And When We Came Back Home The House Had Gone!

"Hi, I'm Robert Reid, and this is the story of my life from when I was two years old.

When I was two years old, the war was on - I was born in 1940 - and the war was on with Germany. I remember from when I was two years old that I was playing in my grandma's house on the table, walking on the table, and I was so small, when they put the teapot on the table I accidentally put my right foot in, and it went straight into the teapot of boiling water. My grandma and my mam grabbed me and stuck my foot in a bag of flour, and that seemed okay, that worked.

The next thing that I remember is that we were getting air raids every night. We lived in a house in Hull - that's in Yorkshire - and we lived near the docks in Hull, so we got bombed every night. We went to my grandma's house because of the shelter that she had in her back garden - it was called an 'Anderson Shelter' - and we used to go in there when the air raid sirens went off. When we came back, our house had been blown up, so we got another house next door, and the same thing happened to that house! We went to my grandma's for the air raid and when we came home the house had gone!"
"That's pretty bad luck, isn't it?"
"Ha! Well, I went back (this is going forward a few years now) two years ago, and where our houses had been - erm, we lived down Brunswick Avenue, Franklin Street in Hull - you won't believe it but where our two houses were (they were next to each other, and they were in the middle of a long row of terraced houses) there were still two gaps where the houses were! All the other houses were okay and being lived in.

So anyway, going back to where I was, when I was a young lad, we went on a trolley bus. Now, this was a bus that was run by electricity, and to get the electricity, it was on lines like a tram. It got the electricity from lines above the road. We were going back one night and the air raid sounded. We were stopped by an air raid warden, and everybody on the trolley bus had to get off and go into a concrete swimming pool as a temporary shelter, and he told us that as the trolley bus was going down the road, the blue flashes from the electric cables, as it went over the joints, were attracting the enemy aircraft and a fighter plane had come down and it was machine gunning the road. When we came out and went back into the trolley bus to carry on when the air raid had finished, in the street were hundreds of dead people. What had happened was, as the air raid happened, all of the cinemas in that street got everybody to go out. Unfortunately, they went out, and that's when they got shot by this airplane.. Erm.. I mean, I saw it, but it didn't affect me because I was so young, I, I knew the people were dead and the blood was in the gutters but.. I was too young to realise what it was about.

One of the things about the air raids, when shops got bombed people used to go and help their selves.Well, in the toyshop up the road there was a doll's pram, and that shop got bombed one night, and I told my sister Pat  - now, you've got to remember, I was about three and a half years old - but I told my sister Pat I'd go and get her this doll's pram. And I went, but somebody had already got it. When I told Pat it had gone she cried her eyes out for hours! She was about four, four and a half mind, she's a bit older than me."

Here's the first 4:16 minutes of the 18:32 minute first recording. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll be posting more later.