The Bank

Kick the Can and Second World War Shootouts Across the road from our house on Wern Fawr Road, in the Port Tennant end of Swansea, was The Bank, an unassuming strip of land with old garages, overgrown grass, and a handful of crumbling concrete shelters. This was the late 1950s, close enough to the war that the shelters were still standing and nobody had got round to knocking them down. To anyone else it was waste ground. To us it was everything: battlefield, spaceport, football pitch, forbidden zone. We'd vanish there for hours, grubby and loud, completely absorbed in whatever drama we were staging. It was really the last slope of Kilvey Hill before it flattened out into railway lines, the dual carriageway, and then the King's and Queen's docks with the bay beyond. There were three old air-raid shelters, and each had a name: the White Shelter, the Red Shelter (the tallest), and the Underground Shelter, which was the favourite for any game requiring mystery or danger. Its dark corners…