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This is one of the stories collected on the 25th October 2003 at the CSV's Make a Difference Day held at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Manchester. The story was typed and entered on to the site by a CSV volunteer with kind permission of Rev. Richard W Stevens.

I was born in London On September 9th 1937. I am an only child and my family home is Finchley. I was not evacuated during the war, my parents said that if we were to go, we were all to go together! Only one boy was evacuated in our road, Roger Howell to Colwyn Bay. When he retuned he was ostracized by all of the rest, ‘the hard men’ who had stuck out the war and not run away, not that it was his fault but kids can be cruel.

My father was born in 1900 and was parading at Aldershot to go over to France when the Armistice was signed on, Sept 11th 1918. He enjoyed two years in Germany as part of the occupying power- so he told me with a twinkle in his eye! In 1940 he missed the call up by one year, had he been born a year later he would have had to enlist. He spent the war in the Home Guard (his office in the centre of London had been evacuated to Croxley Green, then a green field sight). I have a vivid memory of him coming to in his battle dress before the parade. We lived very close to Mill Hill Barracks and were kept awake by the ack-ack guns shooting at the German bombers. I said one night to my mother, (I was sleeping in her room), ‘Dad’s busy at the barracks tonight!’

I was taken in1941 to see a crater that had appeared at the allotments at the end of the road.
I can remember putting my fingers through the chain link fence as I looked into the hole. ‘It’s a wing off a plane’ my parents told me, and I looked for the RAF roundels in the ‘wing’. 30 years later I mentioned this to my mother, with a withering look she said it was a bomb! While on the subject of bombs, one was dropped on the grounds of the ‘big house’ (Rocklands) next door to our house. The crater rapidly filled up from the ornamental lake, and the local kids, of which I was one, spent many hours fishing for newts. ‘I’m going to the bomb hole’ were the words my mother got used to hearing everyday.

My mother had a dim view of my fathers Home Guard service, a glorified pub crawl she called it. It really was like Dad’s Army. What chance would they have had against Hitler’s crack Panzer battalions if the Germans had invaded makes one wonder!
I can remember the gloom in our house when HMS Hood was sunk by the Bizmark, and the happiness when she was sunk too. My parents treated the war, at least in the beginning, as a game. We had a large National Geographical map pinned to the living room wall, and as the Germans advanced, so each area was covered with pencil marks, coupled with little flags. After D-Day we began to rub out the pencil marks, and I can remember putting them back in during the Battle of the Bulge, fortunately to rub them out for good later!

I had a serious attack of pneumonia in 1942. The doctor came every day for weeks. One day he came and said he would give me a course of ‘Churchill Tablets’. These were the first penicillin tablets, and the Prime Minister used them to good effect. I was so chuffed and recovered very quickly!

St. Mary’s Primary School in Finchley had been split into three venues for the duration of the war (that was a familiar sign-closed for the duration) the war was understood. For the first two years we went to school at St Paul’s Church Hall, Long Lane, I can remember lining up with my mum on the first day. The next two years we went to the new Hall (opened in August 1939) belonging to the 10th Finchley Scottish Scout Group (a group I joined in 1947). The hall was host to two classes of about 45 children each. It was divided by a thick curtain, but the voices of Miss Brindley and Mrs Mackintosh could clearly be heard. But we didn’t seem to come to any harm! Finally we returned to the old school, still in one piece for the last few years. The idea of splitting the venues was an obvious one, if a bomb fell on one part of the school, hopefully the other would survive.
My cousin Tony Gibb was in the army as a dispatch rider, two days after D-Day he arrived on the step caked in mud from head to foot, with the words ‘can I have a bath Aunty Mabel!’ My mother was taken aback-but he got his bath! Tony married a Belgian girl he met, and he and Jennie stayed with us for a year after the war.

One of my clearest memories of the Second World War is the sight and sound of a V1, christened the ‘doodlebug’. I had com home from school at about 4pm on a spring afternoon in 1945, when my mother and I heard the most awful noise, we knew immediately what it was-a doodlebug! We dived into the spring mattress which made up the base of our Morrison Shelter, and watched and listened through the French window. We knew the facts, while the flames were still coming out from the V1 it would keep on flying, but when the flames went out, it would come to earth with devastating results. We watched, I can see it now as I am typing this, as the doodlebug, spitting flames from the ram jet pipe, passed over the spinney next door to the house. We were mightily relived to see this as it went over the golf links, then we saw the flames gout and waited for the sound of the explosion, which came shortly afterwards. My mother, being something of a ‘ghoul’ said ‘Let’s go and see where it landed’. So off we went on our bikes to see where the doodlebug fallen. Three semi- detached houses were just a pile of bricks and sticking out from that pile at a drunken angle was the very thing we had trusted our safety to, a Morrison Shelter! Apart from waking up one morning during the Blitz to find a huge piece of shrapnel, two thirds buried in our back garden, the doodlebug is imprinted on my mind.

From 1943 we were on the flight path of some of the 1,000 bomber raids to targets in Germany, (my parents used to chase me upstairs to bed with the words ‘target for tonight’ as my rump was lightly smacked!). As the bombers returned my parents would say it’s been a good night or a bad night, which they could tell from the numbers of planes that returned.

On VE Day- the day the war ended in Europe- we all went up to London to see the celebrations. To an eight, (nearly!) year old the thrill of staying up until 2am to watch the fireworks, the like of which I had never seen, seared its self into my memory. Gone were the days of putting up the blackout curtains every night. VJ Day was something of an anticlimax. But we had a huge bonfire at the end of the road, with an effigy of Tojo with a poker through his heart on the top, and a great cheer when he collapsed in the flames.

I might add in conclusion that what I have written were my experiences and not what my parents told me had happened.

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