| inside under the table to 'sit out' the raid in the usual
fashion, when without warning, the earth opened up and the sky came in upon
us. In one tearing, crashing, grinding, deafening second we were buried
beneath the ruins of our house. A piece of shrapnel had passed through
the table top and leg just inches away from my head. Too dazed to panic
and choking with dust, we stumbled through a grotesque arch of twisted timbers
and furniture to the night outside. Already the earlier yellow sky was tinged
with orange as tongues of red flame across the city centre reached into
the sky and as we lurched into the shelter of an open-ended alleyway nearby
I thought of my father. My mother conducted a careful inspection of us to
assure herself that we were unhurt, although I could see that her own hands
were bleeding.
Our neighbours soon joined us and the husband dropped with his wife
on the dirt beside us as he jokingly enquired of the condition of their
egg ration. Our amusement was, however, short-lived. A stick of bombs
whistled down, each one louder than the one before, until one whistle
rose to a deafening shriek. 'My God, this is ours' my mother sobbed, and
at that moment the whole family clasped together were lifted into the
air as one and thrust to the ground some feet away. I lay stricken, for
what seemed an eternity, a painful ringing in my ears and unable to see
through a dense grey acrid cloud hiding the debris that had clattered
to the ground around us. I became aware of blood that was not my own.
Our lighthearted neighbour of a few moments before lay with his leg shattered
by the blast. Until the time he was carried off on a stretcher to
the hospital post in the school at the end of the road, he displayed great
courage. Later, that school was completely destroyed by a landmine and
we never saw him again. The hours of the long night wore on. Whilst the
merciless destruction continued around us hour after hour, my only recollection
is of a confusion of thoughts central to which was the welfare of our
father.
The centre of the city was soon reduced to a desert of rubble; essential
services were completely disorganized; within a mile of the Cathedral
all roads were quite unusable; most buses and trams were destroyed; the
railway systems were out of operation and transport ceased to exist. Gas,
electricity and water were no longer available. The anti-aircraft gun
crews having run oat of ammunition, joined the firemen and Civil Defence
workers, who, in the midst of now uncontrollable fires were tearing ineffectually
at the debris with their bare hands to release those entombed below.
Shortly after the last bomber had departed the cold steel-grey dawn
came at last and uncanny silence prevailed - only the crackle of burning
house frames broke the stillness in the air. We emerged from our shelter
dazed and numb with cold and began to salvage what we could from the rubble.
It was then that we shouted and cried with joy as our father appeared
over the top of a pile of bricks.
Faces blackened and in bedroom slippers, like a small band of refugees
we set out to walk out of the city. Our route took us through numerous
detours along rubble strewn and crater ridden streets. At the foot of
one particular crater lay a double-decker bus. Around us was a scene of
utter devastation and disorder, the only symmetry being the neat rows
of the victims' bodies laid out on the few open space available. Over
six hundred civilians were killed during the night and twelve hundred
received hospital treatment, a terrible toll, but mercifully low for such
devastation. Fifty thousand private houses alone were completely destroyed
or damaged, and in the city centre only 31 out of 975 buildings remained
intact. But our family was alive and we trudged on.
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