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The account below is from an interview with my grandmother, Angie Hibbs, recorded in 1992. Angie's husband, Frank, was an Air Raid Warden; their son, Alan, was born in 1942.

"As we were sitting having breakfast on a Sunday morning, a bomb took a plate of glass out of the window. Just took it out, like that. We were sitting there then. But actually we didn’t have any damage, not to the house.

Alan was tiny then, he had to sleep in the Morrison shelter in the spare bedroom, and so I thought I’d sleep with him. I slept under the shelter one night and oohh! I was nearly suffocated! I couldn’t sleep there any more! So we put him there and then Frank and I moved into the same bedroom.

There was only a single bed, but the thing was, if we’d been bombed, we might have been separated and couldn’t get to his room, so we thought we’d better be in there all together. So that’s what we did. That was a nightmare! Well, Alan wouldn’t keep himself covered up!

The doodlebugs used to come over the wood and several times I wondered whether I’d got to rush out into the wood with Alan; which would be safest, would it be safer indoors or outside?

We decided we’d all sleep in the same room. It was a tight fit in a single bed!

I must say it was a jolly good thing we didn’t know what we’d got to put up with in those days."

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