Miracle Escape in Lewisham
My grandfather built the air raid shelter, which is why I am here to tell the tale. Over a certain income, householders had to provide their own shelter—otherwise, they got an Anderson or a Morrison shelter. My father joined the Royal Signals when the pits in the Rhondda Valley started to close down in the '30s. When WWII broke out, he was sent to Prestatyn Holiday Camp, which had been requisitioned by the Army as a training base after it had only been open for a week.
My mother, seven months pregnant with me, went to stay with my grandparents in Ladywell, Lewisham. One night, the air raid siren sounded, and my mother and grandmother went into the shelter. Grandad was out on duty, mending gas mains when the bombs dropped. The next morning, Grandad came home to find that a bomb had dropped (aiming for the railway lines that ran along the end of the garden), and there was a pile of earth where the shelter used to be. He and the neighbours started digging for the door, but it wasn't there. They kept on digging around the side to find that the shelter had turned 180 degrees in the ground, and my mother and grandmother were shaken but unharmed.
The next day, we got on the train and spent the rest of the war in Prestatyn, which is where I was born two months later. I was the second baby to be christened in the camp church. We went back there for a holiday in the '50s.
One of the memories I have is of standing on Prestatyn's sandy beach, watching what I thought was a firework display but was, in reality, the bombing of Liverpool Docks.
