Bombing Run

During the war my father worked long shifts at the shipyards. The German bombers had been flying overhead for a few nights heading for Clydebank. When the sirens sounded we made our way to the air-raid shelter, my father cursing the Germans. His sleep had been disturbed for three or four nights, at least, and he was exhausted.
When the sirens sounded again the next night he refused to leave his bed. He said Clydebank was far enough away from Partick for us not to worry and that no bloody German was putting him out of his bed again.
My mother grabbed myself and my sisters and took us to the shelter. When we were on the street the bombs fell. But not far away as they had done on previous nights. This time they were close.
There was a flash and an explosion and the street seemed to shake. The south end of the street had been hit. I don't remember how I felt but I remember noticing that some of the children were terrified and screaming, while some were very quiet. My mother left us with a neighbour and ran towards our home. Halfway across the street she saw our father running towards us with no top on clutching at his pants and bare-foot. We stayed in the shelter all night.
In the morning we saw where the bomb had hit. I don't remember the names of the people who were killed but my mother knew them. In one of the flats a whole family had been killed. One of them was a little girl younger than me who I would often see playing with a toy pram.
For a long time afterwards the toy pram was where she had left it in the back-court of the tenament building. It stayed there for what seemed an age. Either no wanted, or no one could bring themselves, to move it.
I remember we children would look at it as we walked by and say nothing. The pram gave me a strange feeling. It was like the feeling I had in church when I was a girl, when I was afraid to speak too loud or to laugh. And I was also a little scared by it. Adults too, I remember, were silent around the toy pram. One day we walked by the gap where the building had been and the toy pram was gone. It is the thing I remember most about that night and afterwards.

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