Flask and sandwiches

“I was interested to see the recent picture of the couple in the Anderson shelter,” emails Isobel Brown from Birkhill. “I well remember the shelter in our back garden. We lived in Shettleston, in the east end of Glasgow.

“Throughout the Second World War years, our dad worked constant night shift in Wm. Beardmore, Steel Mill, rolling the armour plating for the decks of battleships etc.

“So, when the siren sounded, Mum had to go down the garden in the blackout, with a baby, a toddler and a young school child, to our Anderson shelter. Inside there was a lamp and a paraffin heater, a bunk for two sisters, and Mum sat on a wooden chair, with the baby on her knee.

“She always made up a flask and sandwiches before bedtime, which were used at breakfast time if there had been no air raid in the night. She told us in later years that sitting in the corrugated iron shelter, she could hear the drone of the planes and, occasionally, the awful whizz of a bomb.

“Several properties were destroyed in the surrounding streets. It was understood that school would be an hour later in starting on the morning after an air raid.

“When peace came, I remember Dad and a neighbour working together to dig out the shelter, which by then had acquired a covering over of grass. Some people kept the Anderson to serve as a garden shed, but our parents, and the neighbours, wanted them gone from sight, if not from memory.

“When I smell damp earth or paraffin fumes, I am back in the eerie light inside that shelter which had a sheet of corrugated iron for a back and a wooden door at the front facing up the garden to the back door of the house.”

A Mabel Lucie Attwell postcard. Read more at the top of the left-hand column.