Free Fathers and Sons by Richard Madeley Page B

he rolled over and fell into a sleep interrupted by terrible dreams.
     
    The Germans didn’t invade but they visited Shawbury nevertheless. By the time Christopher entered his teens, the Blitz had begun. Manchester and Liverpool lay roughly sixty miles north, and the village was almost directly under the Luftwaffe bombers’ flight path. The air raids went on night after night, and people would go outside to listen to the great flying armadas rumbling their way to their targets. The planes wereinvisible in the dark, but it was possible to distinguish between enemy aircraft and the British night fighters trying to bring them down. The German planes’ twin engines weren’t synchronised and gave a strange, uneven drone which I can still hear my father imitating for me when I was a boy; a sort of low-frequency ululation–sinister and unnerving.
    So was the noise of bombs pulverising the big industrial cities to the north. The sound of the bombing rarely carried as far as Shawbury but the vibrations did. My father always knew when the attacks had started because the heavy balls on his brass bedstead would start to judder and jangle in sympathy with the colossal explosions more than fifty miles away. As the attacks developed and peaked, ornaments would tremble, candles flickered strangely and windows rattled as in a gale.
    One winter night in 1942, the Madeleys were having their evening meal. Liverpool was that night’s target and the bombing had begun earlier than usual. The familiar vibrations had been making the house tremble for about an hour when they were overlaid by something else–the drone of an approaching plane. The steady rise and fall of its engines marked it as a German bomber.
    Conversation came to an abrupt halt and everyone lifted their eyes to the ceiling.
    ‘What the devil does he want here?’
    Kitty stared at her husband. ‘Perhaps the aerodrome, Geoffrey?’
    ‘Maybe. He’ll have a job finding it–it’s cloudy and there isn’t a moon.’
    By now the plane had throttled back its engines and droppeddown closer to the village. It began circling patiently, flying round and round as it sought its target. In several homes nearby, there was something close to panic and many ran to their cellars and shelters, but my father noticed that my grandfather showed no emotion other than curiosity. ‘It made me realise how cool he must have been under fire in the trenches,’ he said.
    As the plane continued to circle, the tension on the ground became almost unbearable. My grandfather, still staring at the ceiling, said: ‘His navigator must be trying to work out where the airfield is by dead reckoning. He can’t possibly see it in the blackout.’
    At last the pilot seemed to give up. His engine revs increased and the plane began to fly away to the south, its mournful droning gradually fading.
    ‘Thank God,’ my grandmother said, ‘he’s leaving.’
    ‘Or lining up for his bombing run,’ came her husband’s reply.
    He was right. The engine noise suddenly increased again. This time there was no tentative circling–the plane was coming in fast and low.
    ‘Everyone to the arches!’
    These were a row of thick red-brick arches set low in a kind of demi-cellar at the back of the house. I have no idea what they were originally for but that night they would have to make shift as tiny one-man air-raid shelters.
    Within seconds the first bomb began to fall with a tearing, rushing sound. There was an enormous crash somewhere near and then the sound of another bomb, which seemed to be falling through the air even closer than the first. It landed barelya hundred yards to the southwest in the field next to the farm. The explosion shook the entire building to its foundations and the crouching family felt the percussive wave punch through them, squeezing their ribcages and jerking involuntary ‘Ahhhs!’ from them as their lungs compressed. Another bomb exploded further away, the plane roared back up into the sky