Air raids Under covers in Morrison shelter
RE air raid shelters (BT Letters, September 22, October 6): Morrison shelters were indoor ones, often referred to as table shelters, while outdoor curved ones were Andersons.
The Andersons were delivered right at the start of the war, but we didn’t have one because, I think, my father didn’t pay National Insurance.
Next door where there was a middle-aged couple plus elderly mother, the council built a brick shelter in the garden.
My father offered to pay for one of these, having four children in the house, but was refused as he didn’t own the property.
Eventually, early in 1944 he was able to buy a double-decker Morrison for £15 – just in time for the flying bombs.
I was now 18 and working in London, and at the approach of a flying bomb would leap under the bedclothes of this shelter, hoping I’d be protected from windows at either end of the room.
I came home from work one day and my mother said they had had 36 air raid warnings that day. She was fed up and said she would take herself and my three siblings off to live with her brother near Wotton-under-Edge.
The air raid warnings just became one and soon all the local children and elderly people were evacuated – the children to Bolton, coming home with north country accents.
We lived 11 miles from central London and were only bothered by one bomb until the V1s.
Post-war I met my husband in Sherwood Forest. We were both in the army and he was Bristolian, so I ended up spending most of my life (until now) living in Bristol and find ‘Bristol Times’ most interesting.
Mrs F. Bryant
Henleaze