Two nights during the blitz
One evening during the blitz in 1940 we (or rather they I was bit young for poker) were playing poker in the house and they thought this will amount to nothing so they stayed there in the house. We were supposed to have gone down in the Anderson shelter in the back garden by our stables in the house at Tottenham Hale. Anyway the shelter had a fucking great bomb drop on it and we would have all be dead if we were in it. But we were OK in the house. One of my fathers young brothers just got some shrapnel in his arm, that is all. The next night they thought sod this, but there was no shelter to go in, so they went down in an underground cellar in a factory across the raid (Gestetners, they made duplicating machines). Anyway, when we came up in the morning the bloody lot of it had gone. Our house and one each side of it. I still have a few things from the wreckage two antique cut glass wine decanters that were not touched and a wooden clothes horse :- ) my mother and I had no place to go and only the clothes which we stood up in; so we walked the streets. So, if we had been in the shelter either of those nights then end of time :- ) My mother was a weaver in a factory just along the road, she ran four big looms. The Stukers used to come down and machine gun them in the streets when they were going and coming from work. Great fun eh. But it only went on for six years. Man the stories I could tell :- ) My father came home on leave for a while and he said sod this and was glad when he got back to France out of the crap that rained down every day and night he thought it was too dangerous here :- ) But we smiled and got on with it. No good crying is it. Merlin
