It was a plain brown box with a long cord, so you could hang it over your shoulder. Inside was this ugly rubber mask with a breathing filter and straps to hang it over your head. Every day it went to school with me, and back home again. It was like a safety blanket, you felt scared without it. My sister, three years younger than me had one too, only her’s was different. Her mask looked like Mickey Mouse. I don’t remember the masks being scary, they looked kind of funny when we put them on to practice or when there was an air raid. But war was scary. Constant air raids day and night. I could recognize the German, British or American planes by the sound they made. In the beginning it was just the Spitfires and the Messerschmitts. We could watch them in the day time, diving and swooping around each other as we ran for shelter. Alongside the fear was the excitement of watching. This combination of fear and excitement was always present, an ongoing tension running through the body.
One day at school, while sitting at my desk, my gas mask hanging on my chair, there was a tremendous crash against the inner classroom wall next to me. Terror ran through my body. I lept from my seat, sure a bomb had landed on the school. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. The tension had closed my throat. I stood there unable to move.
What had happened? A student was swinging around one of the ceiling supports in the area inside the auditorium, that had been made into an air raid shelter. This loosened the support and it crashed into the wall next to my desk. When the general confusion and fear subsided and we all sat down again, I noticed the first thing I had grabbed upon standing had been my gas mask. It was so drilled into us to keep your gas mask with you at all times. Fortunately we were never gassed and only had to use them for practice, as we sat in the school shelter waiting for the all clear to sound.
Forty years after the war, and living in the USA, the mid-day sirens would turn my stomach over and the old fear would wash over me.