Burniston Bombs

At the beginning of the second world war I lived with my Mother, Dad and sister, in a house called Rievaulx, (I always spell it Reivaulx) in Burniston Gardens. There was a reason for the house being called Reivaulx, which I will explain in a later post.

I didn't see much of my dad because he was working on the war effort at various aerodromes, and for the last three years of the war he was in Belgium and Germany, with the REME.

We were issued a steel air-raid shelter which was assembled in a spare bedroom. When the sirens sounded we scrambled into a makeshift bed on the floor of the steel cage. Before we had the shelter three of us would scramble into the tiny under-stairs cupboard. I remember the door knocker rattling from the vibration of the planes and the bombs.

Bombs did drop close to us, I remember one day after a lot of noise in the night, we walked to a field adjacent to our house to look in the huge crater, and I picked up quite a few bits of shrapnel.