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I was 13 when war was declared, and lived with my parents and brothers in Ennerdale Road, Walkergate backing onto the field. A few days after a unit of anti-aircraft arrived on the field with 4 x 2.7 Ack-Ack guns (later replaced by 4.5’s) That evening an officer knocked on our (and others) doors. He wanted beds for his men until their huts arrived and had authority to commandeer same so my single bed was occupied by two soldiers for a couple of weeks. At the end of our road on Waverdale Ave. a barrage balloon was erected (and later in the war a row of smoke screen cans all the length of our pavement) belching out black diesel smoke when ignited.

I was evacuated to Carlisle being a pupil ‘4th year’ at the local (Walker) grammar school. We all stood on the street where we were billeted and the local wives picked out the boys they would take. Education was negligible as put in an infants classroom trying to sit (bare knees sticking up over desks) was most uncomfortable. However we spent most of our time filling sandbags on the green in front of a church next to Carr’s biscuit factory. Father when visited wasn’t pleased and brought me home. The schools were still mainly closed — just opening a couple of hours on various days (most teachers had been ‘called up’ to the services. I got a job with the local co-op and as the air training corps (ATC) was being formed from the Air Defence cadets I joined being keen to fly. So studied hard at the aircrew subjects, Morse code navigation, stars clouds etc. including aircraft recognition and whenever I heard an aircraft overhead would try to slip out of the shop to identify it. One warm sunny afternoon late summer — lots of fluffy cumulus clouds — I heard Dons so went out. It was flying from the coast over the railway by Walkergate station then I saw it more clearly and identified it as a german dornier twin engine bomber (there had been no air raid sirens). He dropped his bombs on the Forth Goods station, turned south east into cloud and away! Later in the war there was more intense bombing, anti-aircraft shrapnel pieces in lots of roofs and on roads etc. A stick of bombs ‘took out’ a house on each of the rows on our estate. The last one landing on a house about 6 — 8 away (it was owned by a friend of my father’s — they went over to work at Hebburn on the ferry DNLY) they were safe in their Anderson shelter but spent the rest of the night with us (I slept in the back with my brothers while they occupied my bed. Around that time after a night of incendiary bombs I found an unexploded one down our garden near the shelter. The next day I carried it up to Headlam Street police station, put it on the counter: the constable there looked at it — dashed into the back and didn’t return. I hung around for a while then just walked home, my father was office manager at Hawthorne Leslie’s ship yard at Hebburn and when the ‘Kelley’ limped in after being quite severely damaged in action my father took me over one Sunday morning to see her (being Lord Louis Mountbatten’s ship).

When I was old enough 17¼ I volunteered —into the RAF as an air-crew cadet.

THE END

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