Trapped Outside during an Air Raid on London

My Grandfather was a stubborn old man and refused to go to the tube station and insisted if he was going to die he was going to do it in his own home. This was before the landmine. But eventually we convinced him he should come to the tube station.

Now this particular night he had forgotten his pipe. My mother was the kind of person to always be service to others and said ‘I’ll go and get it Dad’. I said ‘I’m coming with you’. I would not let her go without me. We’d left it rather late. We’d left it almost too late. One learned to time things and my mother thought she would be able to get home and back before the bombs started falling. We didn’t make it. We did not make it.

We got to the house and it was very eerie because everywhere was cordoned off. We got my Grandfather’ pipe we got back as far as Norfolk Street. It was a tiny little road rather like those in the North where the houses are right on the road. Nowhere to hide and we were pinned against a wall. We could not move for everything falling around us, just my mother and I.

Again, no one thought that any one was foolish enough to be out in the raid. But that was my mother. If my Grand father wanted his pipe she was happy to go and get it. People took silly risks, I suppose. They seemed silly risks now but they were just part of life then.

We were able to inch along the road holding our breath. Don’t ask what it did to me mentally but when I see anything about the Middle East I always think of that. Because that was me, pinned against a wall inching along with my mother until we got we got to the main road. We then ran.

People were too busy doing other things to know we were in a small street where no one was in a house.

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