Underground tunnels

Our school had a reinforced hall— reinforced with extra timber and sandbags etc. That was the school air raid shelter.

At home we had ‘Anderson shelter’ — you know with the corrugated iron. We lived next door to my Aunt and instead of having individual shelters we built them through — we had one tunnel that went through the two gardens, and then the two lots of families went through and congregate together.

I didn’t really like it still though, as it usually meant getting up at some horrible hour of the morning. Especially in the winter “Sorry Love, there’s an air raid, we’ve got to go to the shelter”. I used to think “oh, leave me alone to sleep”.

Looking back, our house wasn’t damaged at all. The nearest we got to damage was a V2 rocket fell 300 yards away — two fields away behind some shops, and all it did was blow down the blackout curtain in my bedroom.

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Becky Barugh of the BBC Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Alvin Mansfield and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

See more of Alvin's stories:

• School Shifts
• Just imagine the headlines!
• Keep going, keep going…
• The Evacuation Line
• An extra egg
• What an anti-climax!
• In retrospect I was very lucky
• Swaps

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