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"This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Berkshire's CSV Action Desk on behalf of George Corbetts and has been added to teh site with his permission. George fully understands the site's terms and conditions".

When the raids were over I, together with Ronald and Maurice Stoneham and Donald Wagstaff, my closest friends at the time, would have great fun in collecting Shrapnel — the bits and pieces of the shattered bomb casings that littered the streets and waste grounds. On particularly lucky occasions, we would come across burnt out incendiary casings or, the biggest prize of all, a discarded ack-ack shell case.

It was towards the end of the Blitz that my parents received a nasty shock. Dad received his ‘call up’ papers. I can remember that Mum shed a few tears and that Dad was not all that happy either. Me — I hadn’t a clue what it was all about! The worry was, thankfully, very short-lived. Dad finished his ‘square bashing’ and was posted to a place called Bovingdon for training as a tank driver in the Royal Armoured Core. He had hardly started his training when he was discharged, because he had been involved in an occupation [he was a furnaceman in an iron foundry at the time] that was considered essential to the war effort. He was in the Army for a total of nine weeks and I guess that, just for a change, bureaucracy had got it wrong when he was called up in the first place!

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