My best friends father was in Britain during the war. His father had just caught the a bus in London when he remembered he’d left a magazine back at the kiosk he’d purchased (i. e., after buying the mag, he saw something interesting, put it down, and then, when the bus came, ran off). He got off at the next stop. Walking back, about a minute later: BOOM! He turned around and could see the bus had been hit a 1/2 mile down the road via a doodlebug. :eek:
I think you mean Martin Hyde. Or Martini Enfield, now that I think about it.
Coventry?
My father got to do much the same. Later he was up on Harrow Hill and had a very close encounter with a V1. It went on to hit a cinema IIRC.
Oh yes, my aunt has an heirloom desk - very ornate. With a great big chip in it. My father got a quote for the repair ofthe desk for her with the instruction that the chip not be repaired, because that damage was their reminder of when they got bombed in the Blitz.
All very interesting reading. Some of the stories in the archives make my heart race.
The mention of the class issues in flodnack’s reference was something I hadn’t thought about.
So, Cicero, what strange things were recommended eating? (I live near the town with the packing plant which supplied all the hearty, pink loaves of Spam we sent your way. Spam’s pretty strange.)
My Father fought in the Pacific Theater, and I may have this backwards, but they lived off of powdered eggs and would have killed for Spam. 
That’s me, I guess. In my grandfather’s perhaps highly colored telling, my mother (or “me mum,” for the purposes of this thread) was born during an air raid. My grandfather had to dash off on his bicycle while the bombs were falling in order to find the doctor. Like jjimm’s dad, he was a draftsman, though I can’t remember where. Might have been an aircraft factory. They were in Hounslow, I believe, in the London suburbs.
I find myself wondering how the air-raid warnings worked. I can’t believe that every time a flight of German bombers approached, the entire population of greater London went into the shelters. But maybe they had to. The authorities couldn’t have known what area was being targeted, could they?
Being born in Texas in the 80’s, I obviously don’t have anything personal to say on the Blitz, other than that the story about jjimm’s grandmother at the butcher’s shop is amazing. Closest I can say is how, being stationed in Korea, how weird it is for me to wonder if there had been a pitched battle wherever I happened to be standing (Incheon International Airport, outside of Seoul, is of course very close to where the Inchon landings happened during the Korean War).
A few months back, I visited the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. One of the (many many) displays they had there was one of a disarmed V-2 and V-1 rocket, captured at the plants where they were produced in Germany (IIRC, the V-2 was found later to be defective in some significant way, likely a work of sabotage by a laborer being made to build it). We were able to get close enough to the things to touch them. While usually being able to come in contact with old things like tanks and planes and such is awesome for me… I didn’t like this experience, not a bit.
There’s a book I read about B-24 crews serving in North Africa and Italy during WWII. Seems that a target that they had to go after quite often was a very heavily defended city known as Vienna. One day, some anonymous joker put up a note on the bulletin board on base saying that they would stop bombing Vienna if Vienna would stop sending them Vienna Sausages. 
That said, you could apparently take the Spam and Vienna Sausages and barter them with the locals, who not being able to get any meat at all, would happily trade you a home-cooked meal for it.
There are 14 pages here on the Coventry Blitz. My grandfather’s brother and his wife were killed in this air-raid, and are buried in the mass grave in Coventry Cemetery.
Sorry it’s taken so long. Just grabbed a few papers and some of the things listed:
- “California syrup of figs” for your constipated child.
- Bile beans
- Irish omelet made with dried eggs.
- Lingfords Vanilla barley - pudding.