A night in the shelter

Text 1: Beside the Cabbages, by Elsie Marchbank

An original twentieth-century memoir.

The siren began while my mother was cutting bread, and I remember that she finished the slice. She cut it carefully, all the way through, laid it on the board, and only then put down the knife. I was seven, and I thought that was the bravest thing I had ever seen.

We went down the garden in our nightclothes, my mother carrying my baby brother wrapped in the eiderdown, my sister and I holding hands. The grass was wet and silver. Above the roofs the searchlights had already begun, long pale fingers feeling about the sky as if they had lost something up there.

The shelter was dug into the earth at the bottom of the garden, beside the cabbages, and it smelt of soil and paraffin and the damp that never left it. Inside, it was the size of a larder. We sat on the bunk with our knees touching. My mother lit the candle and the walls came close around us, curved and corrugated, beaded with wet.

For a while there was nothing. Then, very far off, the guns, a dull thudding like someone beating a carpet three streets away. My sister began to hum. My mother joined in, very softly, and so did I, a hymn from school whose words none of us could remember.

Then the other sound came. I have never been able to describe it properly. It was a drone, low and uneven, as though the engines could not agree with each other. It grew. It filled the shelter, the bunk, my teeth. The candle flame trembled, though there was no wind. My mother stopped humming.

The bang, when it came, was not like a bang at all. It was a shove. The whole earth seemed to lift us an inch and set us down again, and soil pattered from the roof onto our hair, and the candle went out.

In the dark my brother began to cry, and my mother hushed him, and I heard her heart, because my face was pressed against her chest. It was going very fast. That frightened me more than the bomb.

When the all-clear sounded we climbed out into a grey dawn. Our house was standing. Three doors down, where the Pattersons lived, there was a gap like a pulled tooth, and smoke, and a man in a tin hat standing perfectly still in the road, holding a teapot.

Explore how Elsie Marchbank uses language and structure to convey the danger of the air raid and her feelings during it.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.