Fetching Some Coal

One winter's night Mom sent me outside into the barren little yard behind our house to see if there was any slack left. Slack is the little bits of coal that are always left when the big lumps were all burned. It was my duty to get the coal, because it was outside the house and I was a male. Well that was Mom’s rule anyway. Chores inside were female; chores outside were male territory.

The coal man brought a sack of coal once a fortnight and emptied it in a messy pile just inside the gate at the back of the yard. Then he would trudge back along the narrow little alley behind the houses, to the street where he had parked his truck, fill up his sack again and haul it on his back along the alley to the next customer. I thought it must be very hard work, and boring too. It was easier where my Gran lived; there was a ‘coal hole’ in the pavement in front of each house there, so the coal man only had to take the cover off and drop the coal down. I fell down a coal hole once - I rarely looked where I was going – and I still have the scar to prove it.

Queueing for coal

As the war went on, coal was in short supply, so everybody got less. Eventually people were queueing up for it with prams or wheelbarrows or anything else they could use to carry it away. This night, we had a meagre little heap of it in the yard. Maybe some of it had been stolen; during the war people helped each other out a lot, but there were those who were more interested in helping themselves.

It was a bitterly cold Birmingham winter night; the freezing wind caught my breath as Mom slammed the back door shut with a loud bang as she shouted ‘Keep the warm in’. There was a clear frosty sky, with a ‘Bomber’s Moon'. I shivered, remembering the terror of the latest air raid, and hoping there would be no bombing that night, or ever again.

I walked quickly past the air raid shelter. I didn’t like to think about having to go into that concrete and brick edifice that we had to share with the family next door and wait in extreme discomfort for Jerry to drop a bomb on our house. Sometimes the bombing raids got so scary, I wet myself. At least Mrs Gilks next door always brought a flask of tea along, and shared it with us, because my Mom never brought anything.

An Anderson shelter.
This one has a vegetable garden on top.

Not everybody had a solid shelter like ours. Most people with gardens had an Anderson shelter, named after Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary. We had one of those at the house where we lived before in Bacchus Road. It was so cold, wet and uncomfortable that to me it seemed worth chancing a direct hit from a German bomb and dying in bed. An Anderson shelter consisted of fourteen sheets of corrugated steel, forming a shell 6ft high, 4ft wide and 6ft long. It was buried 4ft deep and covered with 15 inches of soil. It could shelter six people in extreme discomfort. We spent more time bailing the rainwater out than sheltering in it. And one time Grandad Joe fell into the shelter when he was drunk, and landed right on top of the fat lady who lived down the road.

Only twenty percent of the population of the United Kingdom had a garden, so more than three quarters of British citizens didn’t even have the option of having their basic safety needs met, and had to shelter from the bombing as best they could. Lots of them had to go to public shelters, but some, like my Gran, had a Morrison shelter inside the house. It was a sort of cage thing with a steel top that was supposed to stop the house falling on you and killing you. Gran’s shelter had a snooker table on the top. My cousin Jean ripped the felt with a pool cue once and blamed me for it. I have never let her forget it.

Anyway, there I was on an expedition for fuel on that bitter night. There was only enough slack left to fill an old boot, which is what I was doing when I heard the air raid sirens start.