A Story from Dorothy Clothier
My little story is about a sight that I remember seeing when I was living at Wathen Road during the WW2 bombing of Coventry.
I was about 4 years old and one day there was a call from my father from upstairs to tell my mother and I to "come upstairs...quickly". The call sounded o urgent that my mother and I raced upstairs to find dad standing in the bath looking out of the window. "Quickly," he said,"Stand up in the bath and look out of the window" (of course there was no water in the bath), but we stood up to the window and there was that sight that I shall always remember. In the distance on the horizon there was the brightest red glow. It was the bombing of Coventry by the German aircraft and the whole sky was ablaze with fire.
All I can say is that it must have been terrible for the people in the city and for people who lost their loved ones.
(contd) My father was older than my mother and so was not called up. He was an Air Raid warden and was always telling us to"Put that light out!"
There were allotments up the hill behind Wathen Road, and quite a lot of people kept a pig. There was a"Pig Bin" at the end of the road for people to put waste scraps and vegetable peelings in, and it was my job, with a little trug my father made for me, to go every week and collect what people had put in there and carry it up to the allotment to a big cauldron, where it was boiled up and then fed to the pig. Once, some men coming up to their allotments after work said,"What a delicious smell!" - but it didn't smell at all delicious to me.
On the night of the Blitz, we all watched from the bathroom window. We could hear the explosions. I remember Dad saying,"My God, they've done it!", - the Cathedral had been bombed. We cried, all of us, when we saw it in the papers. We felt it was personal - we used to go to services there and now it was in ruins. It was very emotional.
My mother's sister and family were bombed out of their hose in Coventry and came to stay with us. I don't know how we all fitted in!
