My mum was slow to the shelters when York was bombed. Saved her life. Her family hid under the stairs, when the raid was over the shelter at the end of the street had been hit and everyone in it killed. Today you can almost read each bomb's fall, there's an empty bit of land or some unkind post-war thing inplace of the the noble Edwardian terraces, each string reaching like a searching finger towards the marshalling yards around the station. It wasn't a big raid even by the scale of 1942, but it nearly ended my life before it began. I can't help standing awestruck when I find a building that still has the blast scars of a WWII bomb up it. There's one in Bath that seems like a lithograph of violence, the splash of shrapnel up its stone face. I can't help feeling how helpless an individual must have felt against such nationalised murder, I don't suppose it was any different for anyone else.
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