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I was at school in Dilwyn during the war. My main recollection is of American army vehicles coming by the school. In playtime we would rush to the school wall to watch the convoy of vehicles. They tried to stop us, but we didn’t take much notice of headmaster. I lived about a mile and a half away along the main road; we would often watch the convoys and the Americans would throw us gum.

My father worked on a farm, in the hopfields, and he had to powder the hops with insecticide at night when the air was still. One night he came home and said he had had to leave the field because he had found a bomb in the hoprow - it showed up in the moonlight, and he saw it and reported it. It had been dropped by a plane chased from a Hereford factory. So next afternoon on our way back from school we went to have a look and found a couple of burnt-out incendiary bombs, and we pulled off a couple of fins. One of them was still in dad’s shed until he died, but I don’t know what happened to it after that.

We lived quite close to Shobden airfield, about 4 miles away. After Sunday school we used to go up there to watch planes take off with gliders; it was exciting for us, we were 8 or 9. There were quite a number of crashes around the area , and if we heard about one, we would all rush off after school to try to get bits off it. It was a happy time for us.

My father was in the Home Guard, and my brother, who was quite a bit older than me, was in Home Guard too. He was about 18 or 19. They had a hut and when they weren’t on duty they used to climb on top of hut and put a sack over the chimney to smoke out the people who were in there. That’s the sort of thing I remember — good things really. We had an RAF engineer staying with us; when he came home on leave once he brought a model Spitfire for me which actually flew — it was great!

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