Lyndhurst Road

My Dad, Terry Sweeting (b1935) also lived in Winchester Road, went to Selwyn boys school. He wrote this: Terry was four and half when the WW2 started. He and his family were bombed out of their house. He recalls that he and his sister went to bed under the stairs each night as this was the safest part of the house. When the air raid siren sounded the parents would join the two children there. In the middle of that night a German plane dropped a land mine, these were usually dropped in pairs, chained together. However, this time the chain broke and one bomb landed on a school two miles away. The second bomb dropped on the shelter of the house across the road. "My mother threw a blanket over me and my sister, this woke us up. I sat up and Mum told me to lie down again. There was a large piece of plaster from the wall behind us on my pillow. It would have hit me on the head!" The front door was split in two horizontally and the two halves jammed between the staircase and the wall. They were lifted over and taken outside. "I remember standing on our emergency suitcases. My family was taken to the Public air raid shelter which was near our local shops. there was an ambulance at the end of the road and as we got near the man shouted 'Duck!'. I looked up and saw a German aircraft lit up by a searchlight beam. Then Spitfire planes came in and attacks it.
In the shelter we all sat on the benches and Mum asked if I was alright. I could see a lady she had been tied onto one of the sloping benches. I was worried, I thought she was dead. But she was sleeping. Our doctor came to the doorway of the shelter and asked if we were alright, his suit was covered in blood.
The bomb that had wrecked our home had all killed the grandparents of the family across the road. Luckily, the young girls had asked their parents to take them along to the public shelter that night so that they could join in the sing song that was regular feature. This saved their lives that night.
They went to live at Beech Hall Road for a while then moved into Winchester Road. A house across the road was bombed another night, the bomb went through the house taking the bed linen off the bed of the occupants with it. The bomb travelled into and under the ground but didn't explode. The Disposal team said later that the bomb had been a dud - probably sabotaged in the factory in which it was made.
School: We each took an emergency box to school, mine had barley sugar and biscuits in. I also had a cushion. These were to use if we had to stay in the school shelter a long time. I never did get to eat the things in my box! after the bombing we had to go and live with my step grandmother until a house could be found for us. The worst part of the rationing was that we only had 2oz of sweets a week, but most of us children had never known better times. Clothes were also rationed so people were careful to pass on anything that others could use. All or any scraps of food that was not eaten was collected regularly, like the rubbish collection and fed to pigs.
In the morning after a raid we would search around outside to see if there was any pieces of metal from the burst shells. Any metal was collected and was used in the war effort, old saucepans and garden railing were all taken away to be reused.
Our food was plain and home grown, there was dried egg and dried potato which didn't taste nice. Jam was always plum because they would grow without any effort'. Terry remembers being disappointed with real bananas when he finally got to taste one.
They were evacuated to Devon at one point.
'We got used to the different sounds that the planes made, the German engines had a distinctive noise.
People worked together and tried to help each other we played games in the shelters. '