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I was seven years old when war broke out. We were in church over the road at the barn in Ladies Mile Road, and the sirens went. Everything stopped, and the steward went outside. My mum cried and when I asked the steward why he’d gone outside, he said, ‘to catch any bombs that fell.’

I remember in the porch of our bungalow we had two buckets, one of water, and one of sand to put out any incendiaries. At school we had air raid shelters. There were about 36 of us in the class, but only six children at a time were allowed to run across the playground to get the shelters, because the Germans had machine gunned people, including children, during air raids. The headmaster would stand at the door and let us out in groups of six. We would run very quickly across the playground, I remember feeling very frightened.

We always carried gas masks, and regularly had practice in class to put them on quickly. When register was called in the class, we had to call out: ‘Here, changed, yes’ — ‘here’ meant present, ‘changed’ meant we’d changed into our indoor shoes, and ‘yes’ meant that we had our gas mask with us.

From the window at school we watched some parachutists practice their landing on the hillside under which was a tunnel for the main London railway line, and it had a chimney to help clear smoke from the steam engines. I remember the children calling ‘Go on, go down the chimney!’, as the parachutists came down! Parachutes were sometimes used to make petticoats and blouses when they were no longer required by the Air Force (‘make do and mend’).

German fighter aircraft came down beside Brayside Avenue on the Downs, and the local Policeman (Bill Riggs) cycled out on his pushbike to arrest the pilot - imagine! — and the pilot was angry and threw his gloves down. Bill picked them up, and eventually passed them to my son.

A stick of bombs fell across the top of Portfield Avenue — the second landed at the side of the path by the Scots pine trees. The third was outside 105 Mackie Avenue, and the fourth fell close to the corner bungalow on the left of Glenfalls Avenue. I was just arriving home for dinner, and the warning ‘pips’ went as we got to Deeside. I was in a group of schoolchildren, and the rest of them went to the air-raid shelter, but I decided to go towards home. Then I heard the bombs screaming down, and I raced up the road as fast as possible — Mum ran down the front path and grabbed me as the bomb hit the road 100 yards behind me. It didn’t detonate, but we were all evacuated up the road to friends’ houses. It was a very deep bomb. Eventually after a few hours we were allowed back home. Word spread about the Glenfalls bungalow — the walls around the bathroom were demolished, and us children went up there to see the toilet roll still hanging on the wall!

Air raids on days when the wind was in the wrong direction meant that we couldn’t hear the sirens, therefore the ARP warden came up Mackie Avenue on his bicycle, blowing his whistle as he rode. He would get half way up the avenues of Mackie Avenue (which were quite steep!) and he would run out of breath, so he would turn round and free wheel back down again. We used to watch him and try to guess how far he’d get this time!

For a short while we had evacuees here, but they didn’t stay very long because of the air raids that happened with us being near the coast. We shared the school with them. We had half a day in school, and half a day out — we sometimes had lessons in Patcham Place, and sometimes we went on walks with the teacher, for example to the Chattri and back.

The ARP wardens were on patrol each night, to check for light leaking out of windows past the blackout curtains. They would hammer on doors shouting, ‘Put that light out!’.

There were tank traps in London Road by Braypool, and even the buses had to stop. An official would get on the bus and check all of our identity passes. There were silver ‘ribbons’ dropped by the German planes, I think to confuse the raidar. We used to pick them up on the Downs and play with them.

There were posters everywhere, saying ‘Careless talk costs lives’ — to encourage people not to gossip. My favourite one was of Hitler on the luggage rack of a railway carriage: Hitler was sort of leaning over the rack listening to a conversation below in the carriage! Food was very short, and we used to grow a lot of stuff at home, but because the bungalows were relatively new the chalk was only a couple of inches from the top soil. So it was difficult to grow, and I had to go up onto the Downs to collect sheep’s droppings, and get the horse droppings from local delivery men so that we had manure. So it was important not to waste food, and the saying was ‘waste not, want not, pick it up and eat it!’

On Sunday evenings on the wireless, the national anthems of all the Allies were played, culminating in ‘God Save the King’. I would be in bed, but I could hear it going on, and I would stand to attention on my bed for our anthem.

At the end of the war, we had a street party, and we all took our own plates and cutlery, and I lost my Mum’s teaspoon, and took home a really tatty one instead. I never found her good one!

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