Thread: The War Years
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Old 14th February 2019, 00:37
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Ron Stringer England Ron Stringer is offline
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Location: Essex, England
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We had the poor relation, the Morrison shelter. A sort of steel version of a big kitchen table, with steel mesh sides between the 'legs' to form a cage. When the air raid warning sounded, the family were supposed to squeeze inside and wait for the All Clear. In our house, sitting on the track for German bombers heading for Manchester and Salford docks, it was normal to ignore that instruction and to stand at the front door to watch the aircraft go over. It was possible to see the red glow from the engine exhausts as the passed.

One night a confused bomb-aimer suffered from premature ejection and dropped a stick of HE bombs, landing in a line starting over a mile away to the East of us and heading straight for our house. Fortunately the last one of the stick fell some 300 yards short. Apart from the first one, which fell into the storage pond of a textile mill (but didn't explode and wasn't found until the mill was being demolished in the 1960s), each bomb took out a house at intervals along one road.

The Morrison shelter sat in our front room for several years after the war - my father had great difficulty in dismantling and disposing of it so that we could recover the use of the front room.

A school friend whose house also had a Morrison shelter in the front room was much envied by me. He had an extensive Hornby Dublo (three rail) layout on the top of it and was given full use of the room. We spent many enjoyable hours there after school in the early 1950s.
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