Give Me Shelter

 

   Teresa and I were jaunting around Cornwall a few years back and one day we stopped in a little town for lunch. It was a nice day so we took our lunch to the picnic tables out front. An older gentleman invited us to sit at his table and after introductions, Bert told us he had grown up in London during the Blitz.

He said one morning he and his mates arrived at school only to find their school had been flattened by a bomb. They had just begun celebrating when their teacher arrived. “Don’t worry, lads,” he said. “We’ll be meeting for class in the church.”

   I should have asked Bert where he and his family went when the bombs were falling. I knew a lot of Londoners went down into the tube, the subway, and slept on the platform. Other families had Anderson shelters in their backyards. The first Anderson shelter was built on this day in 1939 in preparation for the war everyone knew was coming.

   The shelters consisted of fourteen sheets of galvanized metal bolted together and sunk into the ground four feet with another 15 inches of soil on top. The shelters were 4.5 feet wide, 6 feet long and six feet high with a curved roof. The owners made the interior as comfortable as they liked.

   The government had started with concrete shelters, but in tests the roof tended to collapse. The Anderson shelters did well in a blast thanks to their qualities of plastic deformation. This means they would bend and not break, presuming they did not suffer a direct hit.

   The war lasted longer than people thought it would. People began planting flowers on top of their shelters. There were neighborhood competitions to judge the most attractive shelter. The downside was that during the winter the shelters were cold and clammy and tended to fill with rain water.

   Some people set up their shelters inside their houses, but most didn’t have room for that, so the Morrison shelter came along. This was a steel cage-like structure that replaced the dining room table. People ate their meals atop it during the day and slept in it at night. The shelter came in a kit with 359 parts and three tools for assembly.

  The two things that killed people during a bombing were the shock from the initial blast followed by shrapnel. If you were lucky enough  to avoid the first, the Morrison took care of the second. 

    Many Anderson shelters remain today. People store garden tools in them or use them as a study. Sump pumps have been installed to manage the ground water and there’s a Facebook page for people to show off their shelters. 

Mustn’t grumble.