Transcription of the interview with Will Blagburn

Transcript of interview with William Blagburn, April 30, 2010.

Sara: "Where did you live, during the War?"
Will: "We lived in Coventry, which is right in the middle of England."
Sara: "But what was going on in Coventry at the time?"
Will: "In Coventry, for the first number of months, nothing very much happened when the War started, but then the Germans decided to bomb Coventry, and that was the worst bombing raid since they were carried out as far as England was concerned, and they called it in those days a "Blitz" - "Blitzkrieg", and they bombed it very badly, and a lot of the pictures you might find, er, show how badly it was burned out and bombed, and my father was killed during that particular raid, which was on the 14th of November, in 1940."
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Sara: "Aside from the bombs, did anything else affect your life during the War? Were there any major changes?"
Will: "Well of course, there was rationing; you could only buy a certain amount of food because, England being an island, all of the food had to come out on the ships, and the Germans tried to bomb the ships, so that they, we, would run out of food, so that they rationed it, and everybody had a ration book and you were only allowed to have a certain amount of food every week, and everybody had to go to a particular shop, and they had to cut out these little coupons out of this book, to swap for the food that you were buying. But you couldn't go and buy very much sugar or butter, or meat, or anything like that in those days....."
Nora: "Cheese, you got a little tiny bit...."
Will: "And the War went on for about four years, or five years, and um, the food got more and more s...
Nora: "Scarce"
Will: "Scarce."
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Will: "As well as blacking out the windows, if there was a bomb it would blow, not only a house down, but it would blow all of the windows in the whole of the street out so, to make sure that the, the, er, glass didn't shatter and go into people's faces, you put sticky tape across it, like this, so that in fact if it did break at least it was stuck and it didn't fly all over the place."
Nora: "Like masking tape, a bit criss-cross."
Will: "Yes, that's right."
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Nora (after inaudible question from Sara): "Do you remember being scared during the air raids?"
Will: "Yes I think that we were, we were quite frightened; we didn't know what was going to happen, you see, and when the, when the siren went, there was a s.., there was a .... . In each area there was this, what was called a siren, and it made a certain noise that everybody would hear that the Germans were coming, and then when the Germans had gone away it made a different noise to say, they called it the 'all clear', and it, it, and when the, when the Germans were actually coming, the siren would go Wooooooh" (sustained note, offscreen laughter)....
Nora: "Ever so loud, wasn't it?"
Will: "And then at the end, instead of going one note, it went Wooo-uuuh-wooo-uuuh" (more laughter).
Nora: "Oh, very good!"
Will: "They used different sounds.. if you, when the 'all clear' was sounded you could get out into the street and it was, it was safe again."
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Will: "We didn't have a shelter... my father built a shelter down the bottom of the garden, when the War started, but we couldn't go into it because it filled with water!" (offscreen laughter) "So, after the Blitz, when the war continued on for several more years, they had a different shelter they supplied, which you had in the house; it was a great big table, made of steel. So, what you did, you used the table during the daytime, and in the night-time you would sleep underneath it, because it was so strong that, if the house collapsed, you would be all right underneath the table."
Nora: "Was that the Anderson shelter?"
Will: "No, it was called the Morrison shelter."
Sara: "Were there any other types of shelters around?"
Will: "Well, they did have a lot of other shelters, for instance at school, they dug some tunnels under the playing fields, and we had to go down in the shelter, in the tunnels, when the sirens went. Because, in those days, they didn't know for sure whether the Germans were going to, um, not only send us bombs but send us gas, which could kill a lot of people, so you had a gas mask to put on. So we'd go down into the shelter, and all the boys would be, um, sitting there with their gas masks on, and they were very funny sort-of masks, with big breathing thing at the front, that you couldn't really talk to each other very well because it made such a funny noise!"
Nora: "muffled.."
Will: "But you had to carry these gas masks all the time, so that, if you were at school, going to school and from school, you had a gas mask box round your shoulders, and everybody had to carry one of those, all the time."
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Will: "Where we lived, was near one of the big factories, that made all of these aircraft parts, and to try to stop the Germans seeing where they were at night, they used to have what they called 'smoke screens' , and if, if the wind was blowing in a certain direction, they wanted to create all this extra smoke which would then drift over the top of the factories, and from the air you couldn't see what was underneath, because of the smoke."
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Will: "To try to stop the airplanes coming too low, they had 'barrage balloons' which were a great big balloon, on a big steel cable and, whenever there was an air raid siren, all the way around Coventry, they let up these big balloons, so that in fact the whole of Coventry was surrounded by these cables, so airplanes couldn't fly any lower."
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Sara: "Obviously the main target of these, er, bombers were the factories, so..."
Will: "It was supposed to be the factories but in fact they, they destroyed more of Coventry center, where there weren't any factories, because they decided, I think, just to frighten the civilians, thinking that they were going to, um, capit, capitulate and give up fighting. So they really sort-of killed a lot of, um, civilians by bombing the towns and it was the factories really that they were supposed to be aiming at."