Coventry Blitz

On blitz night Jane aged 4 & Jill aged 6 took cocoa to the firemen returning to Penny Park House, the home of Jane’s grand parents. Pappa carried us up the stairs and sat us on the bedroom windowsill to watch the city burning. On many nights Jane and I took cocoa to the firemen, but never again did we watch the city burning from the windowsill.

Mr Alfred Harris gave the Cathedral its Tapestry and his daughter (Jane’s mum) delivered me into this world on a very hot day, the 17th of July 1934. My twin brother died. My dad would come home on his bike from his days work at Morton & Weavers on Pool Meadow corner, Cox Street and Ford Street; have his Tea and change into his fireman's uniform and off he would go and my mum would say “your dad is on the streets, so must we” and off Jane and I would go with the cocoa. Later on leaving my mum’s mother, dad’s father, my dad’s older brother his wife who was deaf and dumb and their 3 daughters (May, Doris and Pauline) all having lost their homes in different parts of the City, we suffered only 3 broken windows from bomb blasts.

I still continued to go to Wheelwright Lane School walking there and back again at dinner time (no school dinners yet). Coming home from school we would go to Parnell’s the bakers to buy a one penny Hovis loaf with Hovis printed on the side and a little further up Wheelwright Lane but on the other side of the road we’d call at Mr Cotton’s for a bottle of pop, he’d set his table up outside his front door; I never remember or saw Mrs Cotton.

On the way to school in the mornings we would call at the Nook stores (a bungalow still in Wheelwright Lane) for a stick of liquorice wood, liquorice shoe laces or packet of 5 sweet ciggies and lie in the hedge if the sirens went and look for the barrage balloon to go up in Burbages Lane. Those were the days, happy free days to us children, sometimes frightening.

We were often looking for shrapnel on the way to school and if we were really lucky you might find an empty bombshell or even a parachute, that really was a find. If there were no air raids at night my mother would allow my cousins and I to stick with candle wax cigarette cards to the walls (wow) or make bags of milk bottle tops and raffia, or pretty bracelets from the inside of electric cables. At school we would knit helmets, scarfs or mittens for the soldiers, sailors and airmen.

At October ½ term holiday there was potato picking or rosehip picking for rosehip syrup. It was not until I was 11 or 12 that I learnt of my twin brother and his death and being put in a shoebox lined with blue silk and placed in another's coffin and buried in the churchyard of st. Paul’s Foleshill Rd.

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