World War Two
Ronald Leedham: Shelter
Ronald Leedham was born in 1929 in India. His family moved back to England in 1931after Ronald contracted Polio. Ronald spent some years in Hospital as a young child after contracting Diptheria. When he was six he returned home to Catford for a short while to live with his father, eventually ending up living in ‘homes for crippled children’ run by the Shaftesbury Society, until he was sixteen.
More from
Ronald Leedham
- Geography
- Explosives
- Certificates
- Oliver Twist
- Visits
- I Knew Nothing About Life
- Incendiaries in the park
- Dogfight
- Awful Sundays
- Home
- Buzz Bombs and Doodlebugs
- Visiting every six weeks
- Shut Away and Tipped Out
- Boys and girls together
- A Miserable Time
- Greyness
- Suitcases
- Shame
- Mum
- ‘Mummy coming’
- Cricket at Sevenoaks
- Lead Soldiers
- Sheltering in the Church
- Beatings
- The Walk to Church on Sunday
- No talking
- The Glow over London
- War starts
- Difficult subject
- Parlour Songs
- Oliver Twist and donk
Here Ron talks about the whole school sheltering in a small cellar.
Transcript
During the Blitz itself, we had to use the cellar, which was our shelter and that was horrible, that was awful. Terrible down there. How on earth… If the place had been hit, we’d have all died, no doubt about that. You know, all the staff were down there. We had bunks made up, but, there must have been 70 people in a space about the size of the ground floor of this part of the flat, this room. Crammed in. Staff, grownups, boys. The matron used to read to us and there’d be this racket going on outside. You could hear the bombers going over. Sometimes they’d be very low and I can remember the matron sort of reading to us and sometimes she burst into tears. It was terrible, no ventilation down there. Awful place.Explore more
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