Life In An Air Raid Shelter 1940

[Flying10uk]

I rediscovered this article recently which was written by my mother probably around 20 years ago when her memory was still good. I haven't rewritten it and so I apologise for the typos but I think that you can get the gist of what she is saying. My mother lived in South Yorkshire during WW2 which was, at the time, one of the main industrial areas of the UK.

I remember that we went back to visit in the mid 1970's when there was still some significant industry in the area. I can remember factories belching out large clouds of thick black smoke, with my mother pointing out that it was much cleaner air and less pollution to what there use to be.

[GeeRam]

My mother was 7 when the war started, and she along with her older sister, and older and younger brothers were all shipped off by train from London to their grandmother and aunt/uncle in Falkirk in Scotland in autumn 1939. As nothing had really happened much in terms of bombing etc., by the time the school year had finished in Scotland in June 1940, they all came back home to West London….just in time for the start of the Battle of Britain
They lived only a couple of miles from RAF Northolt, so she saw and could remember the fighters scrambling out of Northolt to meet the Germans and seeing the contrails up in the sky during the battle overhead that summer. There were only a few raids on Northolt, but my Grandad had built the Anderson shelter in the back garden while the kids were in Scotland over that winter, so Mum did remember going out to the Anderson shelter when the sirens went off. With the raids starting on London in early September, my Grandparents quickly packed all 4 kids back off to the relatives in Scotland again, so Mum didn’t experience the height of the London Blitz.
They all came back down to London again in the summer of ’42 as there were only lone bomber raids by then. Then the summer of ’44 and it all changed again, with the V-weapon raids starting, and this time they stayed in London so this is the time period that my Mum remembered the most, in terms of air raid shelter use, and the sound of the buzz bombs, and especially using the large block shelters that had been built in the school playgrounds earlier in 1939/40 they used when they started back to school in the Sept of '44.
It was having to sleep in the Anderson shelter at home in the garden, that started my late mother’s life long hatred of spiders as they were a constant companion in the Anderson shelter.
As a child growing up in the late 60’s I can well remember the ‘sunken garden area’ that my Grandad had created in the early 50’s after he removed the Anderson shelter, but left the hole in the ground and earth bank build up and he just made a garden feature out of the big hole, which was still there after he died in 1984, and my grandmother was forced to sell the house that they had bought new in 1930 after moving down from Scotland.

[Flying10uk]

When my mother was referring to "biscuit tins" being used for storing items in the air raid shelter she was referring to something similar to what I have pictured below. Biscuit tins use to be available in a serious size that were actually useful for other purposes, once emptied of their original contents. The one seen in the pic is used to store an old, brass, paraffin, Primus Stove in.