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This story was submitted to the Peoples War website by Rod Sutton on behalf of Peter Tutthill, the author, and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was born in Penzance in 1937 my mother came from the Scilly Isles. I was two and we where on holiday on the Scillies and on the day war broke out Mum thought we ought to come back to the mainland, she was married and living in Penzance, so we set sail from Scilly on the Scillonian. It was a very foggy day. On the way back, so my mother tells me, all of a sudden two very strange looking warships loomed out of the mist. We had just declared war on Germany and everybody was dead scared they might have been German, they turned out to be French destroyers luckily for us and to the relief of everybody on board the Scillonian.

In the early days my father joined the LVV which later became the Home guard. I remember his story of them being out one night on patrol, they could hear all this scrabbling in the bushes it was very dark and they didn‘t know what it was and after challenging what ever it was to halt a few times they decided that perhaps as it hadn’t halted they ought to open fire. They opened fire and found that they’d shot a badger.

Other very clear memories were of the raids on Penzance, it wasn’t like Plymouth or Falmouth but we still had some very nasty raids and the whole of Penzance town centre was burnt out on one raid, they dropped a lot of incendiary bombs and I always remember the smell — I think that’s what comes through more than any other the smell the day after of all the burnt buildings, the timber and everything that had gone up.

We used to have standing water tanks everywhere for the Fire Brigade to have a reserve of water. In our village we had two but they had to be covered with wire netting because the children used to climb up and I think that there were one or two drownings when they fell into these standing water tanks, they were about six feet deep and if you were only about three feet tall you didn’t exactly come out above the water. We also had a river dammed in the village to provide a further supply of water and I was lying on the side playing with a wooden destroyer, it was going further and further out I was trying to reach it, reached too far and fell in. The reason why I haven’t got much hair now is one of the boys pulled me out completely by my hair, a rather painful experience.

Then, of course, the Americans turned up, that was very exciting they had anti-aircraft batteries. They had a ring of anti-aircraft guns all around. The Americans were very friendly, they used to supply us with chewing gum and things like that but I started collecting the names on Jeeps. Every Jeep had a name painted down the side and I wasn’t really old enough to quite understand what some of the names meant — things like Blood and Guts, Bloody Mary and all sorts of other distinctive names. I think there were worse names than that and I collected them all. I got a real telling off from my mother for collecting these dreadful names.

The anti-aircraft battery, I got to know the Yanks there and they wanted to get some jam, you couldn’t get much jam during the war years, my mother made blackberry and apple, we used to go out and pick some blackberries and find the apples and I took about half a dozen jars up to the Yanks in my little wheelbarrow and in return they supplied us with potatoes which were difficult to get hold of.

Penzance, certainly the seafront, was turned into a fortress. The bathing pool which had reinforced walls was barb wired and sand bagged off, they had two or three big guns in there. One couldn’t go on the beach they were all restricted access — very limited access indeed because of the barbed wire and mines and everything.

I shall always remember I went to the village shop in our village and there was a bus driver living down the road he had just driven the bus back from St Ives and he proudly showed us his hat which had a bullet hole into the front and out through the back where his bus had actually been machine gunned by the Germans.

My auntie had gone to St Ives, they had one beach which was open to the public and so they had been on the beach when this German aircraft came in and machine gunned the people on the beach. They did a funny thing they all ran into the bathing tents for protection which obviously wouldn’t have been a lot of good.

I found the war very exciting indeed collecting shrapnel and all the things that went with it.

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