大象传媒

When the war began, I lived at 4 Arundel Avenue, Morden, Surrey, in a semi-detached house in a quiet suburban street. I was evacuated, but returned for holidays. I finished school and started work in 1941.

At first, air raids were something which we feared but which did not occur. We were issued with an Anderson Shelter and my father constructed it in the garden and reinforced it with concrete, so that we had somewhere to go if a raid came.

It was not until the very beginning of the Battle of Britain that we saw anything of the war in the air. I was standing at the front gate and my mother was cleaning the windows of the front upstairs bedroom when she called down to me to look at the sky. I looked south east and saw that over Croydon there were puffs of black smoke in the sky. This was the very first day of the Battle of Britain and this was our first sight of anti-aircraft gunfire; soon we became accustomed to seeing the vapour trails of high flying aircraft and hearing the rattle of gunfire from the fighters.

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