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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Jan Bedford of Kent County Council Maidstone Library on behalf of Alan Martin and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War — Headcorn Library Monday 16th August 2004

Alan Martin

My story really doesn’t involve the services at all during the war, because I was too young, I was only 14 when the war broke out. In keeping with many of the lads in the little village that I lived in, I lived and worked in south-east London right through the war, so I had quite an exciting time really. We thought it was exciting anyway.

I was a shop-boy working mornings, and there was never any question of losing the war. We were going to win sometime somehow. We had one little bit of excitement early on when the raids started. We had a Thursday afternoon cricket team and we’d go to the local park. All the shop-boys had Thursday afternoons off, so we’d always be out there playing cricket.

What used to upset us was if the bombers came over and interrupted our cricket. If they were close or we heard a bomb coming down, we just used to lie down and then get up and get on again with the next over.

There was no question of invasion or being occupied. It didn’t occur to us even though it was all happening on the continent, quite remarkable really, nobody was afraid or didn’t appear to be afraid. My mother and father were rather blunt. My mother used to say ‘oh those blasted Germans again.’ When the doodlebugs started, I was on fire watch in the factory I worked at in Lewisham. We were on the roof cheering like anything because we thought it was an aeroplane being shot down, but in point of fact it was a doodlebug, a flying bomb. I believe that dropped somewhere in Bromley-by-Bow.

The night blitz was more of a problem. We used to work night work of course in those days, anything up to 60-65 hours a week, which would be rather frowned on these days I’m afraid. I came home one morning and mother said ‘I don’t know where you’re going to sleep today ‘. The house had had a near miss and all the ceilings were down, all the windows were out. Anyway mother had tidied up as best she could and I slept in my room with no ceiling and no windows.

The bombing got very, very serious in the Blitz. We had quite a lot of bombs around the area that I lived in, which was Sidcup. I got roped into a rescue squad and got dragged out, and they used to come round and call for volunteers ’Come on we need some more people. There’s a bomb landed, there’s some people trapped’ or whatever. I went out several times to dig people out of the rubbish. Fortunately I didn’t see anything too unpleasant other than dragging people out a bit blood-stained. I had a nasty experience in Lewisham when a flying bomb landed in Lewisham market during the day. We were called out from work by the police to help clear up the rubbish and I found an arm! It had been cut off completely like a razor at the shoulder, must have been by a piece of flying glass or something. So I took it to a policeman and he said’ Well the best thing you can do is look for a body with matching suit, but I don’t suppose they’ll want it though will they.’ And that was the attitude.

I didn’t get involved in the war at all in the services, I got involved a bit in one of the forgotten wars in Malaya after the war, against the communist party. The Malayan communist party they called themselves, but they were just terrorists, nothing else. I was flying out there in the Royal Airforce. They did some terrible things to civilians so we had no compunction about bombing them, trying to get rid of them. It was the only ‘after the war ‘incident that was won by us. In Vietnam and the other places the Americans eventually had to pull out, but in Malaya we did succeed and won. I didn’t have much part in that though, I did quite a lot of flying.

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