It was over seventy years ago, but I still clearly remember being awakened by a frightening noise, a sort of melancholy wail, echoing in the night air, rising and falling like some ghastly ship in a storm-swept sea. It was the autumn of 1940, and the war ‘proper’ arrived on that night, starting with that wailing! Even before I was completely awake, Mum gently picked me up, put some clothes on me and carried me downstairs to where Dad was waiting; a large torch in his hand, and his overcoat on.
He opened the back door and walked out into the garden, followed by my mother, still carrying me, as we made our way down the path towards the new shelter that had recently been built at the end of our the garden. I was still half asleep, but I remember glancing up and seeing narrow bars of light crisscrossing the sky, sweeping back and forth, some slowly, some quickly.
“What are those, Dad?” I said, pointing upwards.
“Those are searchlights,” he said, glancing up. “They’re like big torches, and they’re used to find enemy planes.”
He pushed open the door of the shelter, and we all piled into the dark and slightly damp smelling little interior, a room with corrugated iron upper walls and roof and a concrete floor and lower wall. First, he turned on his big torch and swept the beam around, until it settled on a hurricane lamp on a little shelf. He took out a box of matches, turned up the wick and lit it. Immediately, the interior was filled with a warm yellow glow, his body casting a weird black shadow on the walls as he leant over it.
Dad went back to the door of the shelter, which he opened slightly and peered out into the darkness. Then he stepped outside and stood in the doorway, his head tilted back as he looked up into the night sky, his breath forming a misty plume around him in the cold autumn air, lit by the soft glow of the hurricane lamp inside the shelter.
“Hey, come and look at this,” he called back over his shoulder. – “And shut the door too!” he muttered, “or we’ll be in trouble with the wardens for showing a light.”
We looked up and saw a stunning sight, right above where we were standing. All the searchlights I had seen now formed an immense cone of light, fixed on one point, and there, at the centre, was a solitary aircraft, looking ghostly and white against the dense black of the sky. The plane was weaving wildly, trying to escape the dreadful light that was holding it but without success. Then, as we stood watching, small pinpoints of orange light began to appear around the plane, disappearing again almost as soon as they came. Now I heard a new sound. It was a dull ‘thud – thud’, like something heavy hitting a solid wood door. It was the anti-aircraft batteries on the hills around Bristol, and the little orange sparkles above were their shells bursting near the aircraft caught in the lights.
It suddenly occurred to my father that shells bursting right above us could mean shrapnel was falling all about us in a very short time, so he quickly ushered us back into the shelter and out of the cold night air. Just as well he did too because we did indeed hear crashes as bits of the jagged metal fell to earth nearby, one actually hitting our shelter, with a frightening “CLANG”, though thankfully, it did no damage!
We came to no harm, that first night in the shelter, and we spent many more nights there, safe from the horrors going on around us. The little building served us for many years after the war too until it was eventually removed to make way for a garage. But that first night is one I shall never forget, even though I was a little under five years old at the time.
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