air raid

Once a month we had an air-raid practice, filed into the dark, damp and mouse-infested shelter, took our seats on the wooden benches and were allowed to eat the contents of our tins before we took them home for replenishment.

The papers hanging off newsstands ran big headlines alongside photographs of the new air-raid shelters they've put up downtown.

I told of the chimney sweep in our street - Thesiger Street - who used to dump all the soot he collected in the air-raid shelter as his family, quite a large one, never used it.

He said he wanted to be sympathetic to the concerns and fears of people across the city, and knew that to many Blitz survivors hearing the air-raid sirens blast out across the city once more could cause upset and distress.

A Birmingham couple revisit their home after a wartime air-raid

As air-raid shelters they were wet, cold and the only time I think my neighbours and I used the them was when Manors station was bombed and a raid at Westerhope.

My uncle Ernest Tudor, who was an air-raid warden, had to dig us out after one particularly heavy raid.

Americans used ration stamps to buy meat, sugar, and fuel, scrambled for shelter during air-raid warnings, and collected mountains of scrap for the making of bombs and equipment.

At the Ahmanson, searchlights rather than fairy wings illuminate the night sky; the sound of bombs prefaces each of the three acts; air-raid alert signs flash in Lez Brotherston's award-winning, stunningly conceived designs.

Air-raid sirens have just sounded, marking the second night of NATO's bombing.

A woman injured in an air-raid alert is claiming a war pension - 55 years later.