I was two when the war started, and so I'm not sure when my recollections began. My dad was often on fire watch duty, the men not called up worked during the day, did fire watch over night, walked home if the raid finished before morning for a wash and shave before going off to work again.
I always slept in moms bed when dad wasn't there, she would block the bedroom door with the tallboy, and a Lloyd loom chair and the linen basket on top of that 'To keep the b..... jerries out' So if the siren went off, and of course it often did, there was a scurry to move the furniture, wrap me up and dash down stairs, me being carried. We always went to a neighbouors shelter, the men had all made a big effort to keep it dry, whereas ours was always wet and the smell was pretty nasty, so it became the communal place to shelter. Our immediate neighbours slept heavily, and mom would wake them by knocking on the kitchen fanlight window with our line prop. She would tell me to stand under our lean to where she kept the wash tub, while she picked up the prop leant her arms as far as she could over the fence and started rapping on the glass. She wouldn't stop until she saw a face at the window, no lights of course, she couldn't even put on a torch. She said in later years how terrified she was, so she was brave to hang about waiting for them to waken. The inevitable happened of course, one night she put the prop through the window, the neighbours were furious, mom wasn't too happy either, and my dad had to try to find a piece of glass and get it cut. But it meant the end of her good deed, she never woke them again.
It was 1943 when I started school, February 6th, I saw the school log entry last year when my school celebrated its centenary, and we carried gas masks and had a brick building with no windows - later turned into a cloakroom, today it's the staff room - where we would practice to go should there be a daylight raid, in fact there wasn't one during my time there. We would pick up shrapnel the day after a raid, but I was never afraid at any time. My parents did a wonderful job, they shielded me from as much of the war as they could. The bombing that was going on all around us, during the worst of the war in Birmingham made no impact one me. I guess I was alseep, I can still sleep through thunder stormes. I do recall passing 'bombed out' houses in or near Lozells, when we were visiting my grannie, but I don't recall any more war damage.
I spent the last year of the war in Hamstead at my aunts house, and was there for VE day where Aunt Jane helped organise the street party. The whole of the bottom end of Hamstead village sat round tressle tables, put up in the road where the number 6 bus turned in those days, eating food that had been squirreled away for just such a celebration. All of us children were given a bag of Dolly Mixtures, and a few were sick from eating too much food. We had a huge bonfire that night with Hitler sitting on top, and he burned to our cheers.
The end of war really came to our family when one of my cousins husband came home after spending much of the war in a German prison camp. There was bunting hung from one lamp post to the next, and we had one more party.
