Someone was talking to me the other day about nuclear fall-out shelters. I can't remember who it was offhand but the point being made was that sometime during the Cold War people started thinking about nuclear shelters because politicians and journalists and other people were talking about the possibility that Soviet Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.

I remember the Cold War and Suez and John F. Kennedy and that whole period very well. (Elsewhere on this Blog I've written a bit about the Suez Crisis.)

But anyway, I began to think that the whole idea of nuclear shelters probably owed quite a bit to the experience of the British during the war and during the Blitz. After all, it's not very likely that a shelter would protect people from a nuclear bomb. It sounds like an idea based on the triumph of hope over common sense to me...

What I think happened in the Cold War perhaps was that people had this idea of the British taking shelter from German bombs. During the Blitz, of course, people used to scramble to get down into the London Underground when the air raid sirens sounded. I don't suppose my grandchildren would even know what I meant if I used the words "air raid siren" now but during the war we all knew what it meant when that siren went off. Londoners would hurry down to the underground station platforms and sleep there if necessary to avoid nazi bombs. It might have been reassuring to be safe underground during a bombing raid but you wouldn't necessarily know of course if your friends and family were safe and you wouldn't know till the all clear sounded and you came up above ground again if your house was still standing.

I lived in Lancashire during the war and was a child. (I was born in 1929.) We didn't have underground stations there, naturally, so people improvised. Most people just went under their dining table when we heard the bombers fly over. Fat lot of good that would do, but you felt you had to take some sort of shelter. After the war began though our next door neighbours devised a bomb shelter.

They had labradors - big dogs - and had built a huge kennel in their back yard. It wasn't tall enough to stand in but it was long and wide. Once the man of the household - Mr Stuttard - realised we were likely to be bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), he reinforced the kennel's sides and roof and put sandbags all round it. He and his wife had no children so they had room to let my mother, my father and me shelter in the kennel with them and their dogs when bombers flew over. I remember crouching in that kennel during bombing when the nazis were dropping incendiary bombs and hoping to high heaven that the reinforced kennel roof would stop a bomb from killing us all. 

Looking back, a bomb dropped from a plane and exploding on the Stuttards' kennel would more than likely have killed the lot of us instantly. But it felt good to feel we had some kind of shelter, a place to run when we heard the bombers. My father removed part of the fence separating our garden from the yard next door so we could nip through in a hurry when we needed to. Still, I don't suppose the kennel-air-raid-shelter would have been terribly effective. Its main function was probably just to make us feel a bit safer - it was more a psychological help than anything else I imagine. And I suspect the same applies to the idea of the nuclear fallout shelter.