Blitz Memories

This month I set the following exercise for Hove Writers. Write a story as told to you by a 3rd party. Could be a friend, relative, colleague, client etc, but do change the names if necessary.

Here's mine.

When my father was a boy of about eight he had to walk to and from school during the Coventry Blitz.

One day he made his way to Cramper's Field which he had to walk across to reach his street in Coundon.

A burly Air Raid Warden took his arm and escorted him across the Green telling him ‘Keep your eyes on the path son!’ My father took a sneaky peek and saw that rows of air raid victims had been laid out on either side of the Green.  He noticed a familiar sports jacket among the prone figures and realised it belonged to their neighbour, Mr Browett.

When he got home, all the windows had been blown out but half of next door was missing. His mother’s new curtains still hung at the kitchen window. miraculously undamaged.

One day my father was kept off school. He later overheard the grown ups talking and learned this was because a bomb had hit a graveyard near his school and blown bodies up into the air which were hanging from the trees and telegraph wires.

Another time he met his mother at the local Bingo hall after school and they started walking home together. As they turned into their avenue, his mother suddenly grabbed his arm and insisted they walk round the block to enter the avenue by the other end. This was quite a detour and my father remembered feeling annoyed. Within an hour they heard that an unexploded bomb had been found at the other end of their avenue and his mother’s instincts had potentially saved them in the darkness (no streetlights allowed). My father’s street had quite a lot of hits as the German bombers mistook the primary school behind his street for a factory and often dropped bombs there, which would miss their target and hit surrounding houses.

On a lighter note one house in his street had a hit which caused the piano to shoot out into the middle of the street. No one was killed as the occupants were at work, but another neighbour went out into the street after the All Clear and started playing the piano sparking an impromptu neighbourhood knees up.

Then there was the lady who was envious of the fancy new hat her neighbour had just purchased on the black market (new clothes being on ration). During one air raid, the hat was blown clean from her neighbour’s bedroom into hers directly across the road! Sadly it was too bomb-damaged to wear, though she put the remnants of it on anyway and everyone laughed, except the hat's owner, who was apparently furious.

One night my father and his parents, along with thousands of others, walked to Kenilworth, a village about six miles away to take shelter. My father said it was like watching a firework display seeing the city burning in the distance with rockets whistling before they hit, but then his father completed the Anderson Shelter in the garden and he and his parents would go there if the air raid siren sounded. A bank manager and his family across the street tried to fortify their understairs cupboard and were all killed in an air raid.