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In 1936 I started school at "The little School" as I always knew it, more recently "Springfield School". I don't remember hearing such a name in 1936 when at the age of four I was able to start school a year earlier than normal due to my April date of birth. Once settled and making friends we played at each other's homes and occasionally a parent would ask "What's your name" and where I lived, and I'd answer, "No. 19 High Street". Occasionally they said "Oh! You live up The Jetty". I protested, but was told it was called that before being renamed High Street some years previously.
I was used to people calling the wide accesses from a road to behind the houses "Jetties", and small gaps "Entries", and private property was within the walls and fences. Keresley's "Jetty", as High Street was once called, was the boundary between Coventry and Meriden Rural District; an invisible boundary with its own baggage that surfaced occasionally in small ways in hidden officialdom. Petty things, I suppose.
My own gripe as a four-year-old was when we were given a "Coronation Mug" in 1936. I was proud as punch. Never had I received such a beautiful thing in my life and couldn't wait to get home to show mum my trophy. Suddenly a head pops round the classroom door, a hurried whispered conversation, door closed - a couple of minutes later, in comes the head mistress with a box and my ornate "Coventry Mug" was taken from me and I was given a shapeless smaller mug more like today's coffee mug. My tearful protest was in vain! "You're from the wrong side of High Street, and not entitled to a Coventry mug - you get a Meriden Rural District mug"!
The second time the invisible boundary manifested itself was much more serious, but fortuitous as it played out some years later in 1939 when the Second World War broke out. Dad had expected to be called up with his age group and wanted us to have an Air-Raid shelter during his absence, and so applied to Coventry for a shelter - an "Anderson" - but the request was refused as we were not resident in Coventry but of "Meriden Rural District" on the "St. Thomas' Church" side of High Street. The foundation was already dug just over the fence in the unused vegetable garden of No 23.
Then came the refusal. Coventry would not supply us with an Anderson Shelter as they were in short supply for the city residents and we had to apply to Meriden Rural District. This was November 1939. They could only offer a "Morrison Shelter", useless for outside family use.
The war's first winter was harsh, and snow lay deep over the waiting open foundation. I remember the humps and hollows of snow as it drifted up to our back fence as seen from my back bedroom window. Spring came, and the thaw filled the foundation with water. It was decided to fill it in, as my three-year-old brother was very mobile so better safe than sorry! Dad was not called up, being M.U., but redirected back into the engineering industry, his pre-depression trade.
Now we had to stay where we were, and slept under the stairs or kitchen table and various safe places during this period of our lives until we were finally evacuated out into the countryside after the Easter Raids of 1941. I only recall one public shelter, built for about thirty or fourty people sitting approximately where the door end of "Pensioners Association Building" faces today, toward Bennett's Road. The end entrances to the shelter were protected by a blast wall at both ends. The sports field farm gate opened adjacent to the last house side of the row where three or four cars now park toward the house front. The Public Shelter was still there in 1948 when we left.
I used the word fortuitous at the beginning of my story. This was because had we received an Anderson Shelter we may very well have been in it as the bomb that dropped at about 9:30 P.M. on Sunday 25 August 1940 behind No. 19 High Street hit the exact spot where the filled in shelter foundation was sited. This happened just after dark the same Sunday evening that the Rex Cinema was destroyed in the city, around midnight during the same air raid.
An interesting adjunct, too, regarding air raid shelters in our case. When we returned to No. 19 in 1965, a brick shelter had been built behind Nos. 19 & 21 within our joint divide of the two houses. Who built it I don't know, but it was still there when we sold up and emigrated in 1948. It would be interesting to see how it would have stood up to the blast of the 1940 bomb immediately over the fence behind it. It seems that our event was never recorded as a Coventry bombing, again, presumably the invisible divide line. We moved back home after the house was repaired by the Bomb Damage people in May 1945.
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