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This story was submitted to the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by Wymondham Learning Centre on behalf of the author who fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

1939.
That is the start of a period in my life, which meant upheaval for a small boy, dramatic change and very few laughs.

That’s how it appears to me in retrospect but it was a long time ago and the years to tend to eliminate bad times and often highlight all the good times of life (and a damn good job too, can I hear you say?)
Back then I was a pupil at a prep school in Mill Hill where we lived at the time; my father managed a warehouse and offices in Wood Street in Central London. His headquarter company was based in Leicester and life was pretty idyllic, good teachers, plenty of games, I had good friends and then came the shock. War was declared, all was panic and dismay.

Father sternly declared that we were about to be bombed into oblivion, that we should get away from the danger area at once and I should leave my beloved Highwood School instantly. So I did.

After a quiet period, the phoney war was still on and nothing was happening, he decided to leave Leicester where we lived in ‘temporary accommodation’ (much to my mother’s disgust) and return to London, this time not to Mill Hill but to West End Avenue in Pinner. More upheaval and strange territory for me!

No trace of my Mill Hill friends, the swimming baths at the top of Mill Hill High Street, where I had spent many happy hours, was closed ‘for the duration’ and I felt very much outside of everything without much hope of finding an anchor to cling to in terms of fellow thirteen-year-old sufferers.

However, West End Avenue was not a bad place to live in a detached house, almost rural at that time with plenty of open spaces and very quiet. Not bad at all, or so it seemed and for a moment all was well. Of course, since then it has changed, but that is how I saw it as a newcomer to the area.

But to proceed. My father, who had had very bad experiences in World War One (four years in France with the Royal Artillery) knew a thing or two about bombardment. He proceeded to build an air raid shelter on the back lawn, complete with bunk beds, thick brick walls and a solid concrete roof. It was enormous!

I went to Merchant Taylors School at Sandy Lodge, biking every day (there were no buses) in all weathers, sometimes a very cold and unhappy experience, but then it was an accepted practice and we all took discomfort for granted.

The trouble really started with the night bombing of London. Up to then the war seemed to be separate from my small life. Certainly there were deprivations, not much fun to be had in any direction, reports in the papers about Dunkirk and so on, but not much to affect us in Pinner. We read reports of the Battle of Britain but we remained untouched. The problem started when enemy daylight bombers reached anywhere near Harrow, not too far away. The sirens went in all adjacent areas and at the school, for instance, down we went to the underground shelters until the ‘all clear’ sounded. This sometimes took all morning, or afternoon. Little work was done especially by me, being loath to seek advantage of escaping the torture of Latin verbs or mathematical equations.
Night bombing altered our lives dramatically.

We could no longer expect to get a good night’s sleep in a comfortable warm bed. The sirens would sound as soon as it became dark and we would troop into the shelter complete with flasks of coffee and a supply of biscuits and there we would remain until the ‘all clear’ was heard, often at daybreak the following day.

The night the Docks and East End were bombed I recall standing on the roof of the shelter, my father on the lawn below me. Looking across to the not so distant horizon it was clear to see the horrendous and savage glow of the fires that burned in the City centre.

At about two o’clock in the morning the ‘all clear’ sounded and my father immediately got the car out of the garage with the intention of finding out whether there was anything left of the stockrooms and offices in Wood Street or whether his livelihood, and our way of life for that matter, had all disappeared in the fires we could so clearly see from the back of the house. I went with him.

I have a very muddled recollection of the ensuing hours. We arrived eventually at Regents Park and, because of the pall of smoke that hung over the City like a fog and the emergency vehicles racing towards and away from the City, we could proceed no further. We parked the car on the side of the road and walked. We arrived at last in Cheapside and with some difficulty reached the proximity of Wood Street. The trouble was that all we were able to see among the surrounding chaos were fire engines, ambulances, piles of rubble and burning buildings. Of Wood Street there was no sign. In the background there was the towering majesty of St Pauls Cathedral, just visible through the smoke. Very downhearted we retraced our steps, found the car and arrived home at around seven o’clock in the morning. Utterly worn out and very low in spirits.

Looking back it was of some benefit to be probably the only small boy who had experienced at first hand the sights and scenes of the destruction of the Nation’s Capital, but it was many years later before I could get a proper perspective on the activities of that night.

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