Wednesday, 9th April 1941: 01.30 BDST: Smethwick, England

The Heinkel 111 H-5 1G + FK (Werke Nr. 4018) of 2./KG 27 buries itself into a sodden field in Warwick, its propellers bending backwards into half clenched-like claws, just six miles away from Shakespeare’s birthplace. At that very moment, Thomas Atkins, a large, heavy-set man with a receding ginger hairline, breaks wind aggressively in a communal shelter down in the basement of Thimblemill Swimming baths in Smethwick. Trumpeting out a night time sonata, the length and loudness of which shakes him from his own slumber. He sighs, his senses returning, as he rolls slightly onto his side, and then his startled eyes open quickly. “Oh my goodness!”, he thinks to himself, shame quickly finding him, and then prodding its accusatory finger at him like a dagger – his body crumples. Thomas, ‘Tooting Tommo’ or ‘Ack-Ack Atkins’, as his fellow shelter dwellers have begun to christen him, over previous nights of ‘confined combat’, suddenly remembers that he’s not at home in the privacy of his own bed, but instead is in the company of forty-nine other strangers in the shelter, deep down in the bowels of the swimming baths, and so keeps deathly still. 

Laying there playing possum, closing his eyes again, his cheeks flush beetroot. “Oh, the bloody shame of it!”, he thinks, torturing himself with shame again, without ever realising that he’s been terrorising his fellow shelter dwellers every night he’s slept in the shelter. His eyelids squeeze tightly as a mob is growing around him, roused by the stench in their nostrils, symbolic pitchforks and burning torches glowing – this mob wants blood. “Oh, you dirty bugger”, says one. “Ruddy twat!”, shouts another, and a baby begins to cry when the fallout reaches its nose, their mother humming a lullaby from behind the handkerchief pressed over her mouth and nose. But instead of comfort, she emits a toneless and muffled drone that only adds to the distress of the poor child. 

“Ack-Ack Atkin’s at it again boyo!”, someone else blurts out from the shadows, laughing loudly as Thomas, the ‘Ginger Whinger’ to his mates down on at the bowling green, pretends to gently snore out loud, the smell of the cabbages he had for supper continuing to waft around the shelter, dispersed as it is by synchronised out-stretched arms wafting in the night. Trying to fan it away from themselves – but only spreading the toxic fumes. “I finally needed my ruddy gas mask Ethel,” an older woman’s voice chirps up in the pall of darkness which befits the shelter. Doreen Joan Hanson rolls over in disgust, pulling a bedsheet up over her head in a huff, hearing her copy of the Radio Times fall to the floor, but too upset to care as she pinches her nose closed while silently mouthing the words “filthy pig” to herself, vowing with all power to sleep in her own blooming shelter tomorrow night. 

Doreen, the twenty-four-year-old dressmaker and the perineal owner of a short, washed and set hairstyle, had been evacuated up to Smethwick from Acton in London back in 1939. Moving up to stay with her uncle Theo, his wife Emily and their daughter Florence. By then Frederick, Theo’s and Emily’s son, was at sea with the Merchant Navy, his absence made all the harder as their first child and their eldest daughter Beatrice had sadly died three years previously to her arrival. Florence, Doreen’s junior by five years, had felt that she’d got an older sister back again, someone to look up to. The fact that Doreen would have the dressmaking skills to give her wardrobe a new lease of life wouldn’t hurt either. 

Doreen stayed with them all until her mother Amy made the journey up from London, after they’d secured housing for them both on Hales Lane. Amy had left her husband William behind as his job, as an engineer, was deemed important for the war effort and he’d been forced to stay put.

For Amy, born just up the road in Handsworth in 1892, it was strange to be coming back to live in the West Midlands again. Coming back for a visit was always a pleasure, she loved to visit, but to stay? Well, like Doreen, the pace of London life suited them both, but in reflection, the chance to be close to so many family members again was a comfort when William seemed so far away.

But 1939 seemed so far away too now as quiet began to descend in the shelter. The numerous coughs and clearing of throats fading, the first overtures of snores, quietly at first, then gratingly beginning to replace them and then to reign as overlord where laughter once had. Tiredness gently caresses Doreen in its slumbering call, seducing her with its warm tranquil glow and it’s offer to slip the surly bonds of the pressures of the world. Calling her deeper and deeper into its clutches as the warmth under her blanket grew. A feeling of inner peace swelling in her too as all seemed, just for now at least, at peace.  The anxieties of it all exhaled out of her in a long sigh of air that she drew back in again to grate at the back of her throat, as a ponderous snore, while sleep finally took her in its grip.