OUR AIR RAID SHELTER
(with apologies if I have previously posted this elsewhere)
The shelter we had in our back garden was to a four-year-old 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 derision of friends and neighbours. But eighteen months later his family was protected by a two foot thick slab of concrete while the neighbours sheltered under their stairs or within flimsy structures of brick or 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 21 or so years earlier. It was always known within the family as "The Dugout" and it almost certainly survives today, still defying efforts to demolish it.
After the alarm sounded the family would wait for a few moments at the french doors at the back of the house and when there seemed to be a lull overhead we would scurry down the garden, with me usually being carried in a blanket. We 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. 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. 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.
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. Nevertheless my own sense of security had been somewhat compromised by my sister who airily advised me one day that this massive structure would of course not survive a direct hit. This was a disturbing nugget of information which I did not find particularly helpful or welcome.
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 very lucky.
Chris
