Distant sirens
Your article “Distant Early Warnings” [ FT399:44-49] brought back childhood memories of growing up here in New York City and visiting relatives nearby. In the mid 1960s our local Civil Defence siren was sounded every day at noon. All the kids, not thinking a whit of nuclear doom, knew it was time for lunch. We had no real mental connection to the Cold War fears our parents obviously had with the sound. My friends and I gained a child’s sense of accomplishment when we finally figured out which apartment building had the siren installed on the roof. We would look at it when it went off; it was like sighting an animal you usually only heard.
Initially we could hear the noon siren from several buildings around the city, but as time wore on fewer and fewer sirens would go off. At some point the noon sirens stopped, maybe in the mid-1970s. Occasionally in the 1980s, a siren was tested at odd times during the business day. These days I live near a church that rings its bells every morning at 7am and my office is near a church that rings at noon. Just now thinking of the childhood sirens, I realised that my childhood religious sounds were the CD sirens and the real doom fears they embodied as opposed to the spiritual doom fears the church bells embody.
Also in the 1960s and 70s, when we went visiting relatives upstate, I remember the sounds of distant horn blasts that would sound several times at seemingly arbitrary times. The echoes and the inscrutable codes that the horns seemed to be putting across were very evocative to me as a child – especially at night when everything was silent except for crickets and frogs. Unlike train horns or boat horns, these were a mystery sound with no known source. My relatives didn’t seem to know what the horn blasts were for, but I now suspect they were for volunteer emergency services with the horn count alerting either fire or medical support personnel. William Hohauser
New York
“Distant Early Warnings” both intrigued me and awoke memories. In the 1970s, I was a child in
Plumstead, an area of southeast London, literally just uphill from Woolwich. My mother and sister had jobs on the construction of the Woolwich flood barrier and Steve Toase’s mention of the sirens heralding the raising of the barrier in rehearsal made me recall (I think) that even before the ground was broken on the construction project, “flood alert” sirens were sounded as a rehearsal. I think it was always on a Sunday morning around 11am. I remember vividly hearing them and being told what they were. My father was working in security over the river in Silvertown warehouses, so would have good reason to know about them.
Does anyone else remember the sirens over SE London?
Alan Cassady-Bishop
Filey, North Yorkshire
Speaking from a UK perspective, it is often difficult to identify where a siren sound originates, and this is particularly unsettling when you are driving. You hear the noise, but have no idea where the emergency vehicle is, and whether you should prepare to pull over. The same problem occurs with office telephones in open-plan offices. Whereas many years ago they had a jingling sound, and tended to have a fixed volume, so that you had an idea where the phone was, these days the sound is too ‘vague’ to locate easily.
Dave Miles
By email