Blitz. Robert Westall

      As soon as the bombing of Tyneside got bad, the timber-yards down by the river moved their wood piles out into the open fields.

      Albert Bowdon and I were the first to find them, on Lawson’s Farm. We were cycling around as always, looking for war souvenirs and trouble.

      Lawson’s was a favourite calling-stop, right out beyond the edge of town. It had been sold to a house builder just before war broke out, but the farm-buildings still stood, a marvellous place for the gangs to practise street-fighting each other, shinning up the ladders into the haylofts. Though no matter how hard you machine-gunned the enemy with your wooden tommy-gun, no matter how hard you shouted “Wa-wa-wa-wa!” he would never admit to being dead. Just say you’d narrowly missed and go on fighting.

      There was also, at Lawson’s, the head-high walls of a street of new houses, frozen dead by the War. We called it the Maginot Line ’til the French surrendered to the Nazis, after which we slowly kicked it to bits, brick by brick, in disgust.

      Lawson’s was deserted that night because it was a long walk from town, and the gangs usually saved it for weekends. But, looking through Lawson’s wildly overgrown hedge, we saw a new city grown up like mushrooms overnight. A city of many streets, and pale gold and white buildings. A city of flat roofs, which gave it an eastern look, like something in the background of a Christmas crib; which was why we called it the Ruined City of Kor.

      It was the smell that told us it was a city of solidly-piled wood. The sweet smell of pine and resin and mahogany. Kor never again smelled as sweet as it did that night. We climbed through the streets between, giving them names because we were the first. The Street Called Straight, the main thoroughfare was named that night; and the Street of the Goldsmiths.

      And the uneven lengths and piling of the wood made little caves where you could hide and plot, or keep dry in the rain, or even, greatly daring, light camp-fires.

      Later, there was a sidestreet of caves used by lads who’d got taken short or couldn’t be bothered to walk home, and that got called Rotten Row. People brought chalk and paint, and labelled the streets with their names in big scrawling letters.

      Of course it was a nuisance when men came with lorries during the day, when we were at school, and took our buildings away, or built new ones. But they were never there when we were, not even a night-watchman; even the old gaffers had gone for war work.

      There were two games we played in the Ruined City of Kor, besides street-fighting. If several gangs got together, you had ‘Breakout from Stalag Luft VI’ which was a marvellous chase over the piles and the long planks we laid between them, miles above the ground.

      But even if there were only two of you, you could still play ‘Paratroops’. From the tallest pile, a plank sloped down at forty-five degrees, a plank smoothed over the weeks by a hundred bums – and one or two tin trays, when the plank was new and full of splinters. But what did a few splinters in your bum matter? Britain stood alone; it was a time for courage. You whizzed down the plank at breathtaking speed, pushed up your kid’s tin hat when it fell over your eyes, and machine-gunned everything in sight in a mad rage.

      Albert and I were playing ‘Paratroops’ the evening things really happened. Our mothers hadn’t wanted to let us come because there’d been a lot of daylight raids that week, and they were nervous. But it was a lovely golden evening, with the barrage balloons up so high that the setting sun winking on their silver sides made them look almost like stars.

      People thought then that if the barrage balloons were high, there wouldn’t be a raid. They used them like the weather forecast.

      How wrong they were! I was just picking a splinter out of my bum when the siren went.

      No, we weren’t terrified. We just got that little sinking feeling in our guts. We were old hands at air-raids. Nobody ever panicked; everybody else would have sneered at them – their lives would’ve been misery for months afterwards.

      I just looked at Albert and he looked at me. We were over two miles from home and the siren only gave you a couple of minutes warning before the bombers were on you.

      “Dig in?” I said. And Albert nodded.

      We went and dragged our bikes into the deepest cave and squatted over them. We didn’t feel in any danger from falling shrapnel, not under twenty feet of wood. Not unless Jerry dropped incendiary bombs on us, and then we could still get out fast, before the whole place went up in flames.

      “It’ll only get you if it’s got your number on it,” said Albert.

      “Me mam’ll be worried,” I said.

      “No point,” said Albert. “If we try and belt home, some warden will only shove us down the nearest shelter.”

      “We gotta good view.”

      Normally, in raids, I was down our shelter, with nothing to stare at but a pile of sandbags our dog had peed on more often that I care to remember. But now I could see the whole town spread out before me. The gasworks, the masts and funnels of the ships in the river.

      “There they go,” yelled Albert. And I caught a fleeting glimpse of a handful of long thin shapes streaking over the works chimneys down by the river. “Keeping low so the guns can’t get them.”

      “If the guns don’t get them the fighters will …”

      “Hurricanes from Usworth and Spitfires from Acklington,” we chorused together, with great satisfaction. “Gonna be a dogfight.”

      And then we began to hear the machine-guns up in the clouds; they sounded like a boy running a stick along a row of iron railings. Only lots of boys,