Safe in the Cellar

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Pam Vincent of Age Concern Shropshire Telford & Wrekin on behalf of Kate James and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was living in Balsall Heath, Birmingham at the time. My son was born in 1940. I suppose he was what you would call a war baby. I was a housewife and stayed at home to look after him. I fed him myself and when he went onto solids he had whatever was going. I had an aunt who sent me baby clothes from Canada.

It was a hard job finding a doctor when my baby was born, because the majority were in the Services. I was a long time in labour and the midwife had to send for a doctor that she knew, as my doctor had gone off to the war. Probably half of all doctors had joined the Forces.

We had an incendiary bomb drop onto my mother’s house. We always went to her house whenever the sirens went off. Every householder had a bucket of water, bucket of sand and a stirrup pump to put the fires out. Ours didn’t work this time and we had to go outside and fetch dirt from the garden. We got the fire out then.

There was a bomb dropped in the middle of our road, but it didn’t affect us, as it was further up the street. A young girl was injured though.

My uncle was an air raid warden. Heaven help you, if you showed any lights!

There was rationing of course, but no one starved or was hungry, although the food was very plain. We were still rationed after the war, for about four years I think.

We had clothing coupons during and after the war. All the furniture was utility — very good, but very plain. There was no specialised furniture available at that time. We had utility blankets too. In fact I’ve still got one. It has its special utility mark in one corner.

All the children and babies used to go to the local welfare clinic and all were given a bottle of orange juice and a bottle of cod liver oil, to supplement the plain diet I suppose. In fact, it was a better diet than today with all these beef burgers and things like that.

I used to swap my sugar for bacon with my neighbour, as they were sweet-toothed and I wasn’t. I expect other people did the same. There was quite a good bit of black market going on. I knew someone who was involved in it.

If bananas or fruits were coming in from abroad, the news spread like wild fire and we would all dash to the shops. I always felt guilty buying things like bananas and oranges. They were brought in by the Merchant Navy and I always felt a Merchant Seaman had risked his life in bringing them in. It didn’t stop me from buying them though. I expect the government did it as our own food was so drab.

The road where my mum lived was terraced houses with a recreation ground at the bottom of the row. There was a Big Bertha in this recreation ground. This was a big gun which was used to shoot at the enemy aircraft. It made more noise than the aircraft themselves. We could always tell which was a bomb dropping and which was Big Bertha shooting.

Most people had an air raid shelter. We had one in the garden, although we didn’t feel safe in it and always dashed off to my mum’s cellar instead. My dad got the cellar ever so nice, with armchairs, a table and ordinary chairs. We had a valor lamp, lit by paraffin. It took an hour to heat up a kettle on it, but then we could have a cup of tea. It also helped to warm the cellar up with heat coming out through the slats. Often when my dad came in from his evening shift at work, the air raid sirens would go off and I think he ate more dinners in the cellar than in the house. We felt ever so safe in the cellar, although it was a three-storied house and the whole lot could have come down on us.

We saw Coventry burning. We heard the planes going over, so went up to look out of the attic window. It looked like a red sunset, miles away, on the horizon.

Everybody helped everybody else. It was like the three musketeers: “All for one and one for all”. We all helped one another.

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