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This story is contributed by Mike Urry and is added to the site with his permission.

I was a boy in London when the war started. First of all nothing very much happened….that’s what they called the phoney war….until Dunkirk and then we saw a lot of the soldiers coming back on the trains. Then immediately after the Battle of Britain started and it was marvellous for a youngster of ten or so, it was like your best videos, films, all come to life. Sitting on top of the air raid shelter, the school air raid shelter, watching the Battle of Britain all round. Bullets, everything, we were immortal, we were OK we were on the right side…we had no worries, we were going to live forever. It was marvellous, exciting! How our mothers felt was another matter of course.
Even the teacher didn’t know, because if you were the last one in the shelter you could nip out because it was dark and sit outside rather than sit inside listening to the lessons.

There were aeroplanes being shot out of the sky lots of parachutes etc. We did have one rather nasty moment a Heinkel 111 was being shot down by a Hurricane and the Heinkel was losing height and came directly over our school grounds at lunchtime and machine gunned us. That was his last act on earth — and how he could do a thing like that to ten-year-old children I shall never know. But that was his last act before crashing and being killed on the next hillside. Incredible.

I stayed in London throughout…..my parents decided that we were going to stay together regardless.

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