I should like to bring Lyn's excellent thread back to the top of the pile as there are no doubt a number of new Forum members who have joined since the last post and perhaps we might see some further contributions. So I'll put my own memories in. (I'm sure I have posted something similar elsewhere in the past and apologies to anyone who has read it before).
In the autumn of 1940 I was four and a half and remember being regularly hurried in a blanket towards our shelter. We were very lucky: we lived a mile or so outside the city boundary, to the north-east (in Chester Road, Streetly), and therefore a reasonable distance away from the main industrial targets like "The Dunlop", Nuffields, BSA, ICI, Lucas and the rest. But the ghastly air raid warning siren was nevertheless taken very seriously indeed. I would be roused from my slumbers, wrapped up in a blanket and carried to the half open french windows at the back of our house. There the wooden blackout frames would have been removed and we would wait by the open door in total darkness for my father to decide that there was a lull overhead and it was safe to scurry the twenty-odd yards to the shelter down the garden.
Our shelter was an impressive structure. My father, an inveterate do-it-yourselfer years before it became fashionable, had constructed it himself in late 1938 and early 1939, well before the outbreak of war and to the ill-concealed amusement of friends and neighbours. But now two years later his family was protected by a two foot thick slab of concrete while the neighbours sheltered under their stairs or beneath a structure of thin corrugated iron covered by a few inches of soil. One of my earliest memories is of its construction, its walls being cast with barrowloads of concrete reinforced with steel mesh. It was mainly below ground and its design must have owed much to the dugouts my father had occupied on the Western Front just 23 years earlier. It was always known within the family as "The Dugout" and it almost certainly survives today, still defying efforts to demolish it.
You entered the dugout down several angled steps. Inside there were a couple of bunks, one above the other, made of rough wood and chicken netting. These were for my sister and my mother. I reclined in some sort of orange box wedged across the far wall. I don’t ever remember it as being uncomfortable - in fact it was quite cosy - but my main recollection is the ever-present smell of mustiness and of fumes from the paraffin heater and the hurricane lamp or candles which we inhaled over the following hours.
While the Luftwaffe planes droned overhead, the three of us would spend the rest of the night in relative safety and comfort whilst my father and elder brother, if they were not elsewhere on Home Guard duty, would maintain a vigil up at ground level protected only by their tin hats. One was well aware of the seriousness of the situation - I once got thoroughly ticked off for allowing the torch I was holding to point briefly upwards as I went down the steps - but it never seemed particularly frightening, thanks, I suppose, to my parents protecting me from their worst fears and somehow keeping me cocooned. There was apprehension, of course. But one accepted it all as part of normal life. How my parents felt as they strove to protect their children in these extraordinary circumstances I prefer not to imagine. I have to say however that my own sense of relative security was one day somewhat compromised by my elder sister who airily advised me that this massive structure would, as everyone knew, not survive a direct hit. This was a disturbing nugget of information which I could happily have forgone.
We spent many nights like that - I cannot remember how many. But as the war progressed and the siren continued to sound from time to time my father seemed to develop some sort of system to assess the risk. Sometimes I was allowed to stay in bed where I would lie awake, waiting for the wail of the all-clear and the feeling of relief. On other occasions I would be taken downstairs where it was deemed safe enough to sleep on the floor whilst unknown aircraft droned far overhead in the darkness. And sometimes it would be back to the orange box.
But history reveals that no direct hit ever materialised, neither on the dugout, nor in the immediate vicinity. Many of those nights were full of distant thumps and glows on the horizon and on one occasion we could see an area of Sutton Park ablaze - "The so-and-sos really thought they had hit something worthwhile", the grown-ups chortled the following morning. But nothing close, the buckets of sand and water standing ready in the house were never put to use, the stirrup pump stayed idle. Unlike those living in the more central areas for whom the memories are far less cosy, we were, as I say, very lucky.
