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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Morwenna Nadar of CSV/´óÏó´«Ã½ LONDON on behalf of Bill Gray and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 8 years old when the war ended and I have lots of little memories of what it was like living right in the middle of London during the years it was on. However, although I clearly remember the incidents, I am not sure of the dates when they all happened.

I remember:

My Uncle Arthur, a sailor, coming home on leave and bringing me a sailor doll (complete with kitbag), a model submarine, a diver toy, and CHOCOLATE. You couldn’t get chocolate here so we were very excited when he brought it for us. It was ships’ chocolate which came in massive chunks and was then grated down to make ships’ cocoa. But we loved it.
Uncle Arthur later died in the Indian Ocean when his ship, HMS Dunedin, was sunk by a German surface raider. These surface raiders had moveable metal sides which were used to hide the guns, and they sailed under a neutral flag. When they were going to attack our ships, the metal sides were pulled down, the German flag was quickly run up, and…….Bang!

We had a Japanese family friend called Aki Yani who taught me to whistle. He also gave me a Gurkha Kukri knife which I treasured. I could not understand why he was my friend but our forces were fighting all the other Japanese. I don’t think he was ever interned and I often wonder what happened to him.

We children used to go to the Lyons Corner House in Leicester Square where lots of American servicemen used to gather. We used to ask them, ‘Got any gum, chum?’ and they would give us square Chicklet chewing-gum.
One day the American Forces gave a big party for children. It was held at the Connaught Rooms, and they gave us lots of lovely food that we couldn’t get in Britain during the war. We were also given presents, and I got a rifle (a toy one) and SWEETS! You couldn’t get sweets here then. The Americans had much better food than we did as they had things sent over from American for their troops. They were very kind and generous to us.

My dad, whose name was the same as mine (Bill Gray), was a caretaker for one of the big office blocks in the Gray’s Inn Road and we had a flat there, which is why I was in the centre of London during the war. Dad was a fire watcher there and he used to tell me about some of the awful destruction he saw when he was on duty at night.

I went to school very near to where I lived. Because paper was in short supply, we used to use the backs of official forms as school writing-paper.
I remember being told at my Laystall Street school that my Gray’s Inn Road home had been bombed. I ran all the way to Gray’s Inn Road, past barriers and policemen who tried to stop me, and thankfully found my home intact. But Staple Inn, which was behind the Old Holborn Buildings in High Holborn, had been bombed and there was debris everywhere. There were piles of ledgers, papers bound with pink string and sealing-wax, bits of office furniture, bricks and glass strewn all over the place. There were also wrecked goldfish ponds and dead fish lying about.

Because of Dad’s job, he knew other caretakers and the buildings they looked after, so he knew about the different cellars we could shelter in. One night, Dad must have had a premonition as he said we weren’t to use our cellar air-raid shelter again. The next night it was bombed and everyone in it was killed.
I remember being half asleep and half dressed, waiting for the sirens to go, when we would go down into Chancery Lane tube station which was our main shelter. At first we all slept on the platforms but then, as the war continued, rows and rows of bunks were put there. The place stank of Pine disinfectant, lavatories and people. When we went to the shelter before the sirens had sounded, the trains would still be running, and we had to be careful not to go too near the edge of the platform. Once I was knocked on to the railway line by a group of ‘revellers’ but luckily there were no trains just then! We used to be given tea from massive urns.
I used to go up on the escalator and risk a telling-off from officials because I wanted to see London burning, the searchlights and the flames of the V1 and V2 rockets.

Smithfield Meat Market was bombed and piles of debris and meat were dumped in waste ground in Portpool Lane. Lots of people went there as they were tempted to take the meat (you could get very little meat at that time as it was rationed) but it was studded with glass from all the shattered windows.

After Gray’s Inn was bombed, I remember seeing half a building still standing, looking as if it had been sliced right down the middle. The inside of the part that was left was completely exposed and you could see a bath standing three floors up. There was rubble everywhere and some of the panes of glass hadn’t shattered, and were stuck upright in the grass. There were also blood-stained sheets which were covering the bodies of those who had died.

When one raid started, Mum and I had no time to reach the air-raid shelter so we sheltered behind a lot of coats hanging on a coat-rack. A bomb fell nearby and the skylight cracked and fell down. When we emerged from behind the rack, we saw that the coats were all covered with broken glass so we wwwere luck not to have been hurt.

One day my uncle came to see us and I remember the adults all talking in hushed tones about a disaster along the Central Line tube at Bethnal Green. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and nobody would tell me what it was all about, and it wasn’t until a long time after that I heard what had happened. Although there had been no air-raid siren, local people had gone anyway to the tube shelter as they often did in case of a raid. It seems that an anti-aircraft battalion had decided to practise its firing (it was not meant to be doing so) and had hit the station. I believe about 150 people were killed.

I will never forget the smell of London burning. The mornings after the raids there would be burnt and smoking timber everywhere, and hosepipes be all over the streets. The shop windows would have no glass in them and they used to be repaired by using wood replacements with a much smaller glass window in the centre. The children would be out in the streets collecting all the bits of shrapnel that were lying around. The bomb-sites made the best adventure playgrounds and we children used to have great fun playing on them!

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