In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Page B

neighbours. At teatime that day she watched trembling from the window as a constable slowly strode the length of Maesglas Avenue, sniffing the aroma of grilling and frying kippers. But no arrests were made.
    During this early wartime period, my father also provided sacks to be used as sandbags for bolstering the defences of our air raid shelter. He did nothing, despite my mother's scolding, to help fill them with earth. That was left to me.
    Not that I minded. The air raid shelter was my pride. In my eagerness to get on with the fight against Nazism, I had dug a hole fifteen yards from the back door at the bottom of our garden, by the boarded fence that divided us from the Great Western Railway engine repair sheds. My mother told me where to dig because she had read in the paper that Anderson shelters, corrugated iron huts half-interred in the earth, were to be situated fifteen yards from the place of exit from the house. It was a warm autumn and I was only eight. Nevertheless, I was very determined and I dug and dug until I had a suitable hole. Every afternoon when I returned from school, and every Saturday and Sunday, I made that hole wider and bigger. Eagerly I awaited the arrival of the air raid shelter. We would be the best-protected family in Maesglas. Hitler could do his worst.
    When the men arrived with the curved and shining metal panels that were to be bolted together to form our refuge, they said that the hole was in the wrong place. My mother had mixed it up. The shelter had to be established fifteen feet, not yards, from the back door. I set about digging another hole.
    Some workmen arrived to complete the job but I still had to fill in the first hole. Then came the satisfaction of piling earth on the naked corrugated iron shelter, filling the flour sacks that my father magicked from the docks, fitting the floorboards and witnessing the delivery of the wood and wire bunks. We had a little table and an oil lamp, a ladder to step down and a wooden door, like a bastion, to pull over the hole. It was wonderful, a home from home, deep in the ground; on fine nights my brother and I camped out in there.
    Whether the sight of my labour, or my mother's scorn, was too much for him, I do not know, but my father quickly returned to the sea. His excuse was that his chest ached on land and he breathed better in the stokehold. I missed hearing the wheezings, gurglings and hissings within his body as he lay next to me in bed at night. Sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could imagine they were playing a tune.
    On our air raid shelter I planted vegetables and flowers, a multiple achievement since it provided us with produce and decoration and camouflaged our hide-out from German reconnaisance aircraft. Mr Coles next door had a wonderful shelter, all lined and padded, with proper beds and even folding chairs and a wireless set. His son, who was called Flare, used to boast about their air raid shelter (which was fifteen yards from the back door at the bottom of the garden near the fence with the engine sheds). I was jealous, but pleased when Mr Coles gave me some strawberry plants and I put them on top of the shelter. In the hot summer of 1940, while Britain stood alone and aeroplanes battled in the sky, we had a splendid crop of strawberries.
    Enthusiastically horticultural, I dug the entire back garden to grow potatoes, lettuces, carrots and onions. Somehow I felt that the injunction to 'Dig For Victory' on the Government advertisement hoardings was addressed specifically to me. I even set to work on the patch of front garden behind our ragged but sweet-smelling privet hedge, trimming the dog rose and cosseting the irises, which were our only flowers. I dug a rectangular flower bed at the centre of the patchy grass and was very proud of it until Mrs Holtom, a local fortune-teller, walked past and pronounced that it looked like a grave. She told my mother to instruct me to make it a different shape. I did. The resulting cross