大象传媒

I was 12 years old when the war broke out and I lived in Croydon, quite near to Croydon aerodrome, which was a very busy RAF fighter base during the Battle of Britain. I remember going to school and seeing the German and British fighters overhead.. At my school in Croydon we used to have brick-built shelters where we used to take lessons during the bombing.

Of course, when we were at home at home during the Blitz, we had an Anderson shelter in the garden and also a Morrison shelter indoors under the table, so we had the best of both worlds. We were a very heavily blitzed area in Croydon because we were on the main flight path from the South Coast up to London. We used to sleep in it as much as possible once we had the Morrison shelter, and we would hear all the bombs coming down and just hope they weren't going to hit us. We were very lucky, very lucky indeed. But sometimes we would go in to school some mornings and there would be empty desks because children had been killed during the night. I did a paper round first thing in the morning, at 6 o'clock, and often a lot of the houses had been bombed during the night. I used to pick up pieces of German planes and shells, and also see body parts and things like that after the raid. But it was a very interesting period of my life.

Then of course in 1944 we had what we used to call the doodlebugs, the V1s, come up. Croydon was the first borough to be bombed as they were coming up from the South Coast to London. We just used to stand there and hear the flight of the engine and just wait for it to cut out. When it cut out that meant it was going to come down and explode, and you just hoped it wasn't in your area. So we had quite a good time as far as all the bombs were concerned! But we managed to get through it all right.

Then when I was just under aged 17, although I was in the Sea Cadets, I joined the Royal Navy. I went straight in as a telegraphist, just before the end of the war. Luckily, I was still in training when the European War ended. On that day there was a coincidence to end all coincidences My sister, was 8 years older than I and was in the National Fire Service. On VE Day I was going across London on the back of a naval lorry, on draft up to Scotland. My sister, with her fiance who was also in the Fire Service, was in Trafalgar Square, and among I suppose 1/4 to 1/2 a million people, she saw me in the back of this lorry. We were all madly waving away from the back of our lorry and I didn't see her, but she was apparently calling out, "My brother! There's my brother in the back of a lorry!" What a coincident! Again luckily, a few months later the war in Japan ended and my family had managed to get through it all without any loss of life.

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