Fire Watching

Apparently, the threat of fire bombing was so great in 1943-44 that the government asked that individual areas took responsibilty for the night time fire watch. They were given the necessary equipment to fight the fires with such as stirrup pumps, hoses, buckets of sand and the like.

My father was one of these fire watchers. It was rare for a woman to help out other than provide cups of tea. This is what my mother did. However, most of the time she was too busy looking after me.
On this particular night my father and his colleagues were fire watching, going about their usual duties, putting out fires when they noticed that the factory behind them was on fire. This could have been a dangerous incident because the factory made wooden cabinets. They and the fire brigade successfuly put the fire out, my father and his team went back to the roof to store their equipment when my mother appeard and offered the weary ones a cup of tea. The men naturally were very grateful at this offer and trooped off behind my mother. My father stayed behind to do some errand or other when he noticed a smell of burning. It took him a while to fathom out where it was coming from, then to his horror, he noticed a fire bomb wedged in the "V" part of the roof, gradually burning it's way down. He called back the men, and the fire brigade who removed it. Had he not noticed that fire bomb, it would have burnt through the roof, into the factory below and I might not have lived to tell this tale.

My father is still alive, 97 years old and in a residential home but remembers this time in his life as if were yesterday.

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