I walked through the Coventry Transport Museum that October<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Exhibit after exhibit of what the German bombs had done those November nights in 1940;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Old newsreels of the dazed, the smashed, the burned<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Firestorms having wiped out most of the city center<\/p>\n\n\n\n
800 people dead, thousands injured and homeless<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Different rooms had piped-in air raid sirens, people yelling, explosive concussions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Then I walked through St. Michael\u2019s Cathedral. Well, what was left<\/em> of St. Michael\u2019s Cathedral\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n A shell of Luftwaffe destruction, a ruin, a relic, a reminder;<\/p>\n\n\n\n I heard many accents that day, but no German ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An old man caught my American accent<\/p>\n\n\n\n And told how his parents\u2019 house had been vaporized<\/p>\n\n\n\n How as a little boy he\u2019d been terrified that night<\/p>\n\n\n\n How 71 years later Coventry still hadn\u2019t quite recovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Several days afterwards, when I visited my friend Norma in London,<\/p>\n\n\n\n She told me she\u2019d been there, that very night<\/p>\n\n\n\n On a train with her RAF boyfriend Reg, heading south out of Coventry<\/p>\n\n\n\n I expected more serious, more searing, more sacred, more sad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She put down her teacup, fingered the rim, turned her head<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looked out the window to her garden<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where her husband Reg had tended roses and wisteria, where he\u2019d buried their dog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \/<\/p>\n\n\n\n I sat, waiting for another Blitz story<\/p>\n\n\n\n More death and doom cached in a Londoner\u2019s memory;<\/p>\n\n\n\n She placed her small spoon on the saucer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t really care who was bombing Coventry that night,\u201d she whispered,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Staring out at the garden. \u201cWe were just outside of town when they stopped the train<\/p>\n\n\n\n And turned off all the lights, and it was so cold that November night<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could see the explosions and the fires from the windows<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reg had finally gotten leave, and we hadn\u2019t seen each other for a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe were young and in love, stuck together in a cold train car<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stopped in the darkness for the whole night;<\/p>\n\n\n\n We didn\u2019t really care who was bombing Coventry that night.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coventry was bombed November 14th<\/sup> and 15th<\/sup>, 1940, by the German Luftwaffe. Other bombings occurred in 1941 and 1942. About 1,236 Coventrians were killed in all the raids combined.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I walked through the Coventry Transport Museum that October Exhibit after exhibit of what the German bombs had done those November nights in 1940; Old newsreels of the dazed, the smashed, the burned Firestorms having wiped out most of the city center 800 people dead, thousands injured and homeless Different rooms had piped-in air raid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing","category-united-kingdom-and-ireland-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1189"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}