´óÏó´«Ã½

Story donated by Colin Norden and recorded by Rebecca Digby

One night when I was nine years old, our night fighters were chasing a lone German bomber back to Germany. It was on its way back from Coventry where the German planes went to drop their bombs. However, this one had not dropped all of them. As it flew over our village it dropped them. The house next door to us had the side of it's wall blown out and just across the road another house also had it's wall blown out. An 88-year-old lady owned this last house and she didn't even wake up when this happened!

My father was the village motor-mechanic and the Royal Observer for our village — he plotted the course and heights of incoming German planes and reported his findings to Cambridge.

After this incident he decided our family needed bomb protection. He had a hole in the ground where the repaired the underneath of cars. He put railway sleepers over the top of it to make it a bomb shelter. It felt far safer in there.

Every time the sirens wailed at night my Mum would come in and instruct us to "Light your candles, put on your coats and wellies and go downstairs". We had no electricity and would follow her candle down to the shelter. We did this whatever the weather — it never changed. My two sisters and I tended to fall asleep there.

One night while queuing up to get in the shelter I had to step sideways in the pitch black. I stepped into a tank of oil that had been drained out of two engines that day and fell over in it. My father took me back into the house to clean me up and he prayed that the bombers would stop for another half hour so we could get back in the shelter.

I was never frightened though, I trusted completely in my Mum and Dad's guidance. I still admire my parent for making protection for us.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.