Wartime story READER’S

Inspired by our Liverpool docks story, reader Pete Perry remembers the Blitz. The 85-year-old now lives in Stevenage, Herts, with his wife Nikki, but back in 1943, he was a little lad sheltering in East London…

We could hear the dogfights in the airspace above us as we huddled together in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of our garden in Brettenham Road, Walthamstow.

We had become so used to the Blitz battering London every night that we can tell the different sounds of the British Spitfires and German Messerschmitts as they fired on each other.

I had been in a deep sleep when my mother woke me up to tell me there was an air-raid on, and I really wanted to stay tucked up in my nice warm bed, just as any other six-year-old would!

But it wasn’t to be. If a bomb had hit the house we would all have been dead, so my mother, as loving and dutiful as ever, had woken me and my two elder sisters, Patricia and Eileen, to get us into the safety of the dug-out.

This was a hole literally dug out of the ground before the war had started, with the excess soil used to cover the shelter over again, using straight and curved pieces of corrugated iron to stop the dirt from falling into the hole. Not the most comfortable place in which to sleep, and a far cry from my nice warm bed!

A groundsheet was placed down, but that didn’t really stop very much of the damp from rising and penetrating into our bodies.

We had brought some blankets from our beds to cover us, and the only bit of light and heat came from nightlight candles perched precariously on the wooden beams that kept the corrugated iron in place.

Nowadays, I suppose, those candles would have been outlawed as a fire hazard, but that didn’t occur to us then. We were more concerned as to whether a bomb, a piece of shrapnel – or even worse – a doodlebug would land on our shelter and blow us to smithereens.

The doodlebugs were the first jet-propelled missiles with wings. The official name for them was Flying Bombs, but most people called them doodlebugs after their distinctive revving engine sound.

Just then, we heard it – the unmistakable sound of a doodlebug droning above. We listened intently as it flew directly towards our shelter. Then the engine cut out with a click and the droning stopped.

The Flying Bomb had stopped in the air directly above our shelter!

My mother, not a particularly religious woman normally, threw herself over the three of us and prayed out loud, “Oh God! Protect us from the terrible bomb.”

The wait seemed to go on forever – then there was a huge explosion. The ground beneath us shook as though there was an earthquake, and spiders and bits of dirt fell upon us from the cracks between the corrugated panels.

Then there was silence. A long agonising silence as the enormity of what had just happened began to sink in.

Story continues tomorrow…

MEMORIES Pete with his sisters Eileen and Patricia, and now