Tried to settle down, only this time there was gun-fire very near, I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from there were no gun emplacements near us. The reverberations of each firing shook the ground, there would be even less sleep that night.
Then I heard the double drone of a plane and the whistle of bombs, - bloody hell that first one was close! Followed by two, three and four, the fifth one only made a terrible rushing sound like a train before it exploded, and the ground moved like water. It was like being in a small rowing boat in the wake of a big ship. Dad and I both turned to the door and were both blasted in the face by a stream of grit, dust and dirt from the edges of the door. What damage the concussion of that explosion would have done inside our shelter but for the door, I dread to think. Dad pushed the door open and went outside. I followed. The oak posts and iron roof of his shed has fallen on the shelter and were supporting tons of brick and rubble. The beams made a triangular tunnel we could crawl through into the garden.
Against the moon and star lit sky, the black silhouette of our row of houses had a deep vee in it, the bottom of the vee was where our house should have been, we could see straight through to the houses across the road. The sides of the vee were the two adjoining houses. One bomb had made three families homeless. I glanced at my watch, it was five minutes to 11 o’clock on the eleventh of September [1940].
No one ever mentions the stink of an explosion, it’s a dry, bitter, burnt sort of smell that stings the nostrils and hangs in the air for ages. Dad shouted to the Lawrences one side asking if they were ok, there was no one hurt but they could smell gas – then to the Dellows on the other side, they were fine but had water leaking in their shelter – both then were in a worse predicament than we were. The sound of another plane and gun-fire, searchlights raking the sky to find it, sent us crawling back into the shelter, through the lean-to tunnel.
Dad said to Mum “May, the house has gone” she sobbed heart rending sobs. Over twenty years of hard slogging to build a home – gone in an instant – and now 40ish faced with the prospect of starting all over again with nothing.
