- Contributed by听
- Keith Westwood
- People in story:听
- Frank Westwood
- Location of story:听
- Hall Green, Birmingham
- Article ID:听
- A2063288
- Contributed on:听
- 19 November 2003
TIME - early 1943
"They're different. The drone of their engines - you can always tell." I was born in September 1936, and at 6 years old, this was all my Father told me about German Bombers.
LOCATION Stratford Road, Birmingham.
My Father was the one with the White Tinhat, the Sector Warden. Our house, on the main dual-carriageway, was an informal First Aid Post, and so the doors and windows were often left open in an air-raid, to save the glass being blown in by the blast. Once the blast travelled through the house and played every note on our piano, which was in the back room!
I was not evacuated, because Father was on munitions work, and preferred to have the family at home. During raids, my bed was different too - a brown-painted Anderson Table Shelter - a steel- topped "cage" in the dining room, but with a good spring matress and room for my Mother to sleep with me. I could hide and play in there in the daytime too.
THAT night
The dual carriageway past our house was often used as a guide to incoming raiders, and opposite was a small cul-de-sac, which pointed straight to Coventry. We could tell who was in for it next.
That night was so different. I was taken to the Public Underground Shelter in the Central Reservation, down a flight of concrete steps, through a massive steel door, turn right, and find a place in the wooden benches that lined the sides of the Shelter. Not me - I preferred to push my toy train in and out of the feet of our neighbours, who were all in there. It was all right in there, with electric light and a dry floor. A few hundred yards down the road was a large Traffic Island, with a battery of Search Lights and a battery of ack-ack guns hidden in the bushes, together with "Booming Bertha" - a Naval anti-aircraft gun.
In they came, a number of German Bombers, easily recognised by their sound, but lead by a captured Spitfire - as Father told me next day. He kept the Search Lights switched off until the Spitfire was almost in range, and then turned them all on, full in the Pilot's face. The ack-ack and Bertha joined in, dispersing the following force in all directions.
NEXT MORNING
As I left the house to walk to school, I saw the tail of the Spitfire, sticking up out of the roof of the house on the corner of the cul-de-sac. It could so easily have been our house!
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