Memories of Air Raids in Nottingham

"Now then Anthony darling, you snuggle down and go off to sleepy-byes like a good little boy." This is the first thing I can remember my mother saying to me, when I was nearly three, in 1941.

We were in an air raid shelter, basically a trench which had been dug in the lawn of our garden in Nottingham, about six foot deep, eight foot long, and six foot wide, which had been lined with concrete. The trench had been roofed over by sheets of curved corrugated iron, on top of which the soil from the trench had been laid. This was an Anderson shelter, and I remember it was lit by a candle in a jar. I was sleeping in blankets on a small shelf, while my mother spent the night in blankets in a deck chair, with my baby sister Diana, was in a carry-cot on another shelf in the shelter.

My father wasn't there, because as a doctor, a GP in Nottingham, he was at a Casualty Clearing Station looking after people who had been wounded in the air raid. My mother told me that every night at dusk during the war, drums of tar would be lit every hundred yards along the ring road round Nottingham. This created a pall of smoke which covered the city and helped to deceive the enemy bombers. But some bombers still got through.

When the air raid sirens sounded, my father would drive to the Casualty Clearing Station where he was a casualty officer. No headlights were allowed during the "Black-out", and only one side light which was shielded and pointed downwards. He had to make his way through the fog of smoke to the Casualty Clearing Station. One of their main emergencies was expectant mothers going into labour when the air raid sirens sounded, and he delivered many a baby there. He also stitched up cuts and flesh wounds, and splinted fractured limbs before these were sent off to the hospital.

Some months later there was great excitement because a German bomber had been shot down and had landed in a road not far from our house. We went down to see it, I holding onto the pram in which my sister Diana was sleeping. Sadly when we got to the place where the bomber had been shot down, there was only a hole in the road and a couple of men with shovels. The German bomber had all been taken away.