The Bombers Are Coming

I was four years old in 1941 when Hermann Goering, as chief of the Luftwaffe, sent his bombers
to rain destruction on Manchester, England.

Strangely enough I can remember some of it. All day I played happily in the street or our garden, but the night and darkness brought fear to my parents. I was too young to understand it all but could sense something wasn't right.

First the peculiar whining of the alarm. So loud
and piercing that surely even a deaf person could hear it. It seemed to go on forever, and it
meant the bombers were coming.

I don't recall seeing this - but no doubt the women stopped their housework, calling in the kids off the street, the pubs emptied, and everyone scurried homeward to move silently and anxiously into the shelters.

They were strong, (installed by the Government) and that's what I remember clearly. Going through the back door and walking slowly to join the neighbours at the shelter at the end of the garden. Inside, I looked up at the adult faces, candles highlighting their expression.

They looked grim but determined, as though every person had captured the spirit of Winston
Churchill who (I found out later) in radio broadcasts kept insisting the Nazis would never conquer England.

"'Ere lad," Mum would say, and I rushed across to sit on her knee. "It's more than flesh 'n'
blood can stand," she'd complain.

People didn't speak much, each alone with his or her thoughts. Every bomb was a lottery, no-one
knowing if they might be the unfortunate "winner".

We could all hear the crump as they landed somewhere in the distance. Sometimes a little
louder which meant closer.

Usually the bombs were aimed at the industrial
area of Trafford Park a few miles away. There they destroyed Manchester United's now-famous Old Trafford soccer ground (rebuilt after the war). Sometimes the pilots or the bomb-aimers misjudged, and someone's living room became a pile of rubble.

Dad had been in the infantry in WW1 but he must have thought sitting in the shelters was a picnic compared to the mud, death and carnage of the battlefield.

Sometimes we were in the shelter for hours and we could hear the droning of the bombers' engines, menacing and distinctive, seemingly overhead. Then the siren's renewed wailing burst the balloon of the night's silence. It had a different sound than previously. The "all clear" people called it. Everyone knew it meant the bombers were cruising home to Germany.

Smiles replaced the grimness, and we were safe, at least until tomorrow night. Other parts
of the city were not so lucky and I discovered in later years that while we were going to our
beds the firemen and ambulance crews of 1941 were going to work.