The Night They Blitzed the Ritz: Memoirs of a Bomb Alley Kid 2nd Edition
Author(s): John Bull (Author)
Publisher: Chaplin Books
Publication Date: 1 Jun. 2010
Edition: 2nd
Language: English
Print length: 128 pages
ISBN-10: 0956559506
ISBN-13: 9780956559500
Book Description
“Mum went back to the wreckage on the morning after the raid and found some light-fingered swine had swiped the rings from her dressing table. This was too much for the gypsy in her soul. She mounted a pile of brick rubble and held out both arms in supplication. ‘I, Nell Ferré, do place a solemn curse on the thief,’ she declared, head thrown back to gaze, black-browed, at the eternal sky overhead. ‘May his fingers fester and drop off.’ A couple of days later, one of the men clearing the rubble approached Mum, clutching the rings. ‘God bless you’, said Mum. ‘By the way, how are those hands of yours?’ He thrust them quickly back into his pockets, his guilty face flaring crimson.”
This is the Blitz story from a fresh new perspective – through the eyes of a small boy and his gang of streetwise Bomb Alley Kids. It was the worst of times for adults, thrust into the front line of the war by relentless night-bombing, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was maybe the best of times for children, with every bombsite, aeroplane and wailing siren holding a promise of pleasurable terror. In this personal memoir, John Bull – a former News of the World columnist – perfectly captures the tragicomic, often farcical, events of everyday survival and the tribal stubbornness that stopped the Brits from ‘chucking it in’.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
The Night They Blitzed The Ritz is a book you won’t be able to put down. It perfectly evokes that time when families spent worried nights in their Anderson shelter listening for the next `Moaning Minnie’, were regularly bombed out of their homes, and struggled to feed everyone, yet the main preoccupation of their children was whether they would miss hearing Hi Gang! on the radio, when they could next go mudlarking, or who might have stolen their toy handcuffs.
If you lived through the Blitz, this will bring back so many memories of everyday life; if you were not born until after WWII there’s no better way to discover what it was really like.
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