Another war anniversary - the first day of the blitz (on London). My own native city, the most badly bombed after the capital, seldom gets a mention when the story of the blitz is rehearsed by national organs. We were always "a north-east coast town" when our suffering made it onto the national news. Apparently even the Hull Daily Mail reported the bombs that landed yards from its offices as falling on a north-east coast town. I remember my mother once explaining as we listened to the news "That's us, last night." For years after I thought Hull was situated in the North-East (wrong), and that its location on the Humber estuary qualified it as coastal (wrong, I think). An early example of the disinformation coming out of official bodies, though it took me a couple of decades to recognise the danger of believing all that was said by people in authority.
Personal experience involved my mother and myself being bombed out of our home three times, and having to move in with relatives while the house was made inhabitable (and looters helped themselves to some of my parents' possessions). But that was the experience of the greater part of the town's population. "Only six thousand out of ninety-three thousand houses left undamaged after a thousand hours of air raids. One hundred and fifty-two thousand people left homeless, albeit alive. One thousand two hundred and fifty-eight civilians killed and three times that number left injured, maimed and wounded." (Clive Ashman, "Mosaic")
Of course we were in the air-raid shelters while the bombs were falling. I sat bored, surrounded by ladies gripping rosaries and firing off a Hail Mary every time an explosion sounded nearby. The men were all off doing their bit, of course. Where the other kids were, I don't know, the older ones had probably been evacuated.
Edward Gillett in "A History of Hull" writes of "Children on their way to school the morning after a raid collected pocketfuls of shrapnel ..." I was a shrapnel collector, but never managed to keep the stuff. Maybe my mother threw it out.
Some kids found bits of material from shot down barrage balloons, silver coloured, shiny and slippery. There was a gas-works about a mile from where I lived, and the gas-holders were surrounded by the balloons, or blimps as they were sometimes called.
Some film of bomb damaged Hull here -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNrPVr5klCY