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This story was added to the People's War site by Henry Wootton with help from Endellion Sharpe. The author is aware of the site's Terms and Conditions.

I was born in 1937 and living in Chiswick when the War started, but my earliest memories are of St Tudy in Cornwall. My father was a schoolmaster, and he was evacuated there with his school, which I remember being in a tin hut down the lane. I went with my mother.

My father found us digs on a farm nearby, and I remember the harvest being brought in, with a horse-drawn binder and a steam-driven threshing machine. I also remember feeding an orphan lamb — I was three years old. Then my father found digs in the village which was better because then my parents could be together.

I went often to the village blacksmiths to watch the horse shoes being made and the horses shod. The most special occasion was the wheel-banding. The red-hot steel band was dropped onto the wooden wheel, and then plenty of cold water thrown over, both to stop the wheel scorching, and to shrink the band. Because extra hands were needed, several wheels would be banded at one time — it certainly wasn’t an everyday process.

My first datable memory was the sinking of HMS Hood in 1941. There was a huge silhouette of the ship on the front page of the newspaper, which was taken away from me.

The school was brought home to London in 1942 after the Blitz was over, though there were still lots of air raids. I remember lying on the floor of our ground-floor flat, hearing the aircraft. The only shelters were the cellars of the block of flats where we lived, and they seemed no safer than staying put. If we had been hit, the whole building would have come down on top of us. There was a surface shelter in the playground of the Infants School I went to, and I remember the sirens sounding. My father took his turn fire-watching after the school day was over.

We used to visit my grandmother, who lived in Bletchley, when the bombing got too intense. Captain Faulkner, the last private owner of Bletchley Park who sold the house to the government, was my great-uncle Hubert. The local people rather resented those working at Bletchley Park, which was regarded as a soft option: ‘Why weren’t they fighting a proper war?’

We were at Bletchley when the first V2 successfully launched against Britain landed in Staveley Road, Chiswick, near where we lived. I saw the terrible damage afterwards.

My most poignant memory was when the son of one of my father’s friends came to say goodbye to us, dressed in his RAF uniform — he’d just got his wings. We never saw Roy Gill again. He represents for me all those who died fighting for this country.

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