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I am a poet and was so traumatised by the sight of Coventry burning eight miles away that I couldn't write about it for 60 years. I print below two poems that finally came to the surface.
I was a child of four on the night of the Coventry Blitz. Neighbours in our street, Lee Road, Leamington Spa, had clubbed together to build a community air raid shelter on our green. The children, dressed in siren suits, had bunk shelves for sleeping. I remember to this day the smell of damp concrete and oil stoves and murmuring voices telling stories during air raids.
For everyone in the shelter on the night of November 14/15 1940 there was a fearful dread of what was happening in the unseen skies above. There was a continuous drone of bombers. When the All Clear finally sounded we filed out of the shelter to find the sky half lit with scarlet like a sunrise. We could see the flames. My father lifted me onto his shoulder and said: You'll never forget this. As a girl of 15 I was painting pictures of it at school — black figures standing together lit up with haloes of glowing fire.
Finally in 2000 the Coventry Blitz emerged from its wrapping of fear and anger to become a poem (number IX of a sequence called Intimacy). It was followed by a prose poem written in 2003. I dedicate them to the survivors of the Blitz.

IX

Red-orange daybreak growing in the North at black night
under the hours’ long raid, wives and husbands in the shelter
hiding deep fright,
the knowing dread of bombers

on course, sky armada.
In my green siren suit with matching pixie-hood I’m sleeping and waking,
bunk beds tiered like shelves in a larder,
the women knitting, the men weaving stories like netting

to keep the sky from falling. The paraffin stove
crocheting a jacket of steel over the soft light puckering,
smelling of safety, the light nesting like butterflies above
on the cement ceiling.

Intimacy without windows,
close as a heatwave’s airless night,
open to the sound of bombers (not ours),
a heavy locust cloud humming without number, unstoppable blight

horizon to horizon. Someone’s getting it.
The Scheherezades fearful of ending their stories, told on and on
until the All Clear brought us out,
painted in sky, painted in sky-blood, firelight shone

on our faces, on my siren suit and hood,
the North red, tips of flames like thorns,
our fear ashen as we all stood
like a watcher who mourns

on the road back to Pompeii,
returning to storm clouds of Vesuvius,
the red haze, black hail of boulders, eight miles away,
— swift mouth stopping orange molten lava in a surprise rush —

as the crow would fly, but would not in that burnt air,
and still burning levelling sea;
in such a whirlpool of fire
sank Coventry.

TO THE TUNE OF THE MOONLIGHT SONATA

The room of no choice is the one for a child, under a bombers’ moon, to the tune of the Moonlight Sonata, played, strangely, on one note, strangely, a drone, a bombers’ drone, played, strangely, for eleven hours without altering pitch. The rendering of the Moonlight Sonata sinks through the ceiling of the room, the smell of sweet bodies rising to the accompaniment. In the room of cement and damp air, the paraffin stove is playing to the drone of the Moonlight Sonata, flickering on and on in the manner of stories told in whispers. And the children are listening. What is this? We are leaving the room of no choice and it is abruptly silent except for the cackle of flames applauding the long rendition of the Moonlight Sonata. The sky is on fire for the music, blood scarlet for the music, to the dying strains of the tune in a single, single, wail.

In Memoriam: The destruction of the mediaeval city of Coventry November 14-15 1940 codenamed Moonlight Sonata by Hitler.

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