Your Blitz: Our kitchen table was air raid shelter

Nov 9 2010 By Sophie Cross

DOREEN Ward, aged 84, lost two aunts when a lone aircraft returning from a raid in Birmingham dropped a bomb by her grandparents’ house in Coleshill.

Then aged just 14, Doreen had not long moved up to the area from Norfolk and said she could not return to her job in a hairdressers’ in Birmingham city centre following the tragedy for fear of the raids.

She said: “I was very attached to my aunty Doreen – I was named after her – and my aunty Mary.

“I lived in Norfolk when I was a child and my parents decided to come back to Coleshill to live where my mum’s mother and father lived. We got a house opposite my grandma’s.

“We didn’t have an air raid shelter, we used to have to go under the table. There was a shelter attached to my grandma’s house though.

“I was the eldest of five and we were all terrified.

“One night, on December 11, 1940, we’d had this terrible raid. My father was out fire-watching. Suddenly a terrible noise came as the bombs dropped. My father came up and said the ambulance had just come. He told my mum, I think it’s your mother’s house. We were frightened to death.

“My aunts had been in the shelter that night, but at around 6am they went back to the house to sleep in bed.

“My grandma was making a cup of tea next to the shelter and my grandad was in the room next door to my aunts.