By Virginia Winder
World War II stole Jack Elphick's childhood.
But he was one of the lucky ones - that's all he lost in the Birmingham Blitz.
Despite spending many dark nights listening to the dreaded drone of German bomber planes, the young lad and his parents came through the bombardment of England's industrial Midlands relatively unscathed.
Jack, who has spent more years living in New Zealand than in Britain, still has vivid memories of those siren-filled years.
When England went to war with Germany in September 1939, Jack was a nine-year-old. "The day after war was declared we (the children) all went down to our little school and we were put on a bus with our gas-mask boxes and then put in a train and taken to the country."
He even had his birthday among strangers, turning 10 in October that year. "I spent about three months being evacuated, but there was no bombing during that time and I think people got a little apathetic about it."
So, the homesick lad was sent back to Birmingham, where he discovered his mother, Sybil, had been in hospital having a breast removed. She survived the surgery and cancer, to face a war.
Bombs begin falling
"Shortly after that, the Blitz started," says the Taranaki-based man, who at age 74 describes himself as an "environmental activist".
"I have memories of the bombs falling. You heard the whistling as they came down. The loudness of the whistle gave you some gauge of how close it was, whether you were going to be hit or not."
Even worse were the aerial landmines - the bombs attached to parachutes that floated gently, silently to earth and then exploded. "They would take out a whole street."
Most of the attacks happened under the cover of darkness, with both sides using night as a stealthy disguise. When the skies were devoid of light, the German bomber planes honed in on Birmingham and nearby Coventry.
On the ground, the cities hid behind blackouts. Windows were painted black or covered with dark materials to prevent any telltale glimmers of light from escaping into the night. There were no streetlights, no glowing shop-front lights and the headlights on vehicles were masked to only glow on the ground. Even the beam from a hand-held torch was deemed dangerous. "A lot of the windows were crisscrossed with tape to stop the glass flying when they shattered."
Listening for a whistle
For Jack it was the sounds of war that filled him with fear.
"The first signal was an oscillating siren," he floats his arm up and down, like a boy making waves (but that comes later), "then the sound of the aircraft coming over. The German planes ... it sounded like an intermittent buzz. Then you became tense and you knew the aircraft were up there ... then there was the sound of bombs exploding."
When woken by a night air raid, Jack's parents would guide their only child downstairs to hide in a Morrison shelter. "Which was actually a table in the lounge and it had a thick steel top and the sides were mesh - the same type you use for reinforcing concrete. We got in this; you had to have bedding in there.
"The theory was that if the house collapsed you could still be dug out and hopefully be alive," says Jack.
"My Grandmother and my uncle, who lived in London, their house was completely demolished by a bomb. Surprisingly, they were actually dug out and were uninjured. We used to visit them quite often. I still remember the address - Droop Street, Paddington," he says.
Blast real killer
"Most people who died were killed by the blast - the vacuum sucks the air out of the body."
Jack says he heard of more than one instance where a bomb had exploded close to a basement shelter, sucking the life out of its occupants and those who found them faced an unearthly sight. "They (the victims) were just sitting there in normal positions, but were dead."
The Elphick home never took a direct hit and neither did the neighbours. But it was still a terrifying time for a young boy and his family. "Every night was a close call for everybody. You didn't know when the next bomb was going to fall. They were coming down all around us."
Treasure among ruins
Being young, Jack and his schoolmates took the Blitz in their stride. At night they would lie in muscle-tensing, jaw-clenching fear inside makeshift shelters.
"The next day we would go to school and pick up pieces of shrapnel on the way and they would be little treasures. We were pretty cavalier about it as children.
"We used to walk over the nearby golf course and there were big holes where unexploded bombs had gone down and you could see the tails sticking out."
Jack says there was no way these metal monsters could be protected by the Home Guard or bomb disposal squads. "The urgency was to remove the bombs in the inhabited areas because some of them were deliberately delayed-action bombs."
This warring tactic meant these weapons would sometimes explode just as members of the squads were moving them to safety.
Even though Jack has clear memories of ragged husks of homes surrounded by rubble, he never saw a dead body or an injured survivor dragged out of the ruins.
Switched on to emergency
His father, Robert, got much closer to death. He worked in an essential service, so was exempt from taking up arms for his country. Instead, he worked all day in the office of motor vehicle components factory for the war effort and then went straight to his emergency post, in communications. "He, like most able-bodied males, had to do night duty in addition to his job. He actually worked in the centre of Birmingham on the emergency telephone switchboard.
"One night he there was a bomb dropped on the next building and it was burning and right next to him the paint was blistering on the wall."
After his shift, Robert Elphick would have to cycle three miles (4.8 kilometres) home in the blackout, following his instincts and his inbuilt map of Birmingham's streets. Often he would find himself riding through an air raid.
"One night he was blown off his bike by a blast," Jack says.
In Europe, World War II ended on 8 May 1945.
By then Jack was 15 and, like millions of youngsters worldwide, his childhood was long gone.