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When I was a little lad of about ten, it was decided at that time that my two sisters who were older than me were to be evacuated. I didn't want to be evacuated because at ten I didn't fancy it at all. Luckily for me, a week before war was declared I broke my arm, and my sisters went off and were evacuated to Carlisle, and of course I was at home when war was declared.

I always remember when Chamberlain said those magic words "We are now at a state of war with Germany"; my mother looked at me and said, "You're going to have to be very brave". I thought, "my goodness it's going to be a bit nasty": and with that all the sirens went and my mother said, "My goodness, he didn't waste much time did he!"
But the sirens went all over the country. Subsequently, I lived in the Northeast of England - a place called Whitely Bay, which is right on the coast and four miles from the River Tyne which is a great shipbuilding industry and commercial port. Due north was Blyth, and again another port. So during the Battle of Britain when London was getting bombed quite badly, we were only troubled by minelaying aircraft who were dropping magnetic mines outside the harbour and along the shipping lanes. We used to get our air raid warnings accordingly. There was the big day after the Battle of Britain, when the Germans attacked the Northeast of England, but they were heavily defeated. I was in an air raid shelter at the time, and the air raid wardens wouldn't let me come up, all I could hear them say was "There's one", "He's got that one", "There's one coming down" - things like that.

During 1942, the winters we had up North were very severe. Since the latter part of 1940 we started to get night raids on Tyneside. And then when the Russians entered the conflict, and we were sending ships to Russia, in response to Stalin's desperate need for help. I would go out on a Sunday morning down to the seaside, and there would not be a ship in sight, and then go down again at 2 O’ Clock in the afternoon, and all you could see was ships and ships all over the horizon, destroyers running in and out, and we'd go home and say "there's going to be an air raid tonight", and we'd make preparations, and sure enough there would be an air raid.
The heavy air raids that we had - I remember one period of fourteen consecutive days and nights. The sirens would go off at precisely 9 O'clock, and we would be expecting it. Now I used to live on the main road, and the public air raid shelter was immediately across the road with a warden's post near it. My father was a warden, so he had an interest in what was happening, and he'd commute quite frequently across town to the river. So we'd stand at the door and watch all the balloons go up all the way up the River Tyne to Newcastle. As it got darker the searchlights would start to probe, and we'd gather up our stuff, and thirty seconds later the sirens go off, and we would run across to the air raid shelters. In the air raid shelters, we got quite used to going there, we used to make preparations. We used to go across and take plant pots - earthenware plant pots - and we'd put a candle inside the upturned plant pot so the candle would heat the plant pot and give off heat, and when we went across there it wasn't quite so chilly as it would normally be, as we didn't have electricity there; you just had to manage with the heat you could provide yourself with.

One particular evening I remember the bombers were overhead and the guns were going - there were some heavy ack-ack guns on the River Tyne - and in an adjacent field were about 150 rocket guns which could fire all at once and fill the sky with an acre of exploding shells. They were lethal, and when they used to fire we would get a lot of shrapnel. I remember one particular night sitting in the air raid shelter, when all of a sudden you could hear a stick of bombs getting closer and closer, and when the fifth one arrived we said "The next one's for us" and we waited - nothing happened. We counted and then all of a sudden we heard them again. What had happened was that we had been between two sticks of bombs; one that ended just short of us, and another that started just beyond us.

There was another instance when I was lying on the top bunk fast asleep, and I woke up to see everyone cowering on the ground in the air raid shelter and hearing a loud whistle I lay still for a minute, then just rolled off the top bunk and landed on my mother. I never knew what happened to that bomb; I never heard it go off, I think it was because my mother said one or two choice words when I landed on top of her!
That stick of bombs was lined up with our air raid shelter. We had other bombs in the immediate vicinity; we had a landmine that dropped about 300 yards from the house, and it demolished two houses and left a huge crater, and nearest bomb was 50 yards away, which was an incendiary bomb which immediately after the air raid I went straight over there to see if I could get the fins which were quite prized, but someone had got there before me.
As time went on my father was transferred from the Northeast to Bristol, and we travelled down to London around the 30th May 1942. As we travelled down overnight we could hear aircraft overhead all night, and it turned out to be the first thousand bomber raid on London, and that was quite spectacular because these aircraft were coming in low over the top of the train - it was a bit frightening at times. We knew they were ours - which was important. Subsequently we stayed in London for two nights, and we would see large formations of aircraft flying towards the continent, and we knew there was no immediate problem because they were ours.

Then we came to Bristol, and we bought a house in Muller Road. I always remember on one occasion I was looking into the sky and saying to my mother "Look there's a Heinkel!" and she said don't be silly, but with that there were three shell bursts under it, and then it went up into the cloud. That was when that bomb landed in Old Market and hit a bus killing quite a number of people.

Thereafter we had the odd raid on Bristol, but I was lucky because I arrived after the heavy blitz on Bristol and Bath. I do remember that in Muller Road the Americans had a big transport park, and every time the ships used to come into Avonmouth they used to be lined up the full length of Muller Road ready to go to the docks to unload ammunition and things like that.
On the Downs on the Sea Walls before D-Day there were about 500 tanks parked - in storage for D-Day. To see all those tanks there was quite spectacular. Within a fortnight of D-Day they had all gone - presumably they had all gone on ships to Normandy.

During the war I joined the Air Training Corps in 1943, and I was lucky enough to go to various RAF airfields, and I did quite a bit of flying, in RAF planes at that time. At the end of the war I was called up for National Service, and I did my time in the RAF.

That for me was World War II.

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