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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Deena Campbell from WM CSV Actiondesk on behalf of Gordon Thomas Duggins and has been added to the site with his permission Mr Duggins fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

I was born in 1933 in a back to back house in Kings Heath, Birmingham. I started school in 1938 at Kings Heath infant school in Institute Road. The school closed down in July 1939 and we were to be sent to the new school at wheelers Lane.

The week before we started back, the war was declared and as a six year old. I did not know what this meant. It was some time after, when I heard the first air raid warning and being some way from home, a neighbour took me home to my mother. My father was already in the army somewhere up north and I did not see him for a long time.

Growing up in war time, black out, air raids, and a shelter dad had put in the garden before the War had started was fun to begin with. The shelter was somewhere to hide when you were playing with your mates. When the bombs started to drop around Kings Heath and guns and lorries were going up and down the high street, mom decided that the shelter in the garden, which filled up with water every time it rained, was not safe enough. So we went into a converted cellar under the shops on the High Street. There were about 100 people that slept there every night. One night, a lady was taken very ill and they took her away in an ambulance. We never saw her again and everyone in the shelter had to be examined by a doctor.

We went down the shelter every night until a bomb dropped close to the entrance and we had to escape up the emergency stairs. For the rest of the war, we stayed in our own homes as by then the bombing had almost stopped. As a young boy day time after school and at weekends, my time was spent going over bombed sited looking for shrapnel to swap with my mates. In 1942 mom and I moved to Yardley Wood to look after my grandfather who was very ill. For one day only I went to Yardley Wood Junior School and as I hadn’t taken my gas mask with me, I had to stand on a stool with the other children who went to school without their masks. Unfortunately that night my grandfather died, so I did not have to go back to that school again. We returned to Kings Heath and I went back to Wheelers School.

In 1945 I joined the boys’ brigade, the bombing had stopped and my dad was home, he had been discharged from the army with ear trouble. Up until this time, most of a young boy’s time was either spent at school or getting into some kind of mischief. The boy’s brigade soon made sure that you came back onto the straight and narrow.

When the War in Europe ended, my dad was driving a lorry and he came home with a basket full of fruit, more than we had seen in the last six years. Things I know now but did not realise then, oranges, lemons, pineapples and bananas, you could eat them! I had only seen them in books. You also did not have to stand in a queue to buy food or have coupons to buy clothes. Today’s generations are very lucky to have very little restriction over what they can do. The things I missed during this time was my dad not teaching me to ride a bike or to mend a puncture, going for walks in the park. Some parks had barrage balloons in them or were dug up and vegetables planted in them.

We played football by tying old rags up for a ball and our coats for goal posts. Cricket was always played on a bomb site with wickets chalked on the wall of a bombed house. We were very glad when the War was over.

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