大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Richard Jackson on behalf of Ray Bowman and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Bowman fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

When the government delivered an Anderson shelter to our house in Bexley, my father dug a hole ten feet deep and countersunk the shelter so that the top of it was level with the garden path. He cemented steps down to a room-size door and ran an electric cable down from the house so we had light and a little ring to boil a kettle on. The only toilet facility was a bucket behind a curtain outside the door. Just as the sirens went for an air-raid, my mum nipped outside to use the bucket. We heard the dreadful whistling as a stick of bombs hurtled down towards us and blew our row of houses down. My mother let out a piercing scream and we all thought she had been hit by shrapnel or the blast from the bombs. But what had happened was that a hedge-hog that was walking past above had either fallen or was blown down between my mum and the dug-out wall striking my mum's bare bum on the way down, hence the scream! What happened to the hedge-hog? We thought it must have climbed up the ramp at the side of the steps and trundled off into the night wondering what he had done against Hitler for him to have thrown a bum curve like that at him. Anyway we never saw him again but hoped he survived the blitz as we all had.

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