It Started in a Cupboard by Kenneth Calman sampler

it started in a cupboard
first appearance in the family album. It’s 23 May 1942 and there I
am, being proudly shown off to my adoring gran in our back garden.
Again, at first glance, it seems as though it belongs in peacetime. But,
look again at the garden and you can see that it has been given over
to growing potatoes. By 1941, thanks to the Dig For Victory campaign,
and the songs and recipe books of Captain Carrot and Potato
Pete, Britain’s food imports had halved to 14.65 million tonnes. Some
10,000 square miles of gardens and neglected spaces had been taken
over by vegetable growers. At No. 62 Thornley Avenue, we were doing
our bit too.
In some of the photographs, in the middle of the potatoes is the
grim hump of an Anderson shelter. Again, there’s nothing unusual
about that. 2.1 million of these corrugated galvanised steel shelters
were half-buried in Britain’s gardens, with most resurrected in peacetime,
as ours was, to serve as a garden shed where we also kept our
bikes. But nine months before I was born, in the middle of the Clydebank
Blitz the shelter had its use. I might even have been conceived in
it!
On the night of 13 March 1941 the first of three waves of German
bombers flew west over our house. They’d already done their aerial
reconnaissance, and you can see the targets marked out on their largescale
(1cm:150m) briefing photographs. On them, Knightswood is
unmarked, the neat geometry of its streets undisturbed by parked
cars or indeed vehicles of any kind. The real targets were in Clydebank,
just over a mile to the west. The giant Singer Sewing Machine
works, then largely given over to munitions work (they made Sten
guns), was the biggest one, but John Brown’s shipyard wasn’t far behind:
this was, after all, where the British battle cruisers hms Hood
and hms Repulse – both sunk, with appalling loss of life, later that
year – had both been built. Beardmore’s engineering works was badly
hit, as were the Admiralty oil storage tanks at Kilpatrick, and a huge
timber yard at Singer’s was lost – the last two adding immeasurably to
the fires that earlier incendiary bombs had started. Before the Clydebank
Blitz there had been 12,000 houses in the town. Only seven were
unscathed; 4,300 were destroyed or beyond repair. In the two-night
bombing raids of 13 and 14 March 1941, 528 people died in the concentrated
carnage of Clydebank, and a further 650 in Glasgow. 1
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