• Brick and concrete public shelters in the streets
• Underground shelters in parks, open spaces and playing fields
• The basements of large office blocks
• Deep underground railway stations
• 'Anderson' shelters (corrugated iron, half-buried in the garden)
• 'Morrison' indoor shelters (sheet steel table-like constructions)

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'THE TIN BOX' - a night in an Anderson shelter.

An edited excerpt from my semi-autobiographical novel about a child growing up in
World War 2. Although presented as fiction it is based on actual experience, related
as accurately as memory will allow after more than 60 years.

The date is 1940; the place, a family home on the London/Essex border.

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Betty’s voice increased in pitch and urgency. ‘Come on now,’ she ordered, half pushing
and half dragging her now  tearful son out into the cold night air and down the two
slippery steps into the cold, dark corrugated iron Anderson shelter that would save his life
if a bomb should fall on the house.

Alan, wearing pyjamas embroidered by his mother with a little picture of a popular cartoon character called Mickey Mouse, stood shivering as she lit the paraffin lamp. The fumes got into his throat  and made him cough.  He was thankful for one thing, though; if his father had been at home there would have been the tobacco smoke from his pipe, too.  He smiled inwardly about something else.  In her hurry to get him into the shelter his mother had not noticed that he had left his gas mask behind.  He hated the smell of that coarse black rubber; it made him feel sick.

He eased himself into his bunk, a wooden slatted frame supported on four bricks,
just clear of the water that always covered the floor and tried to snuggle down and get
to sleep, but was uncomfortable in that makeshift bed and just lay there, watching
and counting the little beads of water that formed one by one in the curved corrugations
of the cold iron roof, glistening  in the yellow light of the oil lamp. Uncle Bob, Alan’s
favourite uncle and the genius of the family, had once explained that paraffin contained
water, which the flame turned it into steam, just like when you boil a kettle of water to
make tea, and when the steam hit the cold iron roof it turned back into water.

Alan found such things fascinating. He really liked Uncle Bob. His parents never talked
about really interesting things, but here was a real science lesson in practice. Perhaps
I can be a scientist when I grow up, he told himself.