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This story has been submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Jennie Hocken for Kent Libraries & Archives and Canterbury City Council Museums on behalf of Terry Wheeler and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.

Wreck of the Ratrap,by Terence Wheeler,is a book based on my experiences during the war years. Published by Macmillan.

Born in 1936, so was 3 years old when the war started and was born and brought up in Portsmouth, which is a Naval base and so the city was very badly destroyed during the war. My first memory of the bombing was when my mother took me across the road to an old ladies house for saftey and when we came out I remember the street being littered with spent bullets and bits of shrapnel. I didin't know at that stage what they were. So my Mother, once the bombing started, took us to a place called Waterlooville, just outside Portsmouth. Unfortunately almost as soon we got there the house was machine-gunned by a German fighter that was strafing an anti-aircraft gun that was at the end of the road, and two people were killed at the bus-stop. My mother pushed meunder the sideboard and covered me with her body.

Waterlooville was rather rural, so my early years were in the countryside, like a lot of children who were evacuated. I think it is probably an important influence in people like me, that we had to leave the countryside and go back to cities, which we didin't always want to. In our case because so many thousands of houses had been destroyed we had to live in a very poor house, of which my mother was ashamed.

We had very little furniture or bed linen because my father had gone into the Royal Marines in 1941 and my mother had had only 32 shillings a week to live on, whereas many men in Portsmouth had made a very good living during the war, my Uncle ralph included.

I was of school age during a lot of the war, but with fathers away, and losing sleep at night in the shelters, many children's early schooling was very erratic.

I remember that people working in the fields were sometimes strafed by passing German fighters. There was one day in 1944 when I walked to school in the village and noticed that during the night someone had been along and divided the pavements into sections about 15 feet long. If I remember rightly each section had a number and soon afterwards one morning, the main road out to Petersfield was lined with Army trunks and tanks, and obviously, we children went and talked to the troops and sat in the vehicles. Then one morning they'd all gone. Portsmouth was one of the main embarkation points. No more chewing gum!. The sky was full of aircraft towing gliders and for the very first time we noticed that the Allied aircraft had black and white stripes around the wings, presumably was to make them more identifiable.

Portsmouth was full of foreign servicemen, but I was allowed to run wild. this was after the war, we went back into Portsmouth in early 1945, so I was in Portsmouth for VE day and for VJ Day and the thing I remember that struck me most about the celebrations was a trolley bus which was ENTIRELY covered in lights. With "God Bless the King" on the side.

Around Portsmouth there were these immmense heaps of bricks and concrete, and there war another dump near the Dockyard walls, near Charlotte Street, of wrecked aircraft, and one of our pastimes was to go and get the perspex out of the gun turrets and when you heated it up you could mould it and suddenly it became VERY fashionable to have objects made of aircraft perspex.

Apart from this there was quite a lot of pocket money to be made (quite illegally) by exploring the wrecked houses, the bombed houses, for anything that had been left behind by the demolition gangs, and this would lead to territorial fighting. In our case between the Riga Terrace Gang and the Tommy Nutlin Gang (nobody ever asked him how to spell his name!) which were usually fought across streets, crowded with hundreds, thousands, of men coming into and going out of the Dockyard. The "Living Dead" as they were called locally. We usually fought with catapults, usuing staples about an inch long, which we found dumps of, behind the piano works in Commercial Road, opposite Charles Dickens' Birthplace.

I ran away from my first primary school in Portsmouth, so they tried a Roman Catholic primary school for me, althought I was a Protestant, if anything. When my parent asked who my teacher was, their response was very vocal, because before the war she had been a speaker for Mosely's Black Shirts in the Guildhall Square and my parent's were very strong Labour supporters, and has engaged in activities against the Black Shirts, when a Black Shirt car had deliberately run over the foot of a man in the crowd, and the Police "Lord Trenchard's Boys" had sided with the Black Shirts. But they let me stay at the school and I passed the Eleven Plus and went on to Grammar School.

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