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On 1st September, 1939 I left Barnsbury Park, London at the age of 11 on one of the last evacuation trains to leave London, and we were taken up to Market Harborough. I finished up with four or five others at Green Lodge, Great Bowden, and I stayed with them until ‘the boss’, Mr Stokes, was taken ill. At first we were asked not to make a noise, and then we were moved back to London, and then sent off again, this time to Little Bowden, with a family called the Hewitts, who lived in Littledown. I stayed there until the beginning of 1941, and then returned to London, where I went to two schools, one of which was opposite to Doctor Crippin’s house. I came second in the exams so got a grant to go to the Northern Polytechnic in Holloway Road, learning architecture for three years.

After the Poly I opted to go to the HMS Brecknock, but this was frowned on by my mother, so I did the building training, bricklaying, and in the second and third year did carpentry and joinery as well as architecture.

During the holiday breaks we used to go to the Public Works Department and we did odd jobs for them, especially renovation of property. One year I was setting up doors and so on, and the architect came round and said, ‘We’re going to knock these houses down because the roofs are sagging’. These were houses in St Paul’s Road, North London. I said, ‘What for? There’s no need to do that, you can push the roof out again — get a bit of four-by-two in the centre, you’ll restore the line of the roof’. So they did!

During 1943 or 1944 by now I was about fifteen to sixteen. I had a Southern Irish Labourer working for me, and he was coining it. He used to say to me, ‘ I’m going to get some breakfast,’ and then he’d work straight through to the finish — 7pm.

There were two old gentlemen working on the roof tiles of another property, and the siren went, (by this time it was doodlebugs), and they belted for the shelter in the garden. The first one dropped into it, and it was full of water! He was trying to climb out and the second one was trying to push him back in, because the doodlebug was coming over. I opened the window to watch them, and I was up there laughing my head off. — I wasn’t going to go into a shelter!

Another site I went onto later was a block of flats. By this time I was working full time by now it was 1944. Sunday morning we got called up and I went with the foreman. We were given a key to get into the flat. I nearly dived through the door in eagerness, but the foreman held me back. We found a window with no glass, and the frame was about 30 degrees out. We took out any bits of cement, cleaned it all, pushed the frame back into position, and banged it in, (I remember I hit my finger in the process). There was another flat back in commission in the Essex Road area of North London!

During the same time, in 1944, In Pusey Vale, the White Horse, we spent about six weeks of holiday period stooking and harvesting the barley, and catching rabbits and so on. The building School asked for people to go farming during school summer holidays.
There was a Farm labourer, short; beard; pipe; I was put on to take the horse up the field, at its head; he came up and said to me, ‘Don’t let ‘er put ‘er foot on your foot, she’ll bloody lean on ‘ee’ she did try this, a couple of times, but I pushed her away.
On another occasion someone would whistle; the horse would stop and let down three to four gallons! You couldn’t move him — these Suffolk Punches are biggies.

Another time we had a lad up on a cart. Hew was asked to go and do something else, and he jumped down with a pitchfork in his hand, and it went through his shoulder.

On another occasion, as an ATC Cadet in 1386 Squadron, we went to a place called RAF Castle Camps, in East Anglia. There we used to help out polishing the aeroplanes to try and make them go faster. They were rough-sprayed and we had to buff them down. They said it made about eight knots difference. We had Mosquitoes, early Meteors, and Spitfires. We were also shown what to do with the guns. This was also during the summer holidays, about 1943.

We went to two camps that year, the other one was RAF Andover. We were given the job of sorting out the ammunition. There were 20 mm canon shells, Very cartridges, pistol tracer bullets, and so on. If they went to pick up a crashed plane, they’d bring it all back in boxes, and it was, ‘You two; pile of ammo on the floor, sort it out for size, sort out ball from Very, explosive shells, etc.’

These shells were used in 20 mm canons on each wing, and 303 machine guns, of the Spitfire Mk 8. They had sufficent ammunition for 15 to 30 seconds.

Andover was an ATC holiday camp for the RAF. We used to go down there for flying experience in their Airspeed Oxford. That was great, those trips. It was a ‘yellow monstrosity’ - the training aircraft were coloured yellow.

We used to see aircraft flying backwards, one of the de Haviland DH80s, a Queen Bee. What they did was put an auto-pilot in and then use it for gunfire practice.. In those days the radio control used to have three channels; throttle, elevator and rudder. They could control the mode and altitude of the aircraft, and by holding the nose up, and shutting down the engine, and so on, could make it fly backwards.

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