I can remember going to a small terraced house, adjacent to the school in Church Road. I can recall that when the sirens warned of a raid, we children who were present at school, (many parents kept their children at home), were taken to the cellars of nearby private houses by the teachers. Naturally, our routine at school was severely disrupted by these air-raids. Many people fitted them out as they would a bed-sitter and retired to them at night as if it were their bedroom, particularly in the early days of the war. When an air-raid was in progress day or night, we squashed together under the dining room table.Īir-raid shelters appeared everywhere, of course - from massive, strongly built, multi-roomed public shelters constructed by the Government on any vacant plot of land and in school playgrounds, down to the small above-ground, corrugated-iron Anderson shelters erected in back gardens by the local council. We compromised by moving all the beds in the house downstairs into the front room - Mum and Dad slept in one bed, I across the bottom of their bed, Des and Freda in a three-quarter bed and baby Muriel in her cot. It was to be used on only a very few occasions.īy the time it was completed we had all become used to the sirens, blasé and no longer dashed for shelter at the sound of the first wail. All it then needed was a door and bunk beds to be fitted and our bomb-proof shelter was ready. Two men seemed to work forever to construct it - a massive hole was excavated, a concrete floor was laid, walls and steps built of layers of bricks, a really thick reinforced flat concrete roof cast in situ, and the walls plastered.

Five minutes later we often had to dash for the cellar again.Īll this prompted my father to have a shelter built, at great expense no doubt, in the back garden. It seemed that every person in the lane was assembled and so there we all stayed until the siren screeched out the welcome ‘all clear’, and we all trooped back home. (Baby sister Muriel was always carried across in a wicker clothes basket). I only know that very frequently, day and night, the siren at the local factory, Allen’s of Tipton, would wail out and we stopped whatever we were doing, left everything and made a dash across the road and down a long front garden to the little cottage there, where we squashed into the cellar. I was of course, too young to realise the implications of it all. Everything in the world appeared to be rosy and I was very content.Ībout this time I recollect that I became aware that everything in the world was not quite right and we were told we were at war with the ‘nasty Germans’. In April 1940 my sister Muriel arrived to swell the size of our family. Early in 1939 I was enrolled at Christ Church Infants School,Ĭoseley and loved every minute of it. That same year we moved to a newly built semi-detached house in Bradleys Lane, Coseley, also then in Staffordshire. My name is Alan Newey and I was born on the 3rd March, 1934 in a terraced house in Tipton, Staffordshire.

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