerous detours along rubble strewn and crater ridden streets. At the foot of one particular crater lay a double-decker bus. Around us was a scene of utter devastation and disorder, the only symmetry being the neat rows of the victims' bodies laid out on the few open space available. Over six hundred civilians were killed during the night and twelve hundred received hospital treatment, a terrible toll, but mercifully low for such devastation. Fifty thousand private houses alone were completely destroyed or damaged, and in the city centre only 31 out of 975 buildings remained intact. But our family was alive and we trudged on carrying two goldfish in a jam jar, also survivors..

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