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On Sunday, December 29th 1940, German bombers dropped five incendiary firebombs, which fell through our roof and my bedroom ceiling, landing on my bed. I was only 7 years old and this happened just moments after I had jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs as fast as I could into the cellar of the house, which we thought was the safest place to protect us from the bombs.

There was nothing left of my bedroom – everything was thrown out into the front garden through the windows, which had burned away! The ARP wardens did not have time to put the fires out completely, as nearly every other house in the street was on fire. My school friend and his family across the road lost his whole house and all their possessions. They only had the pyjamas they had on.

The period from September 1940 until May 1941 was called the London Blitz. The German’s dropped 500lb bombs onto our houses, destroying over one million homes in London alone. These bombing raids killed 60,000 civilians and injured another 87,000. Until halfway through the war, more women and children had been killed than soldiers.

Every night when the siren sounded, we ran down the garden into our Anderson shelter, which was buried in a large hole in our garden. It always started to fill up with water when it rained and you had to bail the water out with a tin. It was always very dark and very cold – you could not get batteries for a torch and you were allowed to show a light, so most of the time you were in darkness with perhaps a few nightlights if you were lucky.

Early in 1941, we were in the Anderson shelter when one 500lb bomb dropped 100 feet away on the back of the house opposite ours, and another fell 150 feet away on a house to the right of us. Thankfully both failed to go off!

On another occasion, I was eight years old and running home from school one lunchtime, when two German fighter-bombers unable to return to Germany, machine-gunned everything in their path. A whole strath of bullets went just over my head, but I still had to go back to school after lunch! The bombers ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in South London.

Midway through 1944, we gave up using the Anderson shelter and slept in the cellar of our house. But sadly, a flying bomb fell a short distance away and our house was practically destroyed. My mother took me (aged 11), and my 2 sisters (aged 8 and 5) to the local school where we had labels hung on us and we were evacuated to
Warrington in Lancashire.....

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