Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Five - The War 1 (2/3)

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3). Part One - Arundel Street Days Part Two - Our Terrace Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm) Part Four - Schooldays Part Five - The War 1 Part Six - The War 2

We had all been expecting devastating attacks from the word go and we dived out to the newly built shelters and filled the long wooden benches chattering nervously or excitedly according to out temperaments. In the event nothing happened except the sounding of the all clear about ten minutes later. This happened all over the country and I suppose that it was someone's idea of convincing us that we were really at war. We were convinced. The shelters had appeared a few days before the official kick-off.

If you had a garden you got a small one of your own. If, like us your garden was six feet by ten feet of concrete you got a communal one in the middle of the terrace. They took up most of the playing space and made it hard for our mothers to hang out the washing. Hitler, we felt, had a lot to answer for.

The first shelters were built almost overnight, of rough-sawn creosoted timber and had obviously been got ready well in advance. Along with the wooden shells we got a pile of empty sand-bags and a much bigger pile of sand. As the sand-bags were filled, our fathers and big brothers stacked them against and on top of the wooden structure.

Filling the bags was a communal task which the adults took seriously. So did we for about the first ten minutes after which we started to muck about and throw the sand at each other and get in the way.

Later, by the time the bags were rotting and bleeding their contents on the ground, they were replaced by brick ones, with concrete slab roofs. They couldn't and didn't survive direct hits, but they were safer than staying in the house and taking your chance, although in winter time many families avoided the bitter cold of the shelters to hide in the cupboard under the stairs.

This was believed to be a good move. In houses collapsed by nearby explosions the stairs often stood protecting the occupants from the fallen rubble that used to be their home.

When nothing nasty happened for a while, we relaxed a bit and we embarked on the first few days of the (so far) most savage conflict in history, singing Boom!, eating plums, and filling sandbags.

Plums? Oh yes, the warm summer had created a glut of stone fruit which was practically free in the shops, and for a few days almost everybody had a heavy brown paper bag of the shiny purple fruits, bursting with juice. A slightly unusual luxury, fresh fruit being a rarity in our lives. An old joke went: they're a posh family. Fruit in the 'ouse when nobody's badly.

Many children were evacuated - sent to stay in the country with strangers who were paid something to board them out of harms way. There must be a million untold stories of their experiences among strangers: new schools, new teachers, new playgrounds with new bullies and new people to live among. Many returned after only a short time. Some were better cared for than they had ever been and blended into their host families never to be reclaimed by parents who had apparently never been all that keen on them in the first place. Most drifted back to their perilous homes in the perilous industrial cities of their birth and upbringing, just in time for the bloodshed to start.

Continued on www.thisisull.com...... Next Page (3/3).

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