´óÏó´«Ã½

During the war I used to go about and fire watch in order to do my bit for the community. We lived in Orpington and I used to watch from Mrs Muggings’ house which was on top of a hill. I was about 17 at the time and we used to watch for the entire night three nights in the week. Two of us would go up there after nightfall and if we saw any fires we had to phone up the fire department and tell them about it. We weren’t organised by an outside agency, we just wanted to do our bit! During the daytime I used to work at Sevenoaks Cinema. The cinema kept open during the war in order to keep up peoples moral, but also we used to do special screenings when the soldiers came back and things.

Thankfully we didn’t see many fires when I was fire watching, but you did see enough to feel that what you where doing was important and I kept on doing it even though it meant staying up all night. I had moved down from London to Orpington just before the war started and so felt a bit of an outsider, but once the war started and I was doing my fire watching it was much easier to get along because everybody pulled together.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.