I don’t know
what made me start thinking of my young life in the Second World War. I was six at the time when we lived in a
little house on an avenue in Manchester. My parents had strengthened the cellar
to act as an air raid shelter and each night my mother and her family and her
sister’s family used to troop down into the shelter to sleep. One night during
the blitz a bomb landed at the end of our road, it broke every window in our
house shook it badly so the dust caused a thick fog in our little bolthole. As
the fog cleared my little cousin was stood at the end of his cot with one
finger raise and said “Hark” I can’t remember what the parental reaction was
but I imagine it was something that released the tension.
Because of
this near miss we moved to the country, we had no time to build a shelter there
when a lone German bomber dropped a bomb on us. I believe it was a lost aircraft
dumping it’s cargo, I sat with my mother in her bed while we heard the
whistling of the falling bomb. I was convinced it was about to fall on us and I
must admit to being frightened into a blind panic when there was a loud
explosion and once again we lost all our windows. The next morning I had
recovered enough to go looking for the crater which was about half a mile away,
naturally there were several people about looking at the hole but much to my
joy I found a piece of metal which I believed came from the bomb. This treasure
stayed with me for the rest of the war and beyond.
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