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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Sarah Housden of Norfolk Adult Education’s reminiscence team on behalf of John Burdett and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I was 19 when I joined up in 1941. I had been round to the Air Force first but they wouldn’t have me because my eyes were poor. Then I went to the Army recruiting office and they said they would have me for light duties. When I got my call up papers I went top Pembroke Docks in Wales. They were under fire at the time, and all the gas containers in the docks were ablaze after being bombed. I was training there for four months. We would be on guard duty at night when the alarm would go off and we would be under fire. You could see the boats in the sea all on fire. We would roll down the hill into the trenches to get under cover when the planes came over. There was no running – we rolled over and over. I had only been in the Forces three weeks when this happened. I was still a civvy really. I was frightened. We had no rifles. We never had guns until we went to Penally, where I went to be trained for seven or eight months. Then I went to Leatherhead in Surrey and worked as a store man. They used to take us to Reading every other week where we stayed at a big residence and could have baths. We would normally have cold showers, but at this place there were seven bathrooms.

One of the first things that happened when you were called up was that I was given injections to protect me if I did overseas service. We would all line up and then one doctor would come along and give your arm a swab, the next would scratch it, and the next would give you the injection. Then you’d go upstairs and lie down and you’d find that you were disabled for the next 48 hours.

At Leatherhead I had an accident where I fell off the back off an army lorry when the tailgate gave way, and injured my back. They numbed me from the waste down, and I just had to lie in bed. I couldn’t move. I had to have a few operations on my back before it was better.

Later they moved me to near Dorking and later still to Yorkshire, but they would never tell us where we were going. We weren’t supposed to know. All my service was in the UK, because of my eyes, and the back injury.

I didn’t come up to Norwich much during my time in the Forces as it took so long to travel the distance. It took from 7am to 2am the next morning to get from Thorpe Station in Norwich to Pembroke Docks. I remember one time I did come St Augustine’s had been flattened in the Blitz and it was difficult getting through anywhere.

My older sister worked in munitions in Bedfordshire. She had been working at Harner’s in St Andrew’s in Norwich making clothes, but it was hit and got burnt out.

My first pay was seven and six a week and I used to send two and six to my mother. That left me with five shillings to spend on myself, which mostly went on sweets and Park Drive (I smoked six or seven of them a day). If you tried to keep any chocolate overnight, you would find in the morning that it had been eaten by rats. We used to wrap it in our gas masks and hang them up, to try and stop the rats from getting to it. That’s how things were.

I met my wife during the war while I was stationed up North, and we got married after I was discharged.

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