大象传媒

My Grandfather told me this story:

My father was a member of the Special Constabulary and if there was an air raid at night he would go out and help the local Air Raid Warden.
When there was a raid on, my sister and I slept under the stairs. It was the safest place to be if the house should collapse. One night, during a raid, we were woken by my father rushing into the kitchen. After a minute both he and my mother were in fits of laughter. We got up and looked into the kitchen to see him standing in the middle of the floor, soaked to the skin and dripping water everywhere. They were both still laughing. When they stopped he told us what had happened.
There was a church at the bottom of our road. In the porch they kept a bucket of sand and several buckets of water, together with a stirrup pump. If an incendiary bomb fell on the church, the sand could be put on it to try and stop the burning. The stirrup pump could be put into water and by pumping, water could be sent out through a hose and nozzle to spray on anything which had caught fire.
That night an incendiary bomb had fallen through the church roof. By the time my father and the Air Raid Warden got there some of the pews had started to burn. They used the sand and my father started to use the stirrup pump. He had nearly emptied the bucket and was shouting, 鈥淢ore water! More water!鈥� when he was hit by a torrent of water from above. Someone had seen the start the start of the fire and had called the Fire Brigade. They had arrived, gone up on the roof with their hose and pumped water through the hole, not knowing that my father was underneath.
鈥淚 know it was a Baptist Church, but I didn鈥檛 expect complete immersion tonight鈥� said my father as he dried off.

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