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This story is submitted to the People's War site on behalf of my Father-in-Law Mr John Lawrence and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Lawrence understands the site's terms and conditions.

Air Raid Wardens toured the town enforcing ‘The Blackout’. If a curtain had not been properly drawn and a small chink of light was visible, we would hear the bellow ‘Put that light out’. The fact that the feeble glow was invisible at 100 yards let alone ten thousand feet above never occurred to these people, as Shakespeare said ‘Cloth’d in a little brief authority’.

I wonder how, and by whom, the term ‘Blitzkrieg’ — lightning war — became shorted to ‘The Blitz’ meaning simply ‘the lightning’ to describe the bombing attacks?

Almost all the Luftwaffe raids on London took place at night but I clearly remember one daylight raid on a sunny afternoon. A squadron of HE111 bombers flew over at high speed with Spitfires weaving in and out of the formation. To a sixteen year old schoolboy nothing could have been more exciting. Except perhaps the evening when I stood in our back garden watching our first thousand bomber raid on its way out. At that age my only thought was of the good guys against the bad guys — cops and robbers — cowboys and indians. No conception of the reality, of all the horrors of war.

Bomb blast did some very strange things. Checking our home for damage one morning I found a brick had landed in our toilet without even cracking the bowl. Stranger still, the blast had sucked the window open, and then blown it shut again without even breaking the glass.

Train windows had a heavy mesh material glued on to prevent shattering. There was a small diamond shaped clear area left in the centre of each pane to allow you to peer out. After the bombing ended I still remember the sheer luxury of looking out of a clear glass window.

Going to school in the morning became very competitive as we searched for pieces of shrapnel from the previous nights anti-aircraft barrage. The shells had brass nose cones containing detonation timers and finding one of these was equivalent to a golfer’s hole in one. The Luftwaffe attempted to confuse our radar by dropping large quantities of thin metal strips. I have no idea whether they worked but they provided another trophy for us on the way to school.

We had a shelter in our back garden but my father seldom used it, preferring to take his chance in the house. On one night however, he decided to join us in the shelter. This was very fortunate as a bomb landed near the house. In the morning we found a long sliver of glass stuck in the pillow of Dad’s bed, exactly where his head would have been if he had decided to sleep there as usual.

One night my uncle Cyril came home from his West End office to Richmond to see the remains of Barton’s department store opposite the station. After checking a few local pubs to see if all was well, he finally arrived home sorrowfully muttering ‘Poor Mr. Barton, poor Mr. Barton’.

At weekends I would go on long cycle rides, usually to Hanworth and Heston, two airfields where there was always something interesting to see by peering through a hedge. (Security was pretty casual in those days). One Sunday, I suddenly realised that a V1 — the Doodlebug — was on a parallel course to me, about a mile away. I watched as it stopped, crashed and exploded. Then I was home for tea. ‘Did you have a nice ride dear?’ asked my mother….

It’s strange what will trigger a memory these days. One day recently I was cutting down a carton when a sound sent a chill through me. I was drawing a Stanley knife across corrugated cardboard when I realised the sound was almost exactly the same as the sound of the Doodlebug. The sound, and the silence which followed when the motor cut out, will stay with me forever.

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