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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Pamela Baldwin of the CSV 大象传媒 Coventry & Warwickshire Action Desk on behalf of Jim Cresswell and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

The day war broke out it was a lovely sunny, Sunday morning and I was singing in Bedworth Parish Church choir at the Sunday morning Eucharist. Halfway through the sermon, the Church Warden approached the Rector(Broadie Goode) with a note, he read the note out loud - which announced that war had been declared.

I didn't really grasp what this meant (I was only 11) but I went home for Sunday lunch and found my mother crying - she, of course, remembered the First World War.

I started my apprenticeship in 1941 at Alfred Herbert's machine tool manufacturers, as a Machine Tool Fitter. The day I started work, was I believe the last daylight air raid on Coventry, there were no shelters, so we had to dive under the work benches! Being in a referred occupation I wasn't called up for National Service until January 1946, and completed my apprenticeship upon de-mob in 1948.

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