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Erith is on the banks of the river Thames, and the area is known as ‘Long Reach’. Most of the time there would be ships, mainly coal ships but there were others, they were moored in what were called the Erith Roads. The German planes used to follow the river up to London. If the balloons went up the planes dropped their bombs onto the river in their panic to get away before the RAF plane took off from Hornchurch. You could see them take off, and many a fight has been seen over and around Erith. Also, every day there were two motor boats with a drag rope between them, because it was known that mines used to be dropped in the river.

My family consisted of Dad and Mum, five brothers and three sisters. My father had a coal and wood business before the war, and he still carried on with it during the war. My brothers started to go into the army. As I was younger I still worked for dad; at fourteen and a half years I was, to my mother’s alarm, carrying coal. By this time my sister’s husband and a friend of his who were both in the fire service used to drive the coal lorry on alternate days when off duty. This went on for about fifteen months, then the Air raids in London and around Erith got worse and the shifts that they were on were changed, so it was impossible for them to drive for us. So at fifteen and three quarter years old, one of my brothers came home and said to me, ‘can you drive that lorry?’ I said ‘yes’, and my mother gave me a Driving Licence to sign and she said, ‘Right, away you go’, and I did. I knew that it had to be done as we had to make a living. Things weren’t easy as I had a Dad and Mum , a younger brother and sister, and also my grandmother. How my mother managed with the food I could not tell you, let’s put it down to a Miracle on her part. I do know we had a lot of stews, winter and summer.

My dad and I joined the Home Guard and we also had to do fire watching two or three times a week. And we both had to do night duty in the Home Guard. If you have seen the series ‘Dad’s Army’, well, whoever thought that up was right, that’s how things happened, and that’s more or less the truth. We always used to say that Hitler didn’t come over because he had heard of us.

We often did manoeuvres on the nearby Slade Green Marshes, which I knew very well, and one night as we came upon what my friend thought was a road, he said, let’s cross here. I just managed to stop him before he ran forward. It was a dike covered in green slime and did look like a road!

Erith did have a lot of air Raids and bombs, and I lost friends. Once the Mayor came to see my dad, as he did other people with lorries, to go to the East End of London to bring back families who had been bombed out. They were re-housed in Erith.

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