大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from CSVBerkshire, Amy Williams, on behalf of Doug Bukin and has been added to the site with his permission and he fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

When the war was declared on 3rd September 1939 I was 10 years old. I lived with my parents in the northern part of the east end of London.

On a clear night during the blackout there was total darkness. It's difficult to visualise a complete blackness, but there were really no lights at all. The only lights were masked headlamps on the few number of vehicles that were moving around. It really was black; you might as well have been in the middle of the Spanish mountains where they have beautiful dark skies. It was like that. And on a clear, say a frosty night, the stars were out in thousands. You'd never see them like that now with the light pollution. It was like that then.

One night, on one of these clear nights, it must have been about November time, we were coming back from the local cinema. The Odeon cinema was more or less at the bottom of our road and I was walking home with my mother and father. We saw the aurora borealis, the northern lights, in the sky above us. You'd never see that sight today. Strangely enough my wife also saw them - although I didn't know her at the time. There isn't any question that it was an illusion.

It was this wonderful, unforgettable, beautiful light, a pale-coloured moving curtain of light. I've never ever seen it since. I know if you go up to polar or Arctic circles you can see the northern lights but we saw them in London, in east London, which was most unbelievable.

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