大象传媒

suppose it must have been sometime in 1942 or 1943 that the following memory belongs.
My father had been one of the first to be called up, thus leaving me, an only child, with my mother in a terraced house in Hereford.
Hereford was not an industrial centre but, nevertheless, lay on the route that enemy planes took on their flights to and from the Black Country, so the sirens in the city often went off in the middle of the night and my mother struggled to get me into the Anderson Shelter which was in our back garden.
On the particular night in question, we must have been in the shelter several hours when to our amazement the curtain at the door of the shelter was drawn back and a flashlight shone in on us. A voice from the dark told us that it was an air-raid warden and he was checking on all shleters in our street that night. He went on to say that there was something we all should see and invited us to follow him out in the pitch dark of the blackout. How trusting we were in that era! I guess it must have been about 2 am. Grasping my mother's arm, she holding on to me for grim death, the warden led about a half dozen of us from the terrace to the end of the road and told us to look out towards the south over the river. I still recall what I saw that night, a sort of half moon of orange and red glowing on the horizon.
'It's Swansea burning,' the warden said.
Later in life I checked with the history books of the period and, indeed, Swansea Docks had been very heavily bombed over a period of time. Perhaps the most memporable fact about this incident was the fact that Swansea is over 60 miles from Hereford and that the glow on the horizon was testament to the dreadful pounding that the city was taking.
I have many other stories which perhaps you would like me to share with you.
Bob. (Aged 67)

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