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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of Eric Court and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was living in Camberwell in London at the start of the war, on the corner of Albany Road and Canal Street. My Grandparents kept a bakers and we lived upstairs from there. Our playground at school was near an old brewery and we spent our time making dens in old beer barrels.

I can vividly remember when war was declared – I was in the tin bath at the time, in the living room. My Mum grabbed me, slung a coat over me and everyone ran to the air raid shelter. I was eight years old.

After the bombing raids started they shut the school down, and we had to go to school in the mornings to pick up some work to do at home.

The nightly procedure was to go down the air raid shelter – it was a big one in a park, nearly opposite the shop. We took bedding down to lay on, and people made a corner for themselves to sleep. Grandad would give me sixpence to buy some sweets to eat down the shelters, but he and Grandma never came down with us. As Dad was a baker he wasn’t in the Forces. He was an ARP Warden, and I never understood why he didn’t come down the shelter with us. I remember coming up one morning and seeing everything on fire. Everywhere you looked there were fires. The fires were the thing that made Mum and Dad decide that we should be evacuated away from it. It was having a bad effect on Mum’s nerves.

When the evacuation came it was quite an adventure. We had everything we could carry in a suitcase. My brother was only a year old so Mum had a baby to contend with. It was an adventure not knowing where we were going and we were thankful we were leaving behind all the banging. We travelled by train to Norwich and we were taken to a school which we didn’t know where it was. It was quite dramatic because while we were walking to see if anyone would take us in there was an air raid on, and there was a German plane which we could see quite clearly. This was the first time I had seen a German plane so clearly, as in London it was always dark when they came.

We arrived at the house and found that the lady wanted two girls rather than two boys, but she didn’t have the heart to turn us away when we were so tired, so she took us in. Her name was Mrs Marshall and she had three children of her own. She became my second Mum and staying with her was a very happy time of my war-time life.

I went to school in Norwich, but was never accepted by the rest of the class because I was a Londoner. I had a good mate, Derek, who was also from London, and because he was a big boy he prevented us from being bullied. There was an air raid shelter near the school and if the siren went we had to wait for our Mums to come and pick us up out of school and take us there. We had dancing lessons at the school and I was always sent out to sort out the waste paper when they were on because I didn’t know my left foot from my right and just mucked around. The other London boy was the same.

There was a sweet shop opposite the school, and behind that a pond, so I spent lots of time looking for fish. It was a contrast to life in London and I was becoming more of a country boy. In time, we moved from the Marshall’s and found another house in the same road.

Dad came down from London quite regularly to see us, and was amazed by how green everywhere was. The bakers shop was bombed during the war, so we all stayed in Norfolk after the war and Granny and Grandad went back to live in Scotland.

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