Air-raid shelters at school were damp tunnels
where you sang ‘Ten Green Bottles’ yet again
and might as well have been doing decimals.

At home, though, it was cosier and more fun:
cocoa and toast inside the Table Shelter,
our iron-panelled bunker, our new den.

By day we ate off it; at night you’d find us
under it, the floor plump with mattresses
and the wire grilles neatly latched around us.

You had to be careful not to bump your head;
we padded the hard metal bits with pillows,
then giggled in our glorious social bed.

What could be safer? What could be more romantic
than playing cards by torchlight in a raid?
Odd that it made our mother so neurotic

to hear the sirens; we were quite content –
but slightly cramped once there were four of us,
after we’d taken in old Mrs Brent

from down by the Nag’s Head, who’s been bombed out.
She had her arm in plaster, but she managed 
to dress herself, and smiled, and seemed all right.

Perhaps I just imagined hearing her
moaning a little in the night, and shaking
splinters of glass out of her long grey hair.

The next week we were sent to Leicestershire.