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| Author: |
Ann Tiffany |
| Dated: |
Saturday, November 11 2006 @ 09:00 AM EST |
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1363 times |
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In wartime you get used to disturbed nights, nights when sirens wake you from sleep, nights when you climb out of bed groggily, slip into your siren suit and make your way to the air raid shelter. There is one good thing about an air raid from a child's perspective though and that is that if you have been up during the night for a raid, then you don't have to go to school until after lunch the next day. The air raid shelter became our haven during this time, the place we straggled to wearily night after night.
The shelter was a brick structure with a blast wall in front of it to protect the door. It was small and dank in spite of mum's efforts to make it cosy. There were padded bunks along the walls with blankets and pillows and an old rug on the floor to stave off the cold during the winter months. We would sit huddled up together listening to the sounds outside; the wailing sirens, the far off percussion as a bomb landed somewhere and the distant sounds of ack ack guns firing at the enemy bombers. The shelter became as much a part of my life as the family kitchen, as familiar as an old, well worn jacket, our nightly haven from the dangers of the night. We had cookies and cocoa to chomp on and flashlights so that we could see one another in the darkness. As soon as we had settled in, mum would start to sing in her lovely soprano voice. We would all join in the singing, anything rather than sit waiting for the next bomb to fall on us.
The night that I remember most began the same as all the others except that our family had grown of late. A family of refugees, bombed out of their own home, came to live with us until another home could be found for them. I remember how scared they were having experienced first hand the terror of having their home destroyed. We couldn't know the depth of their fear, or of the incredible noise the bomb made as dropped onto their street wiping out dozens of homes and lives. We hadn't seen the brick walls tumbling down on them snuffing out the lives of the people living closest to the impact, or of seeing their few possessions reduced to rubble. In our shelter they sat trembling covering their ears with shaking hands, looking at us in disbelief as we started to sing. They couldn't understand how mum could sit there calmly handing out cocoa and cookies and singing to us in the midst of mayhem.
That night we came close to understanding how they felt in the worst possible way. After the bombing stopped there was a brief period of quiet and we waited thinking that the bombers had left. We sat quietly listening for the all clear to sound. Into the silence there came the low drone of airplane engines overhead. We stopped what we were doing to listen almost as if we knew what was to come. There was a sudden thunderous explosion of sound and we felt the earth shaking beneath our feet. Mum's face was frozen and she reached out to us protectively. A bomb had landed just a couple of blocks away from where we sat shivering in the dark. It had landed in the park closeby. Then the all clear sounded.
We left our shelter and stood outside looking around us. In the distance we saw flames rising into the sky as buildings burned. The soaring towers of York's Cathedral were etched against a reddened sky lit by flames. Unscathed and beautiful as ever, the twin towers rising three hundred feet towards the sky were shown bright as day by the fires. They stood strong, inviolable a symbol of hope and invincibility in our changing world. Many years later I read that one of the German pilot's, who was shot down in the raid, had described how he had flown around these same towers, lit as bright as day,and thought how beautiful the Cathedral looked. He had circled around it and had flown on. How easy it would have been for him to destroy it but some goodness in the man, had prevailed.
Behind us our neighbours were emerging from their shelters and looking in stunned amazement at the burning buildings. We all looked towards the park where the bomb had landed wondering about family and friends living nearby. Mum looked worried, my grandparents lived close to the park and I know that she wanted to find out if they were safe but, her first concern was for us. Seeing the fear in our eyes, she hurried us back indoors and up to bed.
The next morning we walked over to the park to look at the bomb crater, we were relieved to to see that our grandparents house appeared to be intact. Inside though, things were chaotic, shock waves from the bomb had blown out windows and doors and my gentle grandmother had died during the turmoil. That last salute from the German bomber had been too much for her.
Whenever I hear the phrase a safe haven, I think of that small compact place of safety during my childhood years. The old shed still stands as far as I know. The people who live in the house now probably use it as a shed for unused gardening stuff. They can't know the stories it could tell of another moment in time when it sheltered my family and brought us safely through the turbulant years of war.
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Doris Ray