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"This story was submitted to the site by the 大象传媒's Peoples War Team in the East Midlands with the Johnathan Northcotts permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The article was collated and written by Daviel Cousins, a pupil at Landau Forte College, Derby as part of a Peoples war Project."

When it was announced that we were at war, I was a little over a month away from my 13th birthday and living in the Devon seaside town of Torquay. At that time, we were of very little importance to the enemy, but as the year went on we had a lot of RAF lads training here. They too over a lot of the hotels in the town and the Palace Hotel was turned into a hospital with a big red cross on the roof.

We were never bombed incessantly, more spasmodically and these I can remember quite clearly. I also recall carrying gas masks to school.

I lived on a council estate where everyone knew everyone else, and we all looked out for each other. At first when the siren sounded to indicate when enemy planes were about, we as a family joined others and walked up to the fields and would spend the night there. I remember once my mother shaking me awake as I was sleeping next to a cow!

For quite a while there was a comparative calm and we were considered a safe haven and many children were evacuated here. At this time and for the duration there were no street lights and all houses had black out curtains or blinds. No lights were allowed to be seen coming from the houses and should any be seen, the air raid wardens would shout 鈥淧ut those lights out鈥� 鈥� this was to become a familiar cry.

My memory of the first bombing was as I was delivering papers late one afternoon. The siren sounded and looking across the fields to the see I could see about 25 planes coming over and heard an awful lot of noise. The next day I found that the town itself had been hit, the Woolworth鈥檚 store was badly damaged and people coming out of the cinema at the top of the town had been machine gunned.

One Sunday morning in 1942 a gasometer was hit. This was about half a mile from my home and many of us boys went to watch from a distance as the firemen tried desperately to get things under control.

Another weekend some friends and I had been swimming on Torre Abbey beach and on out way home we decided to spend out few pennies in the amusement arcade. We heard a plane flying very low overhead and went outside to see a German plane dropping a bomb which landed on the rock face behind the arcade. Luckily we only got covered in dirt and dust and weren鈥檛 trapped inside when the ceiling collapsed.

By this time Plymouth and Exeter were being bombed frequently and it appears that sometimes, on their way home over the channel, the enemy planes would drop remaining bomb loads en route. One such raid hit the street behind us and demolished about 4 or 5 houses completely and killed about 10 or 12 people. It left behind a huge crater big enough to hold 2 double decker buses.

One of the worst raids was again on a Sunday afternoon when a bomb dropped on one of our churches and killed 24 children we were at Sunday School. After the bomb had left the plane, the plane itself hit the spire of the Roman Catholic church next to the C of E one and the plane caught fire and crashed in a nearby street.

Latterly there were quite a few hit and run raids and by the end of the war the town was full of RAF, British and American army personnel preparing for the D-Day landings.

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