A Lucky Escape? An Air Raid in Goole

During a Bank Holiday in 1941, I was standing in the lane at the back of our terraced house, with my baby daughter in my arms, chatting to neighbours. An aircraft was flying overhead and we glanced up, not expecting any trouble because the air-raid siren hadn’t sounded. At the same moment that my neighbour realised that it wasn’t a British plane, we saw the bomb doors open and ran for our lives. I turned and ran up the path, past the air-raid shelter, which was a stupid thing to do, and into the house to shelter under the table. It all happened so quickly and it was like a scene from a film because I was ‘herded’ along the path by a stream of bullets. I know that I wasn’t running very fast because I was carrying my baby and to this day I’m convinced that the gunman didn’t want to shoot me but was trying to get me inside before the bombs dropped. The bombs landed a few streets away injuring many people. My dad eventually turned the paving stones over to hide the bullet marks and life went back to ‘normal’.

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