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At the start of the war I was an apprentice carpenter and joiner earning 7/6d a week and by the time I bought tools and paid my way I did not have any money for entertainments, so I spent my spare time walking.

My first encounter with death was when I was walking from Stonehouse Bridge along Devonport Road. I heard this plane overhead and then there was a screech of bombs and I felt a pain in my chest, and looking ahead, I saw a couple of people lying on the pavement. When I got to them I saw it was a young man and woman lying in a pool of blood. The woman grabbed my hand. Just then a man ran up and said, ‘stay with them, I will ring for an ambulance.’ The strange thing is, when the ambulance arrived, it was a pick-up truck with a canvas awning. The back part seemed to have collapsed and was nearly touching the ground. A lady got out and asked me to give a hand. She pulled out two stretchers and we lifted the two people in the ambulance, then she asked me is I was alright and to hurry home.

At the start of the Blitz, I was on the Hoe and, walking through the devastation being caused made me very angry, seeing my city being destroyed. On one occasion I was taking a short cut home through Sherwell when there was a large explosion. Again, I had this terrific pain in my chest. When I came to, debris and dust was falling around, then I saw this baby wrapped around a pipe, then a young girl laying dead with terrible burns on her face and body. Further on, there was a man nearly blown in half. Just then, a policeman came along and said, ‘There is nothing you can do, go on home, I will ring in about this.’

We lived in Stopford Place, my mother, father, brother and two sisters. Grandfather and Grandmother also lived with us. One night after we got the family into the Anderson Shelter in the back garden, father, granddad and myself patrolled around the area, when a stick of incendiary bombs landed in the street. The whole area lit up like day, so I went to deal with them. Whilst doing this, father let out a yell, his local pub, the Stopford Arms, was on fire, so he dashed to deal with it. After we dealt with the bombs, I went through the house to see if the family was alright and saw the smoke and the smell of burning. A bomb had got in between the wainscoting and the wall and I managed to put the fire out. When the all-clear sounded and the family came in, I will never forget the look on mother’s face when she saw the filth on the stairs. It looked as though she had just about had enough of the bombing and seeing her home devastated. She asked me where father was, and like a fool, I said he was putting out a fire in the pub. I’ll never forget how mother got onto him when he got home that he cared more for the pub than for his own home, and to his dying day, he was not allowed to forget it.

I remember coming home from work one day and there was a group of women talking to mother by the front gate, and they asked whether I had seen the mess that Fore Street was in. When I told them I had. One of the women said, ‘Did you notice how Marks and Spencers were hardly damaged?’ When I said I had, ‘There you are,’ said one of the women, ‘Mark is German and they would not destroy their own.’ When I tried to explain that no one high up could make out a small building below, they would not agree.

Before the Forum Cinema was built, there was a Church on the site and a lot of people said that no good will become the cinema, God will destroy it. It’s strange that it was the only cinema standing after the Blitz.

In 1942, I joined the Royal Navy and ended up in the far east so I had no celebration of either V.E. or V.J.

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