Anderson Shelters

ANDERSON SHELTERS.

Our family lived in Walsall during WWII we lived in a council house in a row of about forty others, all had a long rear garden, about twenty yards down the garden of each house was installed an Anderson air raid shelter made from corrugated steel. They are often on display in museums but the ones I have seen always stand on top of the ground sometimes surrounded by sand bags but in reality half of the shelter was below ground level, the half that projected above the ground was covered with soil which in a short time became covered with weeds and grass so from the air the shelter was invisible.

During the early part of the war nothing much happened, there wasn't much to bomb in Walsall, so the shelters were never put to use which was a good thing as most of them being partially below ground had several feet of dark muddy stagnant water inside them, this problem was cured by the water being pumped out and the floor and internal walls up to ground level being coated with concrete several inches thick, no water came in after that, they were then fitted with bunk beds and looked quite dry and comfortable but still no one needed to use them, until one night my sister and I were woken up by mom and dad who were already dressed, it seemed like the middle of the night to us, I don't know what time it was but we were urged to get up as quickly as possible it was at this point I became aware of an eerie wailing noise outside, a noise that was alternately rising and falling in pitch, what's that ? I gasped, mom said shh. It’s an air raid, Sis. and myself quickly put our coats on over our pyjamas, we all went downstairs by torchlight out into pitch black garden where the torch had to be kept strictly facing the ground at all times, so that the German pilots wouldn't be able to see the light from it.

Everyone used torches in the blackout as the only light we ever saw outside at night was moonlight, so a lot of the time everywhere was black, if we had a long way to walk at night we would shine the torch on the ground several yards in front and as we walked we would switch the torch on and off every five seconds or so, this was supposed to make the battery last longer. We arrived at the shelter, mom and us kids scrambled inside and made ourselves comfortable, all the dads in the street, that were not away at the war, bravely stood outside at the front of the shelter, smoking and chatting to each other across the garden fences. After this first night we spent many nights down the shelter, we could hear distant explosions but that was all, eventually it would go quiet and the long continuous sound of the all clear would wail out, Gerry has gone, mom would say then we would go back to our beds. After the war ended the shelters were sold to the tenants for the princely sum of One Pound each. People dug them up and re-erected them on top of the ground, fitted them with proper wooden doors and used them as workshops or garden sheds. They lasted for decades after the war ended. The concrete interior was left in the ground intact, we filled it with water once again and used it as a paddling pool.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.