Bombed out

I was born in 1938 and lived in Hartlepool with my parents. In September of 1940, my mother was pregnant and as a child I was saving the cardboard tops off the milk bottles for 'a baby brother'. We lived in a semi-detached house at the gable end and two houses were built at an angle on the corner, a family of Forster living next door to us with, I think, two small children. We had an Anderson shelter in the garden for protection during the bombing. One night in September there was an air raid and my father and mother and myself were preparing to go to the shelter for protection. My father opened the back door and, so the story goes, believed we hadn't time to get to the sheler, as he could hear the bomb coming - they gave a loud shrieking noise as they fell to earth. We stood as a family in a small lobby with my father protecting us as best we could. The bomb fell directly on to the house next door and the Forster were family were all killed, if we had been in our shelter so would we or at best seriously injured. Our house was demolished to a height of about 2 metres and we had to leave. Staying with family locally for a few days, we eventually went to Scunthorpe where my mother's sister lived and where my baby brother was eventually born. However, in the debris of the house, the jar with my milk bottle tops was discovdered undamaged. For many years my mother kept piece of shrapnel in a drawer which was said to have come from the bomb that fll.

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