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'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' used to be a common catch phrase. Well, what I did in the war was to go school. I was born in the general hospital at Kingston-upon-Thames in April 1934. The first house I lived in was in Princes Road, Teddington, but I lived throughout the war in a railway house alongside the old railway station in Twickenham, Middlesex. I say 'old station' because it was demolished after the war when the new station on the London side of the road bridge was completed. Only the platforms for the new station had been built by 1939, when all work on it stopped.

We were able to live in a railway house because my father, Alfred, was a goods locomotive fireman and then driver, working out of Feltham Loco. Because of his vocation, which was considered part of essential services, he did not get called up for the armed forces. Another result of this was that he got slightly higher rations of some foodstuffs (such as cheese, for his sandwiches that he took to work).

The house, which dates from at least the 1840s, was heated by open coal fires - one was lit every day in the 'living room', at weekends in the 'sitting room', and sometimes, at Christmas only, in my parent’s bedroom. We had mains tap water and drainage, but all hot water had to be heated on the gas cooker in the kitchen in pans, except that there was a gas boiler, or ‘copper’, for heating water for clothes washing. Once a week the galvanised metal bath that hung outside the back door was brought indoors, put in front of the fireplace, and saucepans-full of this hot water were poured in. After I had had my bath and had been put to bed, my parents would have their baths. Later my parents had a 'Courtier' stove with a back boiler fitted in the living room. The hot water was then piped to the kitchen and laundry-cum-toilet room beyond that, which had space for a bath to be fitted. My parents lived out the rest of their lives there (my father until 1987) but never did have central heating put in.

In September 1939, I started at St Mary's School, Arragon Road, which is still there, I believe. All the teachers were women - the men had just gone off to the war. Every school day we pupils walked along Amyand Park Road to the secondary school for lunch, in a long 'crocodile'. One day we were filmed marching along the road outside the school, for a propaganda / morale boosting production I suppose. Across the road was a short terrace of relatively new houses. I was told that the film was to show these while the soundtrack said 'These'. Then film would then show us marching, and again the commentary would say 'These', and so on, for other images. I never saw this film.

My mother Lily often took me to North Sheen, the next Southern Railway station up from Richmond, where her mother lived. There was a gas-works at the bottom of her garden, with a huge gasometer. I remember that there was a large brick communal air raid shelter built in her road (Manor Grove), with just enough room left for a road vehicle to get through. There were very few cars around anyway; my father cycled the ten-mile round trip to work every day for 43 years. Our doctor was the only person that I knew who had a car. We went everywhere by bus, trolleybus and train — or on foot. Some cars had gas-bags on their roofs; I suppose they had been converted to run on town gas. Also, in Grandma's road, there were pig bins tied to the lamp-posts, for any food scraps people had left over. When I went to the grammar school (Hampton) in 1945, there was still a pig club running. Pigs were kept in a pen behind the cycle sheds and looked after by club members, who shared out the bacon at Christmas time.

At Twickenham we were mercifully away from the worst of the Blitz, even though the red glow from the fires in London was a frequent sight, but there was some damage. I used to play on a bomb site in Water Lane with a Junior School friend, letting off home-made fireworks of a sort. The romance of chemistry sets! In 1944, however, the Borough had many hits by 'Doodlebugs' - the V1 flying bombs. I watched one from my bedroom window, until being rushed away to the cupboard under the stairs. The psychological effect of these missiles was terrifying - hearing the engine cut out, and then the silence for ten or twenty seconds while we waited for the crump of the explosion, praying all the time that it would not be us that it hit. The V2 rockets were scary in a different sort of way, in that they came in at several thousand miles per hour, so that you never knew anything about them. Only one landed in the Borough though, in Teddington I believe. Until recent years I have not been able to hear a recording of the wail of an air raid siren without a feeling of dread. Our nearest one was on the roof of the police station, and was very loud. The continuous note of the 'All Clear' was, by comparison, a great relief.

The searchlight beams and the thump of distant anti-aircraft guns are other memories of things long gone. Shrapnel, the fragments of exploded shells, must have rained down over the whole area during some air raids. I had a box of it, collected in our lane. Only as I write this have I recalled the black material that we had to put up at night at the windows at home, during the 'Blackout'. I found the grey, fat barrage balloons to be somewhat awesome, as they seemed so huge; they were mainly to be seen on our infrequent trips to London.

During the 1944 bombardment I was evacuated, along with many other children, to a safer part of the UK. In my case it was to South Wales - to Llandaff North, near Cardiff. We went by train, of course, and at the other end we went to a room in the school and were allocated to families. I have no idea how that was done, but all I know is that I was lucky because my family was good to me. Memories are: of going up Garth Mountain; of the river valley where I found 'interesting' rocks (and being persuaded by a boy to part with my treasured paratroopers compass in exchange for a fossil); of the many fish-and-chip shops; of going to Welsh language lessons (I only remember bus (bws?) and postman, because they are the same in English!); of the hundreds of black beetles on the scullery flagstones, if I had to go for a pee in the night; of the large tin of pineapple jam that Mum sent me, and much enjoyed by all; of visits to Barry Island and Penarth. I was only there that one summer until things quietened down in Twickenham and Mum came and got me - I think she missed me even more than I missed home.

I mentioned the grammar school. Hampton Grammar, now Hampton School, had a 25-acre playing field at the back. This would have been ideal for the landing of enemy invasion aircraft, except that pits had been dug all over it to discourage such an occurrence. These pits were several feet wide and even longer, and deep enough, presumably, to overbalance any aircraft trying to land there. They were arranged in a lattice of straight rows, leaving enough room for football and cricket pitches. They were still there when I was at the school. This has just reminded me of the iron rails that were stacked by the London Road bridge over the River Crane in Twickenham. They were straight railway lines that had been bent once to form two arms; these could be slotted into holes across the road, and so could act as tank traps during an invasion.

My Uncle Victor, who was my mother's youngest brother, was in the army and was taken prisoner-of-war early in the war. He spent the rest of the war in some Stalag, but as far as I know he was treated properly (Geneva Convention and all that). Throughout the war I used to go with my mother to Bentalls department store in Kingston, and she would arrange with the Red Cross department there to send food parcels to uncle. I am very pleased to be able to say that he is still around, living in Teddington.

We were given gas masks at the beginning of the war. Mine was one of the conventional type, not one of the kiddies' Micky Mouse ones. It was quite claustrophobic to wear and smelt strongly of rubber. I am glad that we never had to use them. We had an Anderson shelter made out of corrugated sheets, and half sunk into the ground with an earth mound on top, as they all were. I had a one-piece garment called a 'siren suit' that I was put into if we had to go out there at night (i.e. if there was an air raid). It was a very dry shelter as it was built inside one of the nearby railway out-buildings that had an earth floor. Part of that building had a timber floor and counters, and a hatch that could be opened onto our lane; this was used by one of the station staff when the rugby football crowds were around. Later we had a Morrison shelter, steel roof and mesh sides, put up in the sitting room.

Considering the extraordinary life-style that we had in those years, my parents were heroic. I suppose I took it more for granted, not knowing any better. Yes, there were no bananas, except the yellow plaster bunches hanging up in the greengrocers. Many foodstuffs were rationed, and the weekly portions we could buy of those were tiny, compared with present-day consumption habits. Dad worked a large allotment, and we kept chickens on a part of it. I learned of mysteries such as ‘Karswood Poultry Spice’. To eke out the meagre sweet ration we had to resort to 'treats' of flavoured and coloured penny water ices, and we bought strange little sticks to chew called 'Spanish wood'. When sweets came off ration at the end of the war I pigged myself on Mars Bars, and have hardly eaten them since (though this is really a diet thing now, as I still find them yummy). People bought and ate so many sweets at first that they had to go back on ration for a while. I cannot remember ice cream from before the war, and I still remember the first one I had after the war, bought at Mylos, in Richmond - soft Italian ice-cream in a cone. Sainsbury and Tesco were only tiny high-street stores. Everything in Woolworths was 3d or 6d (old pennies).

We had no telephone, and there was no television anyway, but we had a radio-gramophone, and I still have the valve radio from out of it, in working order. The earliest programme I can remember was Arthur Askey's ‘Band Waggon’, about 1940. Tommy Handley’s ITMA was the big favourite during the war. There were three cinemas in central Twickenham, each with one huge auditorium. Always there were two films per performance, plus a cartoon, plus news. I used to go to the Saturday morning cinema for children in Whitton, 3d to get in; my favourite was the Flash Gordon series. Otherwise, we had to make our own amusement. There were board games made, based on the war and the war effort. I had ‘Battle of the River Plate’ and ‘Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line’ (don’t ask), and later on one called ‘Buy British’. As the war went on, I took an interest in the campaigns, and followed them on the maps in the newspaper, especially the Russian front — I well remember the ‘Kiev bulge’ and the feeling of relief when everything was turned around at Stalingrad. I poured over war publications, such as ‘The Abyssinian Campaign’ and ‘East of Malta, West of Suez’. I have been fascinated by maps and geography ever since.

Well, that’s my story.

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